Citizens' Councils

Big, big time.

Used to call it Big Time Buck White.

That's w- [laughs] That was a character in a play in New York back in the day.

But yeah, it was a lot.

Dr.

King, you have been reported very recently as saying that you no longer fear the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizen Council as much as you have begun to fear the white moderate, that he is the bone in the throat of Negro progress.

Would you implement that s- statement and tell us what you mean by that?

Yes.

He saw an attack on everything he believed the South was supposed to be.

He joined the White Citizens' Council in Greenwood immediately.

The Citizens' Council was the respectable face of white supremacy in Mississippi, sometimes called the Country Club Klan.

Its members were bankers, lawyers, politicians, and business owners who used economic pressure and political influence to maintain segregation.

Here's why.

In Mississippi, jury pools were drawn from voter registration rolls.

Black citizens had been systematically excluded from voter registration since the state's 1890 Constitution, which meant the juries were all white, all male, drawn from communities where the White Citizens' Council ran the civic life of the community and where killing a Black civil rights leader wasn't universally considered a crime.

The White Citizens' Council paid for Beckwith's defense.

So King devotes this really, really strong critique to the white moderate.

And again, he says it's in some ways the white moderate is a greater obstacle in the stride toward freedom than the Ku Klux Klan are those who are using violent intimidation tactics in order to protect white supremacy and the White Citizens Council, which was aptly called by King's ally and friend Bayard Rustin, the Uptown Klan.

Same values, different outfits, different tactics.

King says that these folks are, of course, obstacles on the road toward freedom, but the white moderate who sort of has a lot of the right attitudes but is unwilling to really commit to what it takes to achieve those ideas in the world, that is actually the major obstacle or maybe even a bigger obstacle to freedom.

He'd toured the country giving speeches.

He was on the editorial board of the Citizens Council newspaper and the policy oversight board at Liberty Lobby.

And now he had a pair of viable cases, a team of racist professors at his beck and call, and the seemingly unlimited financial resources of Wycliffe Draper's Pioneer Fund.

I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guides.

I'm sure they would have loved if that were an option because they did send copies of the George Report out to thousands and thousands of people.

9,000 hard copies of the report were donated to public libraries all over the country.

The Citizens Council paid to distribute it across the South.

And, of course, the Pioneer Fund, through front organizations, paid to print nearly 50,000 copies.

White students reportedly took their seats next to their Black classmates without hesitation, and one white student even untied the ribbon from her own hair to offer it to her new Black classmate.

The children seemed oblivious to the apparent gravity of the situation, but the newspaper reminded parents that state tuition assistance was available for white parents interested in moving their students to a private, segregated school run by the Citizens' Council.

10 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v.

Board of Education that segregation on the basis of race was unconstitutional, Black parents in Mississippi and across the South were still fighting county by county to force school districts to comply with that decision.

But he was, in fact, the single largest private donor to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, almost single-handedly bankrolling the State of Mississippi's lobbying and propaganda efforts to block federal civil rights legislation.

If you did listen to that recent series about the murder of Medgar Evers, you already know that the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was a state agency dedicated to surveilling civil rights activists from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s.

And in those episodes, we talked about the commission's symbiotic relationship with the Citizens' Councils, those local civic organizations formed in the aftermath of the Brown versus Board of Education decision to resist integration by any means necessary.

The Citizens' Councils relied on information and funding provided by the Sovereignty Commission.

Board and the start of desegregation in public education, that's when we saw a lot of these very similar mom groups pop up.

Also groups like the White Citizens Councils.

And now we're seeing very similar groups pop up in terms of gender equality, LGBTQ plus exclusion, also efforts to teach like a true honest history of the United States.

Also, this resistance has always been framed in very neutral sounding terms, things like local control, parents' rights, religious liberty, school choice, protecting children, which are all very legitimate causes, but they can also be deployed to preserve exclusion in public education.

So think about after Brown v.

Board.

A lot of the white citizens councils put out all of this propaganda about what's going to happen when your white daughter is sitting next to these big black men in classrooms.

OK, that's scary when you first hear it.