White Citizens' Council
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The White Citizens' Council (WCC) movement was a U.S. movement against racial desegregation. It began in the 1950s as a protest against federal court decisions which ordered racial desegregation, most notably Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The successor organization to the White Citizens' Council is the "Council of Conservative Citizens".[1]
Fourteen whites in the Delta town of Indianola, Mississippi founded the first known chapter of the WCC on July 11, 1954. The prime instigator was Robert 'Tut' Patterson, a plantation manager and the former captain of the Mississippi State University football team. Additional chapters soon appeared in other communities. The formation of the WCC was partly a response to the assertive activities of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), a grass roots civil organization organized by Dr. T.R.M. Howard of the all-black town Mound Bayou, Mississippi in 1951. Mound Bayou was only forty miles from Indianola. Ironically, Patterson was a boyhood friend in Clarksdale, Mississippi of Aaron Henry, an official in the RCNL and the future head of the Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Within a few months, the WCC had spread beyond Mississippi into the rest of the Deep South. It often had the support of the leading citizens of many communities, including business, civic and sometimes religious leaders. Unlike the Ku Klux Klan, the WCC met openly and was seen by many as being "reputable"; in most communities there was little or no stigma associated with being a member of the WCC. Also unlike the Klan, its tactics did not often involve direct confrontation with violence, or terrorism, but rather economic ones.
Blacks who were seen as being too supportive of desegregation, voting rights, or other perceived threats to white supremacy found themselves and their family members unemployed in many instances; whites who supported civil rights for blacks were not immune from finding this happening to them as well. Members of the Citizens' Council were sometimes Klansmen, and the more influential the Citizens' Council member, the more influence he had with the Klan. In fact, the WCC was even referred to during the civil rights era as "an uptown Klan," "a white collar Klan," "a button-down Klan," and "a country club Klan." The rationale for these nicknames was that it appeared that sheets and hoods had been discarded and replaced by suits and ties. Much like the Klan, WCC members held documented white supremacist views and involved themselves in racist activities, however, they also occupied political positions, which enabled them to legally legitimize discriminatory practices aimed at non-whites.
The movement grew as enforcement of racial desegregation became more intense, probably peaking in the early 1960s. By this time there was a sign at the city limits of many small Southern towns proclaiming "The White Citizens' Council of ______ Welcomes You".
As school desegregation increased, in some communities "council schools," sponsored by the WCC, were set up for white children. Derisively referred to by some as "segregation academies," some exist even today, although they have generally assumed other sponsorship and most have been forced to integrate, at least in theory, in order to maintain the tax-exempt status afforded to non-profit private schools, which is granted only to those which maintain a policy of racial and ethnic nondiscrimination.
As white Southerners began to accept desegregation as a permanent aspect of life, the influence of the WCCs began to wane. The attitude of most white Southerners changed as well. Also, the growing economic power of blacks left few white businessowners willing to be openly associated with a racist organization. A few such groups still exist, their names changed to something similar to Conservative Citizens' Council, or member chapters of a kind of successor organization, the Council of Conservative Citizens. U.S. Senator Trent Lott, and Mississippi governor Haley Barbour among other mainstream conservative leaders, received some negative publicity in recent years for addressing one such group.
[edit] References
- David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, T.R.M. Howard: Pragmatism over Strict Integrationist Ideology in the Mississippi Delta, 1942-1954 in Glenn Feldman, ed., Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South (2004 book), 68-95.
- John Dittmer, Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994 book).
- Neil McMillan, The Citizens' Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction 1954-1964 (1971).
- Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995).
- Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman: The Struggle for Justice
[edit] Categories
- American Civil Rights Movement (1896-1954)
- American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)
- Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement
