In a profile in the Weekly Standard, Mississippi Governor (and presidential aspirant) Haley Barbour claimed that, back in the 1950s and 60s, the Citizens’ Council of Yazoo City, MS was a well-intentioned group of businessmen dedicated to running the Ku Klux Klan out of town. 

Why would an ambitious public figure make such a patently false claim?

First, we must remember that Barbour was talking to the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that shares his basic worldview.  In the company of friends, Barbour got a little too loose in his remrks for the general public.

But there’s more to it than that.  You can’t interview a Mississippi governor with presidential aspirations without asking a question or two about civil rights.  Unfortunately for Mr. Barbour, no white politician in the Magnolia state can answer that kind of question without venturing onto thin ice.  You can’t say the civil rights movement was a bad idea.  But in Mississippi you can’t give the movement a ringing endorsement and you sure as hell can’t impugn the motives of Mississippi opinion leaders why worked tirelessly to destroy the civil rights cause. 

Referring to these people as “state-sponsored terrorists”, though historically accurate, is right out.

So what do you say?

You say pretty much what Haley said.  You mumble.  You mutter.  You prevaricate.  You muddy the waters.

I was just about to fire off a historical rejoinder to the governor’s craven revisionism, when I received this essay from my good friend Susan Klopfer.  Susan knows far more about the civil rights movement and the satanic backlash it inspired than I do, so please give the fruit of her research your careful attention.  You will learn something, I promise.  (Ms. Klopfer also has an excellent post on the Yazoo City native Time magazine once described as the most prominent segregationist in America, John Satterfield.)

Here’s a taste of what you will find in the post below:

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 six centuries…If we are bigoted, prejudiced, un-American etc., so were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and other illustrious forebears who believed in segregation. We choose the old paths of our founding fathers and refuse to appease anyone, even the internationalists.

-Citizen Council pamphlet from 1954

White Citizens Councils Filled With Good Guys With Good Intentions? Gov. Haley Barbour Could Use a Mississippi History Lesson

By Susan Klopfer, author

Who Killed Emmett Till and Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited

So Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour wants us to see history through his eyes? Barbour recently stated the Citizens Council he first joined while living in Yazoo City was a good group of men who wanted to better their city and clean up the schools, that it was a nice group of guys dedicated to fixing segregation and righting other wrongs.

But after living in Mississippi, and spending years reading and studying its history, I most heartedly disagree. Here’s what I know (from documented history) about the Citizens Councils, a group that is still operating, and not to the benefit of any of us who care about civil rights, human rights, social justice and equal education…

Citizens Councils came about soon after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which allowed state-sponsored segregation. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court’s unanimous (9–0) decision stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” As a result, de jure racial segregation (segregation required by law) was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement.

Reacting to Brown, the first Citizens Council, a unique white Mississippi organization, was quickly formed on July 11, 1954, a year before Emmett Till was lynched, in the Sunflower County seat of Indianola at the home of D.H. Hawkins, manager of a local cotton compress. (Young Till was actually beaten and killed in a Sunflower County barn thirteen months later, about 25 miles away, following Brown II, the Supreme Court Decision that decreed dismantling of separate school systems for blacks and whites could proceed with “all deliberate speed,” a phrase that pleased neither supporters or opponents of integration.)

The first Council members pledged to fight integration with any means necessary, including using the services of the newly invigorated Ku Klux Klan, according to their own minutes. Growth was rapid, and by 1959, with the election of Governor Ross Barnett, a “Councilor” himself, the Citizen’s Councils were in tight control of the state.

CITIZENS COUNCILS FOUNDER, Robert B. “Tut” Patterson, managed a 1,500-acre cotton plantation in Leflore County. Charter members for Patterson’s Citizens Council included Arthur B. Clark, a Harvard-educated lawyer; Herman Moore, an Indianola banker and Hawkins, along with the town mayor, the county sheriff, a farmer with large landholdings, a smaller farmer, a farm manager, a dentist, a gin operator, a farm implement dealer, two auto dealers, a druggist, and a hardware merchant. All men, state the councils minutes, “pledged at the charter meeting to preserve segregation and called for a public meeting at the Indianola town hall one week later.”

The second meeting attracted between 70 and 100 white men who were told by Moore the meeting “should have been held 30 years ago … when it was very noticeable that the Negro was organizing…Then there was a light in every Negro church, every night, regardless of the time you passed…The Negro continued to meet and organize and through their concerted efforts, with the help of what I believe to be subversive groups and others, have made them a force to be reckoned with.”

Then “cutting to the heart of the matter,” Clark told those gathered “the solution to this problem [enforced desegregation] may become easier if various agitators and the like could be removed from the communities in which they operate.” This would be done through “economic pressure upon those men who cannot be controlled otherwise.”

Patterson was motivated enough to spend the rest of his life growing Citizens Councils and their neo-Nazi successor, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) because – he often told others – he did not want his daughter to attend elementary school with black children, whom he detested.

But in his book, Let The People Decide, historian Dr. J. Todd Moye wrote that Patterson, even before Brown, had “railed against the two-headed monster of miscegenation and Communism… [and] portrayed himself as a modern-day Paul Revere in a desperate race to warn his neighbors of the dangers that approached.”

Citizens Councils soon became the most powerful organization in Mississippi dedicated to preserving white supremacy; within two years, there were more than 200,000 members in 60 council chapters throughout the South, half of them in Mississippi alone. In November 1954, the Citizens Councils published a pamphlet to let others know what they were about, declaring:

“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 six centuries…If we are bigoted, prejudiced, un-American etc., so were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and other illustrious forebears who believed in segregation. We choose the old paths of our founding fathers and refuse to appease anyone, even the internationalists.”

Citizens Councils quickly responded to the NAACP as it assisted its branches in petitioning local school boards to desegregate. The Sunflower County Citizens Council in July organized a boycott of all African Americans who signed the school desegregation petition. Then in Yazoo City, names of the fifty-three professionals who signed the petition were printed in the local paper. All who signed were either fired, boycotted, forced to remove their names or forced to leave town.

Shortly after the first Citizens Councils became a reality, the New York Post sent a reporter into the Deep South on a fact-finding mission. Reporter Stan Optowsky spoke plainly in his assessment, calling the Councils “a loose federation [with the] avowed purpose [to] battle the principle and practice of integration, and to crush all – the Negro and white – who dare advocate the colored man’s rights.” After spending five weeks doing research, the reporter declared the “actual purpose was to elect the right’ candidate; to maintain cheap labor; to eliminate a gnawing business competitor; to protect a shaky job; and to make ‘a few fast bucks.’”

“The success of this movement is staggering.” Optowsky wrote. “It collects about $2 million a year in dues, and does not account for one penny to its members. It induces Jews to belong to an anti-Semite organization; it pressures Catholics into joining an anti-Catholic organization. Even its enemies live in such terror that they literally beg not to be identified publicly, lest they be socially and financially ruined in a matter of months.”

While the first Councils meeting was secret, the Post reporter claimed to have a copy of the meeting’s first speech, given by banker Herman Moore “who makes this very frank admission: ‘The best thing, we think, is to put him (the Negro) right where we have stayed for 30 years and keep him guessing.’”

According to the Post reporter, Councils made a “special point of snuffing out the dangers of the Negro as a political force. Many of their units had formed committees to check the voting registration and purge it of Negroes through loss of job or threats of violence.

“Mississippi, with the nation’s largest Negro population, has 13 counties without a single Negro voter and nine more with less than six Negro voters … although these pressures upon Negroes by the Councils are well known, there’s a less publicized but even greater danger [that] whites, too, are subjected to the same terror if they dare stray from the most rigid segregation line,” Optowsky wrote.

The domination, he suggested, was total. Wrote the Post reporter, “There is no middle ground, no shade of gray. Only black and white. And woe betide the black! ‘Stand up and be counted’ is the rallying cry at each Council organization meeting, and once, in Alabama, a newspaper reporter who didn’t stand up simply because he was writing at the press bench was lifted bodily by two burly rednecks… Business men are badgered by delegations to join up or face boycotts. Ministers are booted from their jobs without ceremony if they protest. With people worked up as they are, it was inevitable that the Ku Klux Klan would simultaneously rise from the dead…The Klan does not claim the niceties which the Councils wear as their mantle. They’re back to flogging again.”

Meanwhile, Patterson’s neighbor, the notorious Senator James O. Eastland from nearby Doddsville, wanted to grow an even larger organization for himself. In the summer of 1955, Eastland announced it was “essential” that a nation-wide organization be set up to “mobilize and organize public opinion” throughout the United States in order to combat school desegregation. The senator said that a “great crusade” would be required to fight the NAACP, CIO, and “all the conscienceless pressure groups who are attempting our destruction.”

Within a month of Eastland’s statement, the Federation for Constitutional Government (FCG), a short-lived organization, was formed in Memphis. Representatives from twelve Southern states came together with the support of Eastland, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, former Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi, U. S. Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi, and other politicians.

Patterson, Judge Thomas Brady and William J. Simmons were elected to positions on the executive committee. John U. Bar of Louisiana was selected president, and it was Eastland’s intention that the Federation would “coordinate” the work of the Citizens Councils and several other organizations.

Many members of the Citizens Councils did not share this view, however, and in April 1956, sixty-five representatives from Citizens Councils in eleven Southern states secretly met to form their own “overseer,” the Citizens Councils of America. The following October, CCA selected Patterson as secretary.

From 1954 to 1989, Patterson spent his time growing the Citizens Councils, as he traveled thousands of miles around the Southeastern states to meet with members and their leaders. As Council numbers grew to over 300,000 members, Eastland helped out, by calling on state governments to fund the movement, even though he was not in control.

Within the first three years, Citizens Councils overseers were freely using the television stations of the U. S. Congress to produce a fifteen minute television program, Citizens Council

Forum, broadcast weekly on twelve television stations in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, courtesy of Eastland.

Councils’ work expanded as the organization grew. Once the Civil Rights Act of 1960 was passed, authorizing judges to appoint referees to help blacks register and vote, the CCA called for establishing a separate African American state, for passage of the African repatriation bill sponsored by U. S. Senator Russell Long (D-LA), and for a “Negro relocation plan” that would distribute the South’s “surplus” blacks evenly among the states.

Several CCA chapters forced evicted black families onto buses headed out of the region and some Citizens Councils ran Reverse Freedom Rides, sending black volunteers into the North as a publicity stunt supporting voluntary migration and resettlement of blacks. “The plantation bloc seemed to be laughing at the entire nation as it made a joke out of its mass destruction of the African American rural community.”

Years later, in 1985, Gordon Le Baum helped Patterson co-found the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the CCA offshoot. Baum had been a regional director in the first Citizens Councils. Patterson remained actively involved in CCC, and was still writing for the organization’s journal, The Informer in 2005, when I personally visited him in his Indianola home.

An Intelligence Report from the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that names of CC members are not public. But after collecting the names of 175 members mentioned in council publications and elsewhere, the Report “was able to document ties to racist groups of 17 of those members — almost 10 percent of the total.” Claiming 15,000 members in 1999, CC was in the news when Mississippi’s U.S. Sen. Trent Lott landed in hot water after it was revealed he spoke before the group again in 2005, as various state legislators and judges were scheduled to attend CC meetings.

While the presence and degree of racism in the CC varies from chapter to chapter, the SPLC report found “a significant number of members have been linked to unabashedly racist groups including the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the National Association for the Advancement of White People; the America First Party; and the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Others have ties to militant ‘Patriot’ organizations such as the extreme-right-wing Populist Party and David Duke.”

And so, I would have to say that Gov. Haley Barbour isn’t much of a historian, at least when it comes to the organization of which he is a proud member.