Cover Story: By the people ...

A blazing wooden cross 9 feet high was jammed into a pipe sunk into the ground in front of Pensacola High School. It was May 20, 1954, just three days after the Brown v. Board of Education decision had ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional. On the same night, many miles across the state of Florida, on the Atlantic coast, another cross burst into flames. This one, wrapped in burlap and soaked with kerosene, was placed on a ridge overlooking the black section of Fort Pierce.

Thus began a fierce campaign of white resistance to integration. While most Ku Klux Klan groups still relied on violence and the intimidating message conveyed by its flaming symbols, the newly formed movement of “Citizens’ Councils” had another idea: use more “respectable” economic pressure against “agitators” who demanded desegregation.

The first Citizens’ Council was formed in conservative, cotton-rich Sunflower County, Miss., inspired by Judge Tom P. Brady’s hastily printed tract, Black Monday, the text of a speech he gave to the Greenwood, Miss., chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution a few months after the Brown decision. Black Monday is a veritable encyclopedia of racist ideas that proposed the creation of a 49th state solely for blacks, and contained such lurid observations as: “Whenever and wherever the white man has drunk the cup of black hemlock, whenever and wherever his blood has been infused with the blood of the Negro, the white man, his intellect and his culture have died.”

One man heavily influenced by Black Monday was Robert B. “Tut” Patterson, a former Mississippi State University football star, World War II paratrooper and the manager of a 1,500-acre cotton plantation in Leflore County. After reading Brady’s remarks, Patterson called together 14 prominent businessmen and civic leaders on July 11, 1954, in Indianola, Miss. The meeting was soon followed by a larger gathering of whites at the town hall, and the first Citizens’ Council was born. Barely six months later, the newly formed State Association claimed affiliates in 33 counties, with new out-of-state councils in Alabama and Georgia.

Within a year, the movement boasted 60,000 members in 253 councils throughout Mississippi. While the blood sport of racial violence never lost its appeal for some white Mississippians, the Citizens’ Council movement tried to cast itself as a law-abiding entity. With only 22,000 of the state’s nearly 1 million blacks registered to vote in 1952, the Citizens’ Councils emphatically recommended that whites discourage Negro registration “by every legal means.”

When Citizens’ Council delegates from 11 Southern states met two years later, the movement claimed 300,000 members, and they renamed themselves the Citizens’ Councils of America. Although most Councilors (as they called themselves) regarded their lower-class Klan cousins with contempt, the movement was just as thoroughly racist. “In general, the nature of the Negro is more primitive and childlike than the Whites, and his crimes are likely to be more savage and less sophisticated,” wrote prominent psychologist Henry E. Garrett in one Council publication.

Such beliefs were commonplace among the elite that closed ranks with the Citizens’ Councils and the South’s leading politicians to oppose integration. Chief among the latter was Mississippi’s senior senator, James O. Eastland, who in 1956 was one of more than 100 congressmen and senators from 11 states who signed a “Southern Manifesto” asserting that the Brown decision and its legal progeny were unconstitutional.

The Citizens’ Councils also embraced anti-Semitism. Because integrationists were considered Communists and Jews were seen as the principal agents of communist subversion, many hard-line segregationists concluded that Jews were the driving force behind the Civil Rights Movement. This theory had the added benefit of divesting blacks of intellectual and moral stature and reducing them to mere pawns in the struggle between devious Jews and the Christian defenders of white civilization.

One year after the Brown decision, the Supreme Court issued an enforcement decree, ordering lower federal courts in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware to implement its landmark ruling “with all deliberate speed.” But the ruling had little immediate effect. Still, worried Citizens’ Council militants sprang into action. In Selma, Ala., more than half of those blacks courageous enough to support a desegregation petition lost their jobs within weeks of signing their names. In Mississippi, South Carolina and elsewhere, Citizens’ Council leaders began to aggressively implement the solution first proposed by Judge Brady in Black Monday: They activated his call for “a cold war and an economic boycott” against black agitators. “A great many Negro employees will be discharged,” Brady predicted.

And they were. State legislatures also attacked black activists with new laws that especially targeted the NAACP. These wide-ranging and unconstitutional statutes required disclosure of NAACP membership rolls, demanded the dismissal of public employees who were NAACP members, and subjected the organization to investigations by state agencies and committees.

More disturbing than Brady’s prescription for economic reprisal was his ominous forecast of violence. “If trouble is to come, we can predict how it will rise,” Brady warned. “The supercilious, glib young Negro, who has sojourned in Chicago or New York, and who considers the counsel of his elders archaic, will perform an obscene act, or make an obscene remark, or a vile overture or assault upon some white girl. For they will reason ... ‘We need but to assert ourselves and abolish every last vestige of segregation and racial difference.’ This is the reasoning which produces riots, bloodshed, raping and revolutions.”

Such were the circumstances — in the eyes of white racists, at least — that led to the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till, on Aug. 28, 1955. The Chicagoan was kidnapped from his grandfather’s home in Money, Miss., after allegedly “wolf-whistling” at a white woman. When his beaten body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, a 70-pound cotton-gin fan had been tied around his neck with barbed wire. Two men were arrested and later acquitted by an all-white jury.

From May 1954 to December 1955, the struggle between black Civil Rights activists and segregationists was generally limited to two issues: school integration and voting rights. But the situation changed dramatically when Rosa Parks refused to defer to local segregation codes in Montgomery, Ala., on Dec. 1, 1955. She was arrested, and the subsequent yearlong bus boycott thrust Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then a young pastor at Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, onto the national stage and fundamentally transformed the fight against segregation “from the courtrooms to the streets, from law libraries to the pews of churches, from the mind to the soul,” wrote black historian Lerone Bennett Jr.

In 1955, one year after the Brown decision, the school board in Little Rock, Ark., responded to a federal lawsuit filed by black students and approved a blueprint for school desegregation. Attempts to execute the plan two years later prompted mob violence and a constitutional crisis that led President Eisenhower to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and mobilize Army troops.

The move horrified segregationists, who used the crisis at Central High School in Arkansas to muster support for Massive Resistance: the South’s second great lost cause. The resistance campaign, led by Citizens’ Council activists, set about disrupting school board meetings, petitioning the governor and taking out newspaper ads to manipulate white fears: “If you integrate Little Rock Central High ... would the Negro boys be permitted to solicit the white girls for dances?” queried one broadside. Will “tender love scenes” in integrated drama classes “be assigned to Negro boys and white girls?”

Terrified by the prospect, Mrs. Clyde Thomason, a member of the newly formed Mothers’ League of Little Rock Central High School, sued and won a temporary restraining order against the desegregation plan. The state chancery court based its decision on the testimony of Gov. Orval Faubus, who warned of the “probability of violence and civil commotion,” falsely claiming that there had been an alarming increase in local gun sales.

Unlike other places in the South, Little Rock had a local school board willing to pursue, rather than obstruct, integration. So when Mrs. Thomason won her injunction, the school board turned to the federal court for relief. In August 1957, Judge Roger N. Davies ordered desegregation to proceed, prompting Gov. Faubus to call out the National Guard. As things heated up in Little Rock, the local Citizens’ Council president, Robert E. Brown, urged Faubus to stand firm: “As the sovereign head of the state, you are immune to federal orders.”

On Sept. 3, 1957, Judge Davies ordered school officials to proceed with integration. But Guard troops continued to prevent black students from entering the school. Although Faubus had promised President Eisenhower that he would allow the nine black students into Central High School, he reneged. This infuriated the president and his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, who concluded that Faubus’ actions were nothing less than “an attempt to nullify the Constitution.” Faubus further enraged Eisenhower when he defiantly ordered the National Guard troops removed, relinquishing control of Central High to a seething segregationist mob. Rock-throwing and other violence led to scores of arrests by police. Despite disavowing violence, the Citizens’ Council quickly established a “Freedom Fund” to help cover legal expenses for 75 people arrested during the fracas.

Eisenhower issued an executive order federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and authorizing the Secretary of Defense to “use such of the armed forces of the Unites States as he may deem necessary.”

On Sept. 24, 1,000 troops from the 101st Airborne in Fort Campbell, Ky., began arriving in Little Rock. The following day, the school’s athletic field was transformed into a military command post, complete with field kitchens, tents and trucks. Outside Central High, soldiers lined the streets three paces apart, rifles and fixed bayonets at the ready.

The image appalled many Southerners. Henceforth, all Citizens’ Council mail carried a stamp bearing the slogan “Remember Little Rock” and the image of a soldier holding a bayonet at the back of two white girls.