'Going to hell to get the devil': The 'Charlotte Three' case and the decline of grassroots activism in 1970s Charlotte, North Carolina

This dissertation examines the 1972 "Charlotte Three" trial in North Carolina, which convicted three African American male activists of burning local horse stables. The defendants' extremely harsh sentences began a controversy over the case which intensified as local newspapers uncovered the prosecution's questionable practices. Public scrutiny of the case, stretching from the local level to President Carter and Amnesty International, only ended when the governor reduced their sentences in 1979. The Charlotte Three case was part of both a national and statewide pattern in the late 1960s and early 1970s of targeting agitators and activists for criminal prosecution. As such, this dissertation enables the reader to closely analyze how that pattern---which included the critical collusion of federal, state, and local law officials---manifested itself in a local community.;On a larger scale, the case reflects the successful strategy of federal, state, and local law enforcement to suppress dissent and protest by shifting activists' attention from civil rights to the criminal justice system. This strategy worked on two levels. First, the portrayal of the defendants---who had been watched by law enforcement officials for their activism---as common criminals muted broader community support for the more popularly appealing civil rights causes they had championed. Second, the legal case forced committed supporters to shift their energies from community racial and political issues to the penal system---which was removed from the grassroots local level that had been their desired focus.;The case also reveals the underpinnings of preserving racial moderation in a reputedly "progressive" New South city in the 1960s and 1970s. Charlotte's white leaders, determined to preserve the city's reputation for racial moderation to attract business, played a key role in the drama. The local business-oriented leadership consciously sought to control the more militant forms of local African American activism which might attract the ugly racial publicity befalling other southern cities.