Recently, someone sent me a link to a site set up about the old white-supremacist Citizen's Council (citizenscouncil.com)--a supposedly upstanding racist group that famed newspaper editor Hodding Carter Jr. called the "uptown Klan."
The Citizens Council played a central role during our state's recent dark past. This group of merchants and community leaders formed to fight integration and help fuel the hatred that drove the violence of the Klan (while claiming not to want anything to do with violence). Its members staged boycotts and smear campaigns against businesses and individuals who dared speak out against white supremacy, or who just allowed black people to use their public restrooms or dine alongside white people. If you were a white person vaguely in favor of ending the state's legally enforced segregation, the Citizens Council spread rumors about you and tried to run you out of town, or business, or both.
It was a hateful outfit.
The relatively new site, run by academic and Council expert Edward H. Sebesta (who has outed politicians who have pandered to the revamped group, the Council of Conservative Citizens), is a remarkable educational tool. It brings reality about our own state and city--the national Council headquarters were in downtown Jackson--directly to our monitors, straight from the horse's mouth.
Most interesting, you can read PDFs of the Citizens Council "newspaper" (published at 203 Wathall Hotel) on the site. In the PDFs, you can see a lot of names and rhetoric that really hit home. It can be a scary proposition for a younger person from this area; just what family member might turn up in the pages of the Citizens Council paper (either supporting its work, or being blasted by it)?
I've read a lot of old Citizens Council rhetoric, and I've poured through the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files (now also online; just Google them and brace yourself for rampant stupidity, especially the so-called "intelligence" reports where amateur, state-funded spies combed the state looking for someone who supported race-mixing).
We're just lucky these idiots didn't have the Internet: They would have been the original hate-bloggers, spreading lies and innuendo about those who dared question their hate, often hiding behind "anonymous" labels.
But I've seen the Citizens Council stuff before, so no real surprise.
What struck me this time, when looking at those PDFs, is just how closely the rhetoric reflects what we're hearing right now out of tea-partiers and the worst of the right wing. When you click to the first Council paper, dated October 1955 (a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision united white supremacists throughout the South), you see excuse-making headlines like "Mississippi Citizens' Councils are Protecting Both Races." In it, Thomas R. Waring writes: "Citizens Councils, 60,000 strong and growing fast, are mobilizing Mississippi to guard both whites and Negroes."
Yeah, right.
He continues: "Their aim is to preserve separation of the races against assaults from"--now, wait for it--"the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in alliance with the federal government." The article then lies and says that the Councils also want to protect blacks from "ruffian white people who may resort to violence." (Actually, they helped disseminate information about how to find "integrationists.") It also denies that the Citizens Council pushed for economic boycotts and redress against said "liberals." Snort.
You also learn very quickly what the phrase "state's rights" means and has always meant. It's part of the Citizens Council's logo: "For a free people under constitutional government," it declares, referring to an interpretation of the Constitution that allows denial of rights and redress to African Americans.
A reprinted column, "NAACP Witch Doctors," by then-Clarion-Ledger columnist Tom Ethridge starts: "The NAACP and their associates, seeking to exploit the unfortunate (Emmett) Till affair, have dug deeper into their bag of tricks. In a sense, they have reverted to ancient tribal instincts." Why this blast at the NAACP? Because they dared argue that the state of Mississippi was in part responsible for Till's death because our "clergy, press and citizenry" didn't do enough to stop such race violence. Another unsigned column was called, "NAACP Sows Seeds of Hate."
Sound familiar? Recent?
I happened to dip into this Council history right after some tea-party members, helped along by their lapdog media, started a hate campaign against the NAACP because it dared call out the party for unabashedly harboring racists and racism in its ranks. Suddenly, here I was reading very similar rants against that group, the "liberal" press (like their rants against Hodding Carter) who dared oppose them and warnings about "communist China." Anybody who dared question them were liberals (then meant "integrationist"), communists or spreading race hatred themselves.
Thank God this group no longer has a stranglehold on Jackson and Mississippi. (The Council's Bill Simmons was quoted as saying that he knew where every white Jacksonian stood on the "race question," although he denied it to me late in his life.) Why would we ever purposefully live in such a hell again?
But look around. Since President Obama took office, there are people all over the country openly pushing hate. They are throwing around the word "communist" for about anything except real communists (you know, like communist China); they are using the old Council trick of slamming the NAACP and anyone else who calls out racism by calling them "racist"; they are trying to repeal the 14th Amendment; they use crime to spread fear about cities (where they often don't have a voting base); they are trying to scare "good" Americans by generalizing about Muslims and "illegals," acting like any mosque is a terrorism hub and every immigrant is here to steal a job and deposit "anchor babies" all over the place.
Just like the Citizens Council, these people are lying to us. They are spreading hate and fear, and they are dividing our state and our nation. (Thankfully, they no longer have a stranglehold on our city.) And they are using nearly the same rhetoric of old and even focusing on the same bogeymen. Just go look at citizenscouncils.com if you don't believe me.
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