Axel Cox’s Black next-door neighbors moved away from their Gulfport home after the white 24-year-old burned a cross in his front yard while hurling racial slurs at them in December 2020. On March 9, a judge sentenced him to three-and-a-half years in federal prison and ordered him to pay $7,810 in restitution costs.
Following the unveiling of Cox’s federal grand jury indictment in September 2022, he pleaded guilty to interfering with the victims’ housing rights in December 2022. The charge amounts to a violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibits violating others’ housing rights based on race. In exchange for the plea, prosecutors dropped a charge of using fire to commit a federal felony, which would have carried a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison.
“This is about conduct that occurred that shouldn’t occur in our communities in this situation,” Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Andrea Cabell Jones said in a Gulfport federal courtroom on March 9 before U.S. District Court Judge Halil S. Ozerden. “The victims were terrified. They were shaken. … He was effective. They did move.”
The attorney said Cox acted based on what he had read in books about the Ku Klux Klan.
“He said he had read in books that the Ku Klux Klan burn crosses … to intimidate Black people. He took these actions solely because of the color of their skin,” she said. “He took measures that historically evoke intimidation and fear in Black people across the nation. We would just reiterate that individuals in our community should not feel that they can’t live where they want to live because of the color of their skin because people can behave in this manner.”
‘Racism That Still Plagues Our Society’
Cross-burning has long been an expression of white supremacy used at lynchings and, more generally, to terrorize African Americans, including to run them out of white spaces and communities.
“As the Klan declined in the late 1920s and 1930s, intimidation became the primary but not exclusive use of the cross,” Middle Tennessee State University’s First Amendment