The White Citizens’ Councils were private organizations formed throughout the South in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared unconstitutional racial SEGREGATION in public schools. The councils advocated nonviolent and lawful resistance to any and all attempts at desegregation.
A few weeks after the announcement of the Brown decision, Mississippi Circuit Court judge Thomas P. Brady published a pamphlet entitled Black Monday. The pamphlet, which espoused white supremacy, called for organized nonviolent resistance to desegregation and became the primer for the formation of the Citizens’ Councils. Robert B. Patterson, a Mississippi farmer who fought in World War II, formed the first such group in July 1954 in his town of Indianola.
Patterson and the Indianola Council created a thorough plan of expansion, traveling from town to town, meeting with each community’s leaders and social luminaries. By September 1954, the Mississippi legislature praised the groups in open session and they began to receive national coverage by the Associated Press. By 1956 Patterson estimated Mississippi was home to 80,000 council members in 65 counties. The councils quickly became the most respected, powerful, and effective private antisegregation organizations in the South. Despite their rhetoric of white supremacy, both Patterson and Brady wished to disassociate their movement from the Ku Kiux Klan, a group whose methods and secrecy were unpalatable to the prominent individuals who made up the bulk of the councils’ membership. Nonetheless, critics often referred to the councils as “the up-town Klan.”
As increasing numbers of black men and women pushed for desegregation, more White Citizens’ Councils formed across the South, especially in the deep southern states of Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina. The councils in states such as Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee were often ineffectual due to weak leadership, a reluctance to adopt the councils’ unremitting ideology of white supremacy, and state governments more willing to comply with federally mandated integration measures. Still, by the end of the decade, senators such as South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond and governors like Alabama’s George C. Wallace ardently supported the councils.
While day-to-day administration remained at the local level, regional councils, including the Citizens’ Councils of America (CCA), established in early 1956, amplified the general ideology of the council movement. At first, the councils organized boycotts of pro-integration black businesses, sent out questionnaires to all possible candidates asking their positions on racial issues, and coerced voter registration officials to be prohibitively strict with black citizens registering to vote. The economic fallout from counterboycotts of white businesses, however, led President Dwight D. Eisenhower, usually reticent to publicly speak about racial issues, to condemn the councils’ boycotts in 1956. Abortive attempts to affect public policy and federal investigations of inequalities in voter registration stalled the councils’ efforts in these arenas as well.
The use of propaganda, concentrated in the nationally circulated newspaper The Citizens’ Council, quickly became the main method of resisting civil rights advances. The councils’ literature inflamed fears of interracial marriage, using quasi-scientific research to prove the black race’s inherent inferiority to whites. Cartoons aimed at elementary school-aged children were commonplace. In 1958, the CCA distributed weekly television and radio shows featuring interviews on racial topics with U. S. senators and representatives, many of whom aided the shows’ production by granting access to government-subsidized studios. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission subsidized many of the shows, granting almost $200,000. While the governing bodies of southern Christian churches, the Southern Baptist Convention most prominently, endorsed a policy of swift desegregation soon after the Brown decision, council pamphlets often appealed to readers’ belief in a divinely sanctioned duty to keep the races separate.
By the early 1960s, maintaining segregation became less of a viable reality. While Mississippi kept its public schools segregated until 1964, most southern states were integrated at least in part by 1960. Attempts at transporting black families from southern states with a “surplus” black population to northern states with a “deficit” in black residents failed, due as much to a lack of funding as overwhelming criticism of the program by even publications that supported the councils in the South. When the University of Mississippi acquiesced under pressure to integration in the fall of 1962, both the regional Mississippi Council and the CCA, which played considerable roles in encouraging the protests at the university, slipped in prestige and political solvency. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide election to the presidency, both the number and the membership rolls of the Citizens’ Councils fell irreparably. By 1968, the failed third-party presidential candidacy of antisegregationist George Wallace effectively ended the power of the councils.
Further reading: Hodding Carter III, The South Strikes Back (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1959); Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-64 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).
—Adam B. Vary
World History
