# US civil rights era messaging, 1954–1969

This hub gathers what the United States government said about race and poverty from 1954 to 1969, at home and to the world, and what private Americans on every side said for themselves: the movement, the segregationists, the newspapers, and the Black Panther Party. Every page rests on a FRAME archive record or a case study built from one.

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  US civil rights era messaging, 1954–1969
  This hub gathers what the United States government said about race and poverty from 1954 to 1969, at home and to the world, and what private Americans on every side said for themselves: the movement, the segregationists, the newspapers, and the Black Panther Party. Every page rests on a FRAME archive record or a case study built from one.

Content note: the pages below quote segregationist slogans, a 1969 poster that calls the police "pigs," and period captions that use the word "Negro." Each is quoted as printed.

Fifteen years, three kinds of speaker. The federal government spoke twice over: to the world, through the U.S. Information Agency's posters and picture sheets, and at home, through laws and, in secret, through the FBI. Private Americans spoke for themselves, in marches, signs, cartoons, and posters, and they did not agree. The movement for civil rights, the Citizens' Councils that fought it, the Washington press, and by 1969 the Black Panther Party all printed their views. This hub holds every side to the same test. Who is speaking? Is the claim true? Was anyone forced?

## What Washington told the world about race

Abroad, America's race problem was a propaganda problem, and the agency's sheets show it working on the answer. The earliest in this set is a 1954 Heroes Day poster for Asia that puts "All men are created equal" under a portrait of Lincoln. Lincoln returns in a Nepali biography poster headed "The Great Emancipator" (1956) and in Farsi and Chinese sheets for his 150th birthday in 1959. A Beirut picture page of August 1954 names a Black music teacher in Georgia honored by Columbia University.

The answers changed over the decade. In 1958 a Bengali sheet for Dacca, Chitra Katha No. 37, offered a Virginia school identified by race as proof that American schooling was equal, and said nothing about the fight over integration. By 1964 and 1965 the Beirut series Pictures in the News showed Martin Luther King Jr. voting in Atlanta and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, led an issue with "Negro Woman Wins High Office" for Constance Baker Motley, and in No. 5 admitted that a Mississippi church had been burned after a civil rights rally. An embassy bulletin for Costa Rica, El Correo Grafico, put Johnson shaking King's hand after the Civil Rights Act among its photographs of Alliance for Progress aid.

Of the thirteen agency sheets in the gallery, FRAME classes three as openly sourced and ten as blurred: the sheet names a series or a magazine, and the American agency behind it is hard or impossible to see. The agency's wider program is on U.S. Information Agency posters abroad.

## The war on poverty

The archive holds less on the Great Society than its name would suggest. No poster from a domestic antipoverty office of the 1960s is in the snapshot. What it does hold shows the phrase traveling. A January 1965 supplement to the agency's Free World, A New Quest for Union, sets "to wage war against poverty and disease" beside "to support Viet-Nam's freedom" under one photograph of President Johnson. In Vietnam a JUSPAO poster called a South Vietnamese village cadre a soldier in the war against poverty. At home in 1961 Jim Berryman of the Washington Star drew the Democrats' "depressed areas" bill as a "gravy train" that a ragged Republican elephant could only watch go by.

## What the Washington press drew

Berryman's cartoons, now in the Senate's records at the National Archives, are the archive's running commentary on the period, and they do not hold one line. In 1956 a "Civil Rights Issue" sits on a stack of papers crushing the three Rs. In June 1957, within six days, he drew the House as a judge with a noose over "The South" in No jury trial for the likes of you, and then the Senate as a fugitive carrying the civil rights bill away from dogs named Filibuster and Judiciary Committee in The Place Is Full of Simon Legrees!

Little Rock runs through 1957 and 1958: Governor Faubus at his desk with his wrists tied, a barricade marked "2 1/2-Year Suspension Order" on the road to integration, and Faubus again, holding up a bayonet stamped U.S.A. beside his landslide. In 1963 Berryman drew a rose labeled "Racial Accord" under scissors marked "Bombs" and "Riots," and then the civil rights bill and a tax cut jammed in the Senate doors. Read in order, they take more than one side: for the bill in the Senate, for the South on juries, against Faubus, and in Birmingham inclined to treat both sides of a fight as equal threats to calm.

## What Americans said for themselves

The movement's case was public and signed. The March on Washington of 28 August 1963 filled both banks of the Reflecting Pool, more than 250,000 people by the National Archives figure, with its demands in its name: jobs and freedom.

The segregationist side was public too, and some of it was paid for by a state. In August 1959 a crowd at the Arkansas capitol held signs reading "Race mixing is Communism." The Citizens' Councils mailed minutes promising "economic pressures" on "agitators," and by 1961 a Mississippi state agency had voted the Councils $5,000 a month; that record is in Citizens' Councils, state money, and the civil rights campaign. The archive's snapshot has no Council leaflet and no Klan sheet from these years. The Klan's bombs in Birmingham in 1963, including the church bombing that killed four, are recorded in the same case study.

The period ends on a different voice. After 4 December 1969 the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party printed a memorial for its deputy chairman, Fred Hampton, killed in a police raid: "Murdered By Fascist Pigs."

## The government nobody saw

One federal voice in these years did not sign its work. From 1956 the FBI ran counterintelligence programs that placed stories with friendly reporters and mailed anonymous letters about American political groups. A directive of 2 September 1964 opened one against the Klan. A program begun in 1967 against "Black Nationalist" groups counted the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference among its first targets, and in November 1964 the Bureau mailed King a tape from hidden microphones and an unsigned letter. The file is in COINTELPRO and the press. A few weeks before the agency's Beirut sheets showed King as a Nobel laureate, an agent had posted that package in Miami; two of his colleagues told the Church Committee they read the letter as an invitation to kill himself. One arm of the government was celebrating him abroad while another worked against him at home.

## How this site reads the record

Three points are honestly open, and on each the site takes the reading that limits power. Those readings are this site's own; the archive does not make them.

First, state power ran both ways, and it should be judged by what it did. When Mississippi paid a private council to pressure its own citizens, that was a state punishing lawful speech. When federal troops went to Little Rock to carry out a court order, force was used to protect nine students from their own state. Distrust of concentrated power does not mean treating those as the same. It means asking, each time, whose rights the force protected.

Second, speech. The marchers, the Citizens' Councils, the crowd at the Arkansas capitol, Berryman, and the Panthers all printed their views under their own names. Many of those views were false or cruel, and the "Race mixing is Communism" signs were both. They were protected anyway, and the answer to them was more speech, which the movement supplied. The speech this record condemns without reservation is the kind that hid its author: the FBI's planted stories and unsigned letters.

Third, the overseas sheets. A government that tells the world the good news about itself is doing what every government does, and some of these sheets were honest about hard things, including the burned church in Mississippi. The fault is selection. The firsts and the prizes were real. So were the bombings and the Sovereignty Commission's grants, and those did not go to Beirut.

## What this hub does not cover

The snapshot holds no domestic poster from the Office of Economic Opportunity or its programs, and no leaflet from the Citizens' Councils or the Klan dated 1954 to 1969, so none is described here. The 1968 Memphis strike is told in the Citizens' Councils case study, not on an object page. Arabic and French editions of the Beirut news sheets are in the archive and are left out of the gallery in favor of the English ones. The Vietnam War's own messaging, including the Johnson administration's case for the war, is on US Vietnam War messaging, 1954–1975.

  United StatesCivil rights era sheets and cartoonsUnited StatesHeroes Day: LincolnAugust 6, 1954 · Testimonial, TransferUnited StatesNo Jury Trial for the Likes of YouJune 16, 1957 · Fear appealUnited StatesThe Place Is Full of Simon Legrees!June 22, 1957 · Name-callingUnited StatesChitra Katha No. 37: a Virginia schoolApril 8, 1958 · Card stacking, Plain folksUnited StatesFaubus Wins in LandslideJuly 31, 1958 · Name-callingUnited StatesRace Mixing Is CommunismAugust 20, 1959 · Semantic hijacking, TransferUnited StatesA Flower Tries to Grow in BirminghamMay 14, 1963 · Glittering generalitiesUnited StatesMarch on Washington, 1963August 28, 1963 · TransferUnited StatesLet Me Through!September 29, 1963 · Card stackingUnited StatesEl Correo Grafico, August 1964January 1, 1965 · Transfer, Glittering generalities, TestimonialUnited StatesA New Quest for Union (1965)February 8, 1965 · Glittering generalities, TestimonialUnited StatesPictures in the News No. 5 (1965)March 12, 1965 · Card stacking, TransferUnited StatesPictures in the News No. 7 (1965)June 20, 1965 · Transfer, TestimonialUnited StatesA Soldier in the War Against Poverty1965 · Testimonial, Glittering generalitiesUnited StatesFred Hampton memorial poster (1969)1969 · Name-callingUnited StatesWhen a state paid for the pressure on its own citizensUnited StatesThe FBI wrote the news and did not sign itUnited StatesUSIA overseas posters

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/topics/civil-rights-era-messaging/