However, as Arsenault documented, tensions between the activists and a growing mob of white counterprotesters escalated as the week progressed. On the first day of the protest, about 10 activists picketed in front of the courthouse without incident, as Raymond Arsenault recounted in Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Fatefully, Mallory agreed and made the trip to Monroe. Williams explained that the local “racists had become emboldened” by the Freedom Riders' decision to protest peacefully and asked for support for the event. The Freedom Riders organized a series of nonviolent pickets at the Monroe Union County Courthouse, from August 21 through 27. In August 1961, he and his wife, Mabel, agreed to help the Freedom Riders, a group of young, interracial activists who challenged segregation in southern cities and on interstate buses. Mallory had found a kindred spirit in the aforementioned Williams, a Black nationalist in Monroe. Her organizing network quickly grew beyond New York City. The bureau labeled her a “subversive” and added her to the list of Black people the agency surveilled through its counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO. Mallory was one of the Black women organizers the FBI tried to remove from the public eye. Her support of these Black nationalist ideals made her an FBI target. The Cleveland Call and Post reported that, at the time, Mallory was able to hide in the city because “she look like a million other domestics or nurse's aides.” “There’s nothing special about her,” the newspaper noted, “except her ideas.” Mallory was an outspoken activist who promoted Black self-defense, Black self-determination, and global Black liberation. Edgar Hoover had issued to police stations and post offices around the country. As she later wrote in her Memo From a Monroe Jail, Mallory was hoping local authorities wouldn’t recognize her from the wanted poster FBI director J. In August 1961, a Black woman dressed in plain clothes, wearing short hair and glasses, calmly boarded a bus from New York to Cleveland.
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