Content note: this page quotes segregationist language of the 1950s and 1960s and describes bombings, killings, and police dogs used against children.
What it said
Two campaigns spoke to the South and to the country at once, and they did not sound alike. The first Citizens' Council formed in Indianola, Mississippi, in July 1954, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Its minutes, mailed to a chosen list, put the plan in a lawyer's words. Attorney Arthur J. Clark Jr. is quoted there:
the solution to this problem may become easier if various agitators and the like could be removed from the communities in which they operate. We propose to accomplish this through the careful application of economic pressures.
Robert B. Patterson, executive secretary of the statewide body set up that October, gave the same reporter the second half of the message: Communists are trying to make us integrate, weaken us and destroy us.
An Indianola mailing warned that unless white citizens organized, the issue will be black against white.
In 1956 the Councils claimed half a million members in the South alone
(Augusta Courier, 23 July 1956). That number is theirs. Nobody outside the Councils counted it.
In Congress, nineteen senators and 77 representatives issued the Declaration of Constitutional Principles on 12 March 1956, the paper known as the Southern Manifesto. It called Brown a clear abuse of judicial power
, pledged all lawful means
to reverse it, and said outside agitators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes
. In August 1959 a crowd at the Arkansas State Capitol held signs reading Race mixing is Communism
, with American flags overhead.
The movement's words were mostly demands with a signature on them. The 1963 march on Washington carried its program in its name, "Jobs and Freedom." Its placards read We demand equal rights now
and We march for integrated schools now
. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man.
Memphis strikers in 1968 carried I Am a Man
.
Who made it and why
On one side stood the Montgomery Improvement Association, the SCLC, the NAACP, SNCC, CORE, the 1963 march coalition, and the Memphis sanitation strikers. Their tools were the bus boycott that began after Rosa Parks's arrest on 1 December 1955, a volunteer car pool, speaking tours, voter drives, lawsuits, marches, and strikes. A federal court struck down Montgomery's bus segregation and the Supreme Court affirmed. The movement also managed its image carefully. Organizers picked a Wednesday in August, while Congress was in session, and printed thousands of signs at march headquarters. Other leaders made John Lewis soften a line on the Kennedy civil rights bill before he spoke.
On the other side stood the Citizens' Councils, Southern members of Congress, governors, police commissioners, and in Mississippi a state agency. The legislature created the State Sovereignty Commission, which the Library of Congress summarizes as having investigated activists across the state, using a network of informants, economic reprisals, and threats.
By January 1961 the Commission had voted the Councils $5,000 a month out of a $350,000 appropriation, according to the Lexington Advertiser. A federal suit challenged the grants. In January 1962 the Commission's director and an investigator swore an affidavit that the editor Hazel Brannon Smith had attended a meeting with integration leaders, and, in a UPI report, the Councils mailed copies around the state.
The stated reason, in the Councils' own account, was peace through separation. State legislator Wilma Sledge described members in 1954 as reliable White male citizens who believe that segregation is not discrimination
who do not and will not advocate violence in any form.
Patterson put it as a promise: As long as there is no integration, there will be no trouble.
What it got right or wrong
The "outside agitator" line was false on the record the archive holds. In Birmingham in May 1963, police and firemen under Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor turned dogs and fire hoses on marchers, and more than 1,400 people were arrested in four days. More than 500 of those held were children under 16. Connor still spoke of agitators coming in here to stir up trouble
(Evening Star, 4 May 1963). The Library of Congress names Fred Shuttlesworth, a Birmingham man, as the city's leading civil rights figure. The people in the jails were local.
The "Communism" line has the same problem. The archive's sources do not show that communists directed the movement. A Cold War word was stretched over a court ruling and over the demands of local Black citizens. The phrase "careful application of economic pressures" was a softer name for something plain. NAACP state president Dr. Emmett J. Stringer told the Evening Star in 1954 that a branch president lost his credit and had to give up
, and that I can't get credit anywhere in Mississippi.
The Councils' disavowal of violence also has to be held against the record, without stretching it. Klan bombs hit the A. G. Gaston Motel and the home of A. D. King on 11 May 1963, and Black residents rioted that night. On 15 September a Klan bomb at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Carol Denise McNair. Johnny Robinson, 16, was killed by police and Virgil Ware, 13, by a white youth in the hours after. The cited record does not show that the Councils as organizations ordered any bombing. Say that, and do not add to it.
The movement is held to the same test. Its signs were real people carrying printed slogans, which is message discipline, not a fake crowd. Its choice to put children in the Birmingham marches was open and disputed at the time: Attorney General Robert Kennedy said an injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay
. Rocks were thrown at police in Birmingham. In Memphis on 28 March 1968, students at the back of a march broke windows and looting followed; a police officer then shot and killed Larry Payne, 16, whom witnesses described as coming out of a basement with his hands up. King was assassinated on 4 April. Critics of the Councils had a hot label of their own: Smith's paper called the Commission the private gestapo for the Citizens Council
. That is name-calling too, though her paper also printed the grants that gave it a factual hook.
The fault line is the state, not the club
Private citizens may form a club, say ugly things, and decline to join a cause. The First Amendment protects the Councils' speech as it protects the march's. The constitutional fault line in this file is the state. When the Sovereignty Commission paid a private council and its investigators swore affidavits against an editor, the government was spending public money to punish lawful speech and assembly. That is a state propaganda and pressure operation, not a voluntary association. A newspaper that reported the grants was doing what the free press is for.
The two economic weapons were not the same. A bus boycott is a public, collective decision to stop buying. Each rider chose to walk. Cutting off a named man's credit, with state money and state informants in the background, is a coercive act aimed at an individual for exercising his rights. Libertarians defend the first because it is voluntary. They have no reason to defend the second.
The Manifesto spoke the language of constitutional limits, and that language deserves respect when it is honest. Here it was not. A pledge of "all lawful means" against equal protection is not a defense of the Constitution, and federalism does not let a state deny its citizens the protections the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees. Little Rock is the hard image. Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to keep nine Black students out of Central High, and President Eisenhower sent federal troops to carry out a court order. The force was federal, and it enforced the rights of nine students against their own state.
Its legacy
The movement won its main case in public, with its names on its signs. Federal courts, troops, and Congress acted, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed the march's lobbying. The segregationist side had state and city governments with it, and in Mississippi it had a state budget line. The other half of the federal record is less flattering. This site's COINTELPRO page records that the FBI listed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference among its early targets. Neither government in this story, state or federal, can claim it kept its hands off peaceful speech.
The habits outlived the era. Calling a protest "outside" or foreign-directed is still a first move. The questions that cut through it were already in this file in 1961: who was actually arrested, where they lived, and who was paying the "citizens'" group doing the calling.
Sources
- FRAME case study "The civil rights movement and the Citizens' Councils," for the chronology, the Birmingham and Memphis events, and the positions on the record.
- Evening Star (Washington), 21 November 1954 (Clark minutes, Patterson, Sledge, Stringer); 12 March 1956 (text of the Declaration of Constitutional Principles); 4 and 6 May 1963 (Birmingham, Connor, Robert Kennedy, arrest figures), as cited there.
- Augusta Courier, 23 July 1956 (membership claim); Lexington Advertiser, 12 January 1961 and 11 and 18 January 1962 (grants and affidavit); Holmes County Herald, 12 January 1961, as cited there.
- Library of Congress exhibits and Civil Rights History Project (Sovereignty Commission summary, Montgomery, Little Rock, Birmingham); National Archives, March on Washington program and Memphis court documents; U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Larry Payne notice to close file, as cited there.
- Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (1958), quoted by the Stanford King Institute, as cited there.
- Library of Congress photograph records: the Little Rock rally, 20 August 1959 (John T. Bledsoe, U.S. News & World Report), and the March on Washington, 28 August 1963 (Warren K. Leffler).