JACKSON, Miss. -- On a stormy night, rain pelts against the security fencing that surrounds an abandoned furniture warehouse on Farish Street. Publisher Charles W. Tisdale is sitting inside, where the air is stale and the lighting dim, proudly cranking out another issue of Mississippi's oldest surviving black newspaper.

Computer cables dangle onto a cold concrete floor and page designs sprawl on cardboard tables. The newsroom of the Jackson Advocate is not normally so beggarly, but 14 months ago the paper was forced out of more habitable offices across the street -- by a firebomb in the middle of the night.

It was, Tisdale says, the 22nd violent attack on his paper since he bought it for $17,000 in 1978.

A year passed, and no arrests were made. Now, the investigation has taken a dramatic turn. An ex-convict has confessed to the bombing and said he was paid to do it by the black president of Jackson's City Council, Louis Armstrong -- who happens to be a lifelong crusader for civil rights and a tireless advocate for the city's poor and hungry.

Some Jacksonians took reassurance from the news. In a state still deeply scarred by the racial rancor of the past, it seemed a relief to think that not everything wrong in Mississippi is about skin color.

Tisdale's take is different. Armstrong was framed, he says, to cover up a broad conspiracy by whites to drive black-run businesses, like his newspaper, out of town.

"Racism has not changed very much over the years," says the publisher, who at 68 acts the roles of both loquacious preacher and crusty journalist. Political power has elevated African-Americans in other cities, he says, but not here: "They don't consider [blacks] to be human beings in Jackson, my friend."

Tisdale's critics, many of them black, discount such talk as irrelevant rhetoric from a bygone era. He is using the attack, and using his paper, they say, to draw national attention to his delusion of persecution.

"If it were true that there was a big racist plot going here now, there would be the same kind of reaction people had in the '60s," says Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr., Jackson's first-ever black mayor. "Try to find somebody else to buy into it, to say he's right, outside a very small group of people."

But even if Tisdale's explanation of why his newspaper was bombed is far-fetched, nobody has presented an alternative explanation accepted by the community. It is not only Tisdale and Armstrong who find the implication of Armstrong bizarre.

The two men were joking amiably about the charges this week. Over the years they have had many differences. Twenty times, Tisdale says, perhaps exaggerating, they have settled them with fistfights. "The first time we met, we had a fistfight." But bombing, he says, is the Ku Klux Klan's way.

"Louis would not firebomb my office," Tisdale says with a smirk. "Louis loves the paper -- he just hates me."

"Mr. Tisdale and I are great friends," Armstrong agrees. And the accusation against him? "That's totally ridiculous."

Armstrong has not been indicted, but in court papers filed Feb. 19, U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott says that Armstrong paid a former campaign worker and occasional felon, Clinton Moses, $500 to firebomb the Advocate.

Moses broke into the newspaper building, Pigott's allegation continues, hurled two Molotov cocktails into the office, then immediately tried to call Armstrong on a cellular phone to inform him of his success.

As to motive, Pigott says that Armstrong had a vendetta against Tisdale because the publisher has written scathingly about his politics and his personality.

Armstrong resigned from the council earlier this month after confessing to accepting a bribe from a strip-club owner to influence zoning decisions. Few in town, however, believe he was responsible for the Advocate attack.

In this week's Advocate, published yesterday, Tisdale advances an alternative theory under the headline: "Bo Brown claims Clinton Moses told him feds wanted city official set up."

Tisdale has always been a newspaper man -- at least since he edited his high school paper, the Trinity Hi-Lites, in Athens, Ala., writing blistering articles about a white superintendent. "We ate him up pretty good," he recalls.

Tisdale came to Jackson two decades ago, taking over the paper from a former publisher, Percy Greene, who had become, Tisdale says, an "Uncle Tom," writing to please the white community.

Of the 22 attacks on the paper since then, last year's was the most serious in many years. Two members of the Ku Klux Klan were convicted for machine-gunning the Advocate in 1982. Tisdale says his family, too, has been targeted by violence. In July, he says, a vacant residence next to his house was set afire while he and his 13-year-old daughter were home.

The firebombing last year caused an estimated $150,000 in damage, charring books, paintings, desks and equipment. Tisdale and his supporters say it is part of a broad effort in town to effectively disenfranchise blacks. He insists that it is a plot more dangerous than any injustices earlier in the century.

Downtown property owners, who are predominantly white, formed a business-improvement district in 1993. Tisdale sees it as a bid by white business owners to emasculate black elected officials, take control of some city services and potentially shut black-owned businesses out of town.

"It's a reign of terror in Mississippi again," says Stephanie Parker-Weaver, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's local chapter. She agrees with Tisdale that the investment district, Capital Center, Inc., had a hand in bombing the paper to silence its criticism.

"I don't have time for this nonsense," says Capital Center's president, Donald A. Shea. He denies that his group had anything to do with the bombing, and also insists that Capital Center has no regulatory power that could prevent blacks from opening businesses.

In working across racial lines to clean up and gentrify some of the city's downtrodden areas, Mayor Johnson and other black city officials find themselves pitted against some of the city's poor blacks.

The fight over the future of Farish Street brought some of these tensions to a head. The neighborhood where the Advocate operates is a collection of mostly boarded-up, long-forgotten storefronts. Mayor Johnson talks of turning the area into an entertainment district.

Tisdale suspects that one outcome of the plan would be the displacement of his newspaper by a restaurant or other ornament of an entertainment zone.

"There are those who want so severely to associate with whites [rather] than with their own kind that they'll defend anything that says they're not really black," the publisher says. "What the black middle class doesn't understand is that as soon as they become weakened by their self-delusions, they'll be overthrown."

Pub Date: 3/05/99