By Jason Upthegrove, President of the Lima, Ohio NAACP

On Valentine’s Day 2008 I was sitting in the driveway of my home, as my wife grabbed the mail from the mailbox and handed it to me. When I opened them, there was a noose in one envelope and racist literature in another.

It took many months, a lengthy investigation, and my testimony before a Federal Grand Jury, but finally this October a white supremacist named Daniel Jones from Portland, Oregon was indicted. At one point my 7-year-old daughter overheard me discussing this and innocently asked, “Daddy, what’s a noose?” This caused me to reflect on the terrorism many of our fore parents endured so we could have the privilege to be a voice for the voiceless as advocates of the NAACP.

In our not so distant past, nooses weren’t being mailed to pose a threat, but were put around the necks of our people to hang them from tree limbs while deranged onlookers gladly observed. Freedom advocates were dragged from churches and theirs homes in front of their families to be murdered for speech we sometimes take for granted that hasn’t always been so free. Therefore, I thought it important to now provide some context of why a small community in the Mid-West attracted such cowardly acts of racism and fear mongering.

On a Friday evening one month before the noose incident, a gang of heavily armed police officers stormed past children’s toys on a porch and went in a home to execute a warrant for a low level drug trafficker. They used distraction devices to create a loud bang with bright lights, causing the dogs in the home to react to the threat which resulted in them being shot by officers on the first floor. Two other officers continued up the stairs where 26-year-old Tarika Wilson stood terrified with her 6 children trying to make sense of what was happening below. 30 year veteran Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, armed with an automatic assault rifle, recklessly shot through a baby, 1-year-old Sincere Wilson and killed his mother.

Our community was left stunned, demanding answers about how a highly trained SWAT officer could kill an unarmed woman holding a baby. Soon the national media was involved and this horror quickly manifest into cultural, class and racial divide at its worst. Concerned citizens protested, voicing long standing displeasure of the heavy handed tactics and excessive force used by the local police department.

Several community forums brought out hundreds of people, telling story after story of how their rights were being violated, not by everyday citizens, but by the police. Eventually a special prosecutor was appointed and a grand jury convened to look at the evidence about the killing of Tarika Wilson. After hearing the argument for probable cause, this grand jury came back with two misdemeanor indictments. Months later the trial began, and ended with an all white jury finding officer Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, not guilty on all charges.

As the president of the Lima NAACP, I was one of the local voices speaking out against this travesty. It was then that the noose was sent to my family’s home.

I’ve been asked many times do the threats scare me, and my answer is unequivocally no. Attempts to quell the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness only affirm our tremendous responsibility to stand united in the midst of coercion and intimidation no matter how high the stakes.

Too many lives lost to cower in the shadows of fear. Too many roads paved with the blood of our ancestors to allow evil to stifle voices for equality. Too many battles left to fight for the disenfranchised and the oppressed everywhere. The opposition toward the evolution of freedom is a constant, but meets a well prepared foe in the NAACP. Liberty comes at the expense of many, but is the ultimate sacrificial determinant of its precious nature.

The threats to my family and others only underscore that the NAACP must be more vigilant, more determined, more focused, more bold, more resolute, more driven, and more deliberate, because our enemies most certainly will.

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