Tuesday marked an important, if painful, anniversary in Mississippi. It was on July 11, 1954 that the first Council of Conservative Citizens’ was formed by a group of business leaders in Indianola to oppose integration of public schools in Mississippi. The group was formed in response to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that state-mandate segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

Preserving segregation may have been the impetus for the formation of the group, but its broader philosophy was racism in all its forms, chief among them preserving white racial superiority in the state.

Within a year, there were 250 Citizens’ Councils throughout the South with a total membership of 60,000. Two years after the founding, there were Citizens’ Councils operating in 30 states. Three years after the Indianola group was founded, national membership was reported to be 250,000.

It’s interesting to note that a national organization that used print, TV and radio to advance the cause of racism in the U.S. and Capitol Hill, also had influence in racist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa. It all could trace its origins to little Indianola. Then again, the KKK was founded in a comparable-sized town – Pulaski, Tennessee.

By the mid-1950s, the Klan’s brutal tactics were falling out of favor and were becoming an albatross to segregationists in their attempt to mainstream their goal of keeping Black kids out of white schools.

The Citizens’ Councils were a way to make Klan ideology respectable. The Councils’ membership of business, religious and civic leaders defended white supremacy and used social pressure and economic retaliation to intimidate and coerce Black and white people who supported integration. In South Carolina, where 55 Council chapters were active by July 1956, 17 Black parents were fired or evicted from their farms within two weeks of signing a pro-integration petition in the small town of Elloree. In Yazoo County, Mississippi, when 53 Black residents signed an NAACP petition for integration, the local Council published their names in a newspaper ad, leading to harassment, firing and credit cancellation. In the end, all signers removed their names from the petition and the Yazoo County NAACP disbanded.

The white Citizens’ Councils claimed to not endorse or engage in explicit violence and in that way tried to differentiate themselves from groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The Councils, dubbed the “Uptown KKK,” did largely avoid the Klan’s stigma but shared many goals—and in some cases, members.

The Citizens’ Council movement was effective in delaying integration if not stopping it. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black school children attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%.

When full integration came to Mississippi in 1971, the Council movement declined, quietly disbanding in 1989.

The spirit behind it did not, something that’s coming into sharper view today.

Whether it’s ideologically-driven Supreme Court ending affirmative action in college admissions or Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville saying white nationalists aren’t necessarily racists, the once dormant disease of racism is on the rebound. In organizations like Empower Mississippi, the “school choice” and “state’s rights” rhetoric that was a prominent part of the Citizens’ Council marketing efforts are being again trumpeted without a blush. Where the rhetoric is the same, so is the intent.

Millsaps’ professor Stephanie Rolph’s 2018 book on the Citizens’ Council, “Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council, 1954–1989” is a must-read for anyone with an interest in this topic. It’s not only a look back at a dark era in our nation’s race relations, but a disturbing foreshadowing of what we are seeing today.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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