“I joined the Citizens’ Council,” said one Delta physician. “They would come up with all of this stuff about how the black boys might molest the white girls—that was a fear. Of course, one of the fears expressed by people like Jim Eastland, Ross Barnett, Judge Brady, and the man down in Louisiana, Leander Perez [was that] they always invoked the fear of intermarriage.” And so these reasonable, respectable white men who disavowed Ku Kluxers stewed in their politicized racial fears until they became comfortable, tacitly or directly, with horrors. The doctor continued, “People like Andrew Gainey over in Meridian would say, ‘Well, we can go to deportation, we can go to amalgamation, or we can go to extermination.’?”25
Brady’s screed reflected the spirit of panic that prevailed in white Mississippi and drove the growth of the Citizens’ Councils. “The main way Councils were organized was through the service clubs,” said William Simmons, the leader of the Jackson Citizens’ Council and the son of a prominent financier. “Patterson and I would go and make a talk to Rotary or Kiwanis or Civitans or Exchange or Lions. We’d tell them what the Council movement is, what fellows were doing in different communities. Invariably the response was favorable.” Simmons and Patterson recruited dozens of other speakers for the Council cause, and they fanned out all over the state.26 Membership claims and estimates vary somewhat, but roughly nineteen members in July 1954 grew to twenty-five thousand in October, when Patterson established the first statewide office of the Association of Citizens’ Councils of Mississippi in Winona, though it soon moved to Greenwood. A year after the first meetings in Indianola the Citizens’ Councils boasted sixty thousand members in 253 communities and seven states.27 By eighteen months out, Simmons claimed that the Councils had more than half a million members; independent investigators suggested that the truth was at least 300,000.28 Patterson was astonished, he said, that the gathering of men who vowed to protect white womanhood would “expand miraculously into a virile and potent organization.”29
The feral heart of Citizens’ Council ideology drew almost equally on what W. J. Cash had fifteen years earlier termed “the Southern rape complex” and the delusion that international communism had spawned the civil rights movement.30 On Black Monday, the Mississippi Association of Citizens’ Councils charged, the U.S. Supreme Court “based their decision upon the writings of communists and socialists.”31 The NAACP was “a left-wing, power-mad organ of destruction” that had been “infiltrated by communist sympathizers.” This language presented anew the logic on which American racism has long relied. Like many white citizens over the years, members of the Council believed that anything that weakened white supremacy or challenged the existing social hierarchy in any way was socialism. But this was largely code for preserving the country’s racial caste system, centuries in the making. Animated by this fear, the Citizens’ Council pledged to defeat integration and deliver “a complete reversal of the contrived trend toward a raceless, classless society.”32
The Southern writer Lillian Smith captured the Citizens’ Councils clearly and succinctly: “Some of these men are bankers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, newspaper editors, and publishers; a few are preachers; some are powerful industrialists. It is a quiet, well-bred mob. Its members speak in cultivated voices, have courteous manners, some have university degrees, and a few wear Brooks Brothers suits. They are a mob, nevertheless. For they not only protect the rabble, and tolerate its violence, they think in the same primitive mode, they share the same irrational anxieties, they are just as lawless in their own quiet way, and they are dominated by the same ‘holy ideal’ of white supremacy.”33
Representative Wilma Sledge announced the birth of the Citizens’ Council movement from the floor of the Mississippi legislature, adding, “It is not the intent or purpose of the Citizens’ Councils to be used as a political machine.” They made haste, however, to claim credit for the passage of two constitutional amendments adopted in late 1954 and began to throw their weight behind politicians who backed their program.34 The Councils also gained the early support of Senator Eastland, scores of elected officials, and the Hederman family, which controlled the Jackson Daily News and the Clarion-Ledger.35 Their membership rolls soon included governors, legislators, and mayors and virtually all who aspired to those offices. In only a few months the Citizens’ Council had become a huge organization that could speak for nearly all vested authority in Mississippi. “The Councils were eminently respectable,” writes the historian Charles Payne, “and in Mississippi were hard to distinguish from the state government.”36 In fact, the state government eventually provided a good deal of funding for them. By 1955 the Jackson (MS) Daily News was printing Citizens’ Council press releases as though they were reported news. Newspaper advertisements for Council membership gave no address or telephone number for those wishing to join but instead directed the reader to inquire at “your local bank.”37
Some of the Council’s power came from its sophisticated communications apparatus. This quickly mutated from a single duplicating machine to a propaganda mill spanning radio, television, and a phalanx of speakers for any occasion. It soon included legislators, governors, U.S. senators, mayors, and virtually anyone who aspired to electoral office.38 Much of this noise machine focused on correcting supposedly unfair or inaccurate views of the South in general and Mississippi in particular. But the river of mail that poured out of Council offices was largely race-hate literature printed by Ellet Lawrence, a man whose unmatched power in the organization came from his ownership of a Jackson printing company. Titles included such “educational material” as “The Ugly Truth about the NAACP, Mixed Schools and Mixed Blood.”39 The mainstay of Council literature remained sexually provocative photographs of black men and white women drinking, dancing, or embracing, accompanied by breathless rants against race-mixing.40
This incendiary propaganda was taken as gospel truth by much of the white South. This helps explain the response of Council members to the scorn the world heaped on Mississippi in the wake of the lynching of Emmett Till. Outside condemnation enraged white Mississippians, most of whom saw the press reports as grossly unfair. To resist these slanders against the Magnolia State, the Citizens’ Council leadership launched its own monthly newspaper, the Citizen, in the eleven states of the former Confederacy plus Missouri.41 William Simmons became the first editor and wrote most of the stories for what soon became forty thousand subscribers. The paper illuminated the views and activities of the Councils and portrayed black Southerners as loyal darkies, utter buffoons, or, as one observer put it, “the Mau Mau in Africa.”42