Citizens Council - Whitman Middle School

White Citizens Councils
White Citizens Council
The White Citizens’ Council was begun in Mississippi in 1954 following the U.S. Supreme
Court ruling that segregated schools were unconstitutional. The Council was a white
resistance campaign against school integration and other efforts for black advancement.
Unlike the Ku Klux Klan, the Council was open rather than secret and maintained that it was
against violence. It pursued racist economic and political avenues to undermine black
progress. The Council publicized the names of blacks working for change so that they would
lose their jobs, credit ratings and income. To oppose school integration, the Council
established private white academies. Although the Council spread across the South, by the
late 1960s they went into decline.
Source: http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/theme/532
White Citizens' Councils aimed to maintain 'Southern way of life'
The White Citizens' Council was born in Greenwood, Miss., shortly after the 1954-55
Brown vs. Board of Education decisions were rendered. Sister branches rapidly surfaced
throughout Mississippi and other Southern states.
Leading citizens joined. The goal was to maintain segregation.
Tennessee's relatively ineffective version of the citizens' council was called the
Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, of which Madison County had a
chapter. The group placed advertisements in The Sun in the 1960s in support of
segregation. One was an editorial from another newspaper that said, "The Negro today
is the best treated human being in the United States."
The Madison chapter also held at least one meeting covered by The Sun. According to
the story, a Memphis attorney called for prosecuting Jackson's bus company for
integrating its buses and called the 1954 school desegregation by the U.S. Supreme
Court "a judicial monstrosity."
At the same meeting, according to the article, District Attorney David P. Murray called on
the audience to "help maintain our Southern way of life" and added, "Let's fight for it to
the bitter end." According to The Sun's story, 200 people attended the meeting, including
a circuit judge, an American Legion commander and the sheriff of Haywood County.
Citizens' councils used economic and political pressure to achieve their ends. The
election of Ross Barnett as governor of Mississippi, on the promise of defending the
state's traditions - which meant white supremacy - was one display of the council's
success.
Below are excerpts from a pamphlet from the Association of Citizens' Councils titled
"Why Does Your Community Need a Citizens' Council?":
Maybe your community has had no racial problems! This may be true; however, you
may not have a fire, yet you maintain a fire department. You can depend on one thing:
The NAACP (National Association for the Agitation of Colored People), aided by alien
influences, bloc vote seeking politicians and left-wing do-gooders, will see that you have
a problem in the near future.
The Citizens' Council is the South's answer to the mongrelizers. We will not be
integrated. We are proud of our white blood and our white heritage of sixty centuries.
... We are certainly not ashamed of our traditions, our conservative beliefs, nor our
segregated way of life.
Sources: The Jackson Sun; "History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement;" The
Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture
Source: http://orig.jacksonsun.com/civilrights/sec2_citizencouncil.shtml
Welcome to the Citizens’ Councils newspaper historical resource web site to aid in
the understanding of the Modern Civil Rights Era.
The Citizens’ Council by Euan Hague, DePaul University
The Citizens’ Council was the newspaper of the white supremacist Citizens’ Council of
Mississippi between October 1955 and September 1961. It was intended to spread a prosegregationist message throughout the southern states with the hope that white people would
be outraged that their children had to share classrooms with African-Americans and would
organize to resist racial desegregation and restore white supremacist rule. The Citizens’
Council newspaper comprised part of a multi-media propaganda strategy that included
television and radio broadcasts. Circulating an average of 50,000 copies an issue by 1960, The
Citizens’ Council maintained that it was “Dedicated to the maintenance of peace, good order,
and domestic tranquility in our Community and in our State and to the preservation of our
States’ Rights.” Published in Jackson, Mississippi, under the editorship of William J. Simmons,
the newspaper was available for a $2 (later $3) annual subscription. It was succeeded by a
monthly magazine, The Citizen.
The Citizens’ Council of Mississippi which published The Citizens’ Council was one of many
similar local anti-integration organizations that were founded in the immediate aftermath of the
May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that mandated racial
integration of public schools. Often identified as white Citizens’ Councils or the Citizens’ Councils
of America, the first recorded Council was established in July 1954 under the leadership of
Robert B. “Tut” Patterson a WWII veteran, former college football star and at the time a
plantation manager in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Comprising a membership drawn from
local bankers, attorneys, and businessmen, Patterson’s Indianola Citizens’ Council set the
template for similar groups across the southern states. Alongside Mississippi, Citizens’ Councils
were most prominent in Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina and Virginia and together
comprised an attempt to overturn desegregation decrees through legal means in an effort to
maintain racially segregated schools and communities. Many participants were seemingly
respectable middle class individuals, members of state and local legislatures, judges, teachers,
doctors, police officials and other white professionals. Citizens’ Councils explicitly denounced Ku
Klux Klan style violence, instead making their case for white supremacy by arguing for new
statutes and forwarding mandates to reverse racial integration. Citizens’ Councils would
organize boycotts and protests, attend meetings to oppose school integration proceedings,
pressure employers to fire African-Americans, refuse to serve blacks in stores and mount other
similar campaigns.
Many Citizens’ Councils members believed that educating white people would empower
them to resist racial integration. Councils published lists of recommended readings for
supporters and through The Citizens’ Council and other publications, they aimed to present
arguments and evidence to prove that racial integration was misguided and that segregation
and white supremacy were both the natural state of affairs and the best way to operate a
biracial society. The most notorious Citizens’ Councils publication was Black Monday. Written
by Mississippi circuit court judge Thomas Pickens Brady this coarsely racist diatribe, titled in
reference to the day of the Brown v. Board decision, basically became a handbook for the
movement. Despite repeated assertions distancing themselves from the KKK, the racial politics
forwarded by Citizens’ Councils led commentators to moniker them the “uptown” or “country
club” Klan. After initially operating as clandestine organizations, within a few months of their
initial appearance in 1954 Councils decided to operate openly. Becoming publicly known, readily
accessible and led by members of the local middle classes in many southern towns, membership
peaked at around 250,000 in 1957.
The Citizens’ Council was a monthly four page newspaper. Reviewing the first issue which
was published in October 1955 with a print run of 125,000 copies, Neil McMillen notes that it
was composed almost entirely of pro-segregation essays reprinted from area newspapers.
Subsequent issues contained original articles and cartoons commenting on topics such as South
Africa’s apartheid policies, civil rights activists and their campaigns, racial differences in
intelligence, “race mixing,” interracial marriage, and contemporary politics and politicians. Black
people, both American and African were often depicted as sexual predators or caricatured as
African savages, cannibals and witch doctors incapable of self-control or self-rule. Racial
integration was understood to be impossible and unnatural, with racial groups being
predisposed to violently maintaining their distinctiveness meaning that trouble would inevitably
flare up if desegregation occurred. The message of The Citizens’ Council was white supremacy.
The newspaper’s racism was coupled with contempt for what were understood to be
hypocritical northern liberals forcing change onto the south while ignoring racial segregation
and racially-motivated disturbances in cities like Chicago, and disdain for southern whites who
were not vigorous enough in defending “racial integrity” and “the southern way of life.”
The newspapers in The Citizens’ Council archive reveal just how widespread the reach of
the Citizens’ Council was. Reports are regularly included from every state in the former
Confederacy about how Councils are contesting desegregation and the November 1960 issue,
for example, reproduces a photograph of Citizens’ Council officials receiving 30 acres of land
in Utah as a gift to initiate an endowment. On the same page as this photograph is a story by
John R. Parker outlining how three thousand years of Ethiopian independence has produced
little and that all major businesses there are run by whites, whereas South Africa’s mere three
hundred years of white rule has generated a thriving industrial economy. The message is
evident – white rule is the only way to ensure a stable, modern society. One regular feature
ofThe Citizens’ Council is articles denouncing civil rights organizations. Stories and cartoons
regularly attack the NAACP as fomenting anti-white hatred, insidiously controlling the Supreme
Court, forcing “race mixing” and conspiring to assume leadership in a dictatorial police state.
Other essays, such as that in the December 1955 issue, show the Citizens’ Councils developing
an ideological argument about the meanings of American republicanism and sovereignty.
Eventually, successful civil rights activism, such as the Montgomery bus boycott and
subsequent legislation like the 1964 Civil Rights Act undermined the Citizens’ Councils and
exposed their failure to stem the tide of change and racial integration. Support for Councils
began to diminish and by the 1970s they were largely moribund. In 1985, however, the mailing
list of the Citizens’ Councils was revived and became the basis for the invigoration of a new
group dedicated to preserving the privileges of white America, the Council of Conservative
Citizens. One of the initial leaders of this new group was the original founder of the white
Citizen’s Councils, Robert Patterson, who, like many others, joined the Council of Conservative
Citizens having previously been active in Citizen’s Councils some three decades previously.
The Citizens’ Council archive is an important collection because these newspapers, despite
their centrality to the “massive resistance” of the anti-integration struggle, were ephemeral and
few copies survive. They show the month-to-month concerns of white supremacist residents of
the United States and provide a wealth of detailed information about the participants in
Citizens’ Councils, their beliefs and activities. Not only is this archive impressive in its extent,
containing every edition of The Citizens’ Council, but it clearly demonstrates the articulation of a
racist, white supremacist ideology that was hostile towards African-Americans, civil rights,
liberal politics, global opinion and federal authority. Many of the positions articulated by
contributors to The Citizens’ Council were reiterated by opponents of civil rights in the 1960s
and are still echoed in current discussions of affirmative action and immigration policy. Further,
today’s neo-Confederate groups, such as the League of the South, and outspoken populist
conservative commentators make many of the same claims, often utilizing the same language
and comparisons that once appeared in The Citizens’ Council. Americans with an interest in civil
rights and building a multicultural society will recognize echoes of The Citizens’ Councils in TV
soundbites, on talk radio and the internet. This is also a valuable archive for scholars of race,
race relations and whiteness and for those interested in social movements and U.S. politics.
Compared to the volume of work on the Ku Klux Klan, the Citizens’ Councils are little explored
with the best texts on the topic having been written around forty years ago (see further
reading).
Racism is often perceived as being a behavior exhibited by the uneducated or working
class. What The Citizens’ Council newspapers make abundantly clear is that many racists are
articulate, educated, upper class members of our populace. Such white supremacy is arguably
as dangerous and threatening to American democracy as that which is violently pursued by
others. In their efforts to enact legislation to ensure white supremacy and encode segregation
through the mundane practices of electoral politics, petitions and publications, Citizens’
Councils challenged the civil rights movement and worked to reverse Supreme Court rulings that
guaranteed equal rights for all Americans.
This online resource is made possible by both Edward H. Sebesta, who in his researches
found and purchased at some expense a bound copy of the entire run of this newspaper, and
the Southern Poverty Law Center who digitized it, provided a book restorer to unbind the
volume for scanning and rebound it again, and did legal research to verify that it was in the
public domain.
Source: http://www.citizenscouncils.com/index.php
http://www.citizenscouncils.com/index.php
Click this link then click a link on the page to see a
copy of the White Citizens Council newspaper:
http://www.citizenscouncils.com/index.php
What was happening in Little Rock at the time of this advertisement?
Source:http://www.thelostyear.com/images/photos/mothers-league-poster.jpg
The following article is the transcript of a radio interview about
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s comment in 2010 that
defended the actions of the White Citizens Councils during the
Civil Right Movement. You can read it, or you can listen to it by
clicking Listen to the Story at this link:
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/27/132364641/Mississippi-CitizensCouncils-What-Were-They
Mississippi Citizens Councils: What Were They?
December 27, 201012:00 PM ET
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is still in the news for his defense of the role
of the Citizens Council in dealing with desegregation and civil rights in Yazoo
City. Many see the councils — which spun off a group that initially called
itself the White Citizens Council — as primarily white supremacist groups.
John Dittmer, professor emeritus at DePauw University in Indiana, is the
author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. He talks
with Michel Martin about the history of the Citizens Councils.
Copyright © 2010 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of
Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
MICHEL MARTIN, host:
This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin.
In a minute we'll hear from a security expert about whether all those new
security procedures at the airport are actually doing any good.
But first, we have another story about the power of memory. We just heard
from the mayor of South Carolina about how his city and state are gearing
up to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War.
Now we go to Mississippi where the legacy of slavery, segregation, is also
being remembered in different ways. In a recent interview in the
conservative Weekly Standard magazine, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour,
a Republican who's been mentioned a bit of late as a potential presidential
candidate, spoke approvingly about a group called the Citizens Council.
Barbour was quoted as saying that while northerners saw the councils as
akin to the Ku Klux Klan, he says the councils were groups of leading
business people that actually kept a lid on the Klan, and helped his
hometown, Yazoo City, integrate the schools without violence.
His remarks sparked criticism even from some other conservatives, and he
has stepped back from them. But we wanted to know more about what the
facts really are about citizens councils and what role they actually did play in
Mississippi, so we've called on John Dittmer. He is professor emeritus at
DePauw University, and author of the book "Local People: The Struggle for
Civil Rights in Mississippi," and he joins us now from his home office in Green
Castle, Indiana.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Mr. JOHN DITTMER (Professor Emeritus, DePauw University): I'm delighted
to be here.
MARTIN: Now, could you just tell us a bit about the history of the citizens
councils, how were they founded, by whom, and what kinds of activities they
engaged in? It's my understanding that they were actually originally called
White Citizens Councils.
Mr. DITTMER: Well, in Mississippi, they just used the name Citizens Council. I
think they thought that White would be redundant. In other states they
added the White to the title.
The Citizens Council was founded specifically for the purpose of denying
blacks entrance into white schools. And as several have pointed out, in Yazoo
City, Barbour's home town, the council was very successful in preventing
blacks who had signed petitions to get their kids into school, to get them in.
People who signed the petitions were fired if they worked for whites, had
credit denied if they were independent, and as such, no Mississippi public
schools desegregated until 1964.
MARTIN: How exactly did these groups work?
Mr. DITTMER: A writer named Hodding Carter once said that Citizens Council
was the uptown Ku Klux Klan. These were a bunch of professional
businessmen, leaders of the community, Barbour was right in that respect.
But the image of the Citizens Council was that it was nonviolent, and the
reality is much, much different.
For example, it was a Citizens Council member, Byron De La Beckwith, who
murdered Jackson civil rights leader Medgar Evers. And after Beckwith was
arrested, the Citizens Council raised money to pay for his court defense.
MARTIN: Well, let me just tell you what Haley Barbour says, and then you
can tell me how you respond to it. I mean, he initially said that the reason
his city desegregated without the violence that characterized other places is
that these organizations of town leaders would run the Klan out of town. And
then he released this following statement on December 21st: When asked
why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when
I was a young man that accompanied other towns' integration efforts, I
accurately said the community leadership would not tolerate it, and helped
prevent violence there. My point was that my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan,
but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were
saints either. Their vehicle, the Citizens Council, is totally indefensible, as is
segregation. It was a difficult and painful time for Mississippi, the rest of the
country, and especially African-Americans who were persecuted in that time.
Do you think his assessment of Yazoo City, to your knowledge, was correct,
that the leadership there did not tolerate the Klan?
Mr. DITTMER: In Yazoo City, as in other cities, it was not so much the Klan
was persona non grata, it was superfluous. The Citizens Council was the
keeper of the color line. Up until the mid-'60s when the civil rights
movement was making great gains in Mississippi, not until 1953 was the
Klan a factor anywhere.
Secondly, he had to walk away from that comment with the simple
statement that the Citizens Council was not a good organization. But as I and
others have tried to point out, this organization of town leaders was really a
vicious group that would do anything to advance the cause of white
supremacy.
For example, right after the Brown decision in 1954, the Citizens Council
stated that if schools were desegregated that would result in the rape of
white girls, and ultimately in, quote, "the mongrelization of the white race."
What was the impact of these kinds of statements on people who were
maybe inclined to react violently against efforts by blacks to desegregate
their facility?
MARTIN: The other thing - the other question I had for you is that in terms
of how school integration actually occurred in Mississippi in general, and in
Yazoo City in particular, do I have it right that the town leaders basically just
set up alternate schools for white kids?
Mr. DITTMER: Well, yeah. Yazoo City did not desegregate its schools until
1970, and your point is a good one, because there was no violence in Yazoo
City in 1970, because by that time whites had given up on the public schools.
They were founding their own private segregated academies so there was no
use for them to get upset.
MARTIN: How were they able to avoid desegregating the schools until 1970?
Mr. DITTMER: Well, that was a series of court evasions. The Supreme Court
in 1955 said that schools should desegregate with all deliberate speed. And
that, for the deep South, meant never.
MARTIN: In interviews, the other comment that Governor Barbour made that
has attracted some attention is he was asked how he remembers that era.
He's quoted as saying, I just don't remember it as being that bad. He said, I
remember Martin Luther King came to town in '62. He spoke out at the old
fairground, it was full of people, black and white, and he was asked if he
remembered what King said. He said, I just don't really remember. The truth
is, we couldn't hear very well, we were sort of out there on the periphery.
We just sat on our cars watching the girls talking with boys. We paid more
attention to the girls than to King.
That's really the only thing that is offered as his memory of that era, and I'm
just wondering how you respond to those remarks.
Mr. DITTMER: Two things. First of all, you did not have in the middle of the
civil rights movement, white teenagers hanging out on the periphery of a
civil rights speech. But the other point is that Barbour did not have any
indication in his remarks of being upset at all by this, but Barbour was a
junior in high school. So he was of age then. He knew what was going on.
Whites knew what was going on. They just didn't approve of it, and I think
this comes down to his remarks today.
MARTIN: Derrick Johnson, we spoke to him, the president of the NAACP in
Mississippi, he says that actually people in Mississippi are not that shocked
by what Governor Barbour has to say, but that they feel that it is important
to let the country know what the mindset is. And the mindset is one of
revisionism. And he thinks it's a very serious matter, and I'd like to ask what
your view of this is.
Mr. DITTMER: Yeah. I think Barbour is one of many unreconstructed
Southerners. He is not a Holocaust denier in the sense that he admits that
slavery existed and that a hundred years of racial segregation existed. But it
really wasn't that big a deal for him.
MARTIN: Well, what if it wasn't that big of a deal for him, it didn't really
affect his life, at least as he remembers it. Is that so wrong?
Mr. DITTMER: Well, I think that it depends on whether you have a moral
conscience or not. Certainly there were people in Mississippi, white people,
who were aware of what was going on, and who were horrified about it. The
problem was there was no white minority in Mississippi that was able to
vocalize its sentiments at the time.
So the Haley Barbours of that generation didn't really have to pay that much
attention to it.
MARTIN: John Dittmer is professor emeritus at DePauw University. He's also
author of the book "Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights In Mississippi,"
which we should note won the prestigious Bancroft Prize. He joined us from
his home office in Green Castle, Indiana.
Professor Dittmer, thank you so much for joining us.
Mr. DITTMER: Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
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Click this link to see a short video describing the White
Citizen’s Council:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn5na4k0Bxg
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