The Civil Rights Movement Revised Edition

The BrownDecision 27

Eastland, James(1905–

86): Powerful Senate

Judiciary chairman from

Mississippi who blocked

civil rights legislation.

ending harassment cost the NAACP 246 branches and 48,000 members in
the South. In many communities, the NAACP was supplanted by the black
church, with its charismatic leadership and unequalled army of followers,
meeting spaces, organizational skills, and fund-raising ability.
Encouraged by their leaders, angry white southerners joined segregation-
ist groups and pasted defiant bumper stickers on their automobiles that read,
‘Hell, No, I Ain’t Forgettin!’ The Ku Klux Klan was reincarnated, attracting
50,000 poor white farmers, mechanics, steel mill workers, loggers, and rail-
road men. One klansman explained his group’s continuing mission: ‘We are
gonna stay white, we are going to keep the nigger black, with the help of our
Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.’ More mainstream racists formed a new group,
the White Citizens’ Council, which first appeared in Indianola, Mississippi,
in July 1954. Led by plantation manager Robert ‘Tut’ Patterson, businessman
William Simmons, and US senator James Eastland, the councils aimed at
driving all remaining blacks out of the state in a decade. This objective was
popular among whites, and five hundred branches with 250,000 members
spread across the South. Ostensibly, the councils shunned violence, thereby
attracting a better class of bigots, including planters, businessmen, profes-
sionals, and politicians who wore suits, rather than sheets. The councils and
similar groups, such as the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual
Liberties and the National Association for the Advancement of White People,
appeared respectable by forswearing violence, but Thurgood Marshall
mocked them as nothing more than ‘Uptown Klans.’
To keep the races apart, the Citizens’ Councilsretaliated against ‘uppity’
blacks and white moderates. One newspaper advertisement against black
activists warned: ‘Not the lash, not the rope, we’ll starve them out.’ Blacks
who belonged to the NAACP or who registered to vote were evicted from
their homes. When fifty-three black farmers in the Mississippi delta signed
a petition to integrate the schools, the Citizens’ Council ran a newspaper
advertisement listing the farmers’ names, addresses, and telephone numbers.
The farmers lost their jobs and were denied credit for seeds and machinery.
Ultimately, all the signatories erased their names from the petition or left the
county. Such coercion reduced the number of black voters in Mississippi by
two-thirds. Through economic reprisals, newspaper insults, ostracism by
friends, and garbage dumped on front lawns, the councils also silenced white
merchants, newspaper owners, ministers, and teachers who tolerated deseg-
regation. National businesses that acted ‘improperly’ in the South, including
Philip Morris and Ford Motor, were subjected to economic blackmail.
When reprisals failed, vigilantes used deadly violence to force blacks back
into line. Mississippi witnessed at least seven gruesome murders during

1955. In Belzoni, white intimidation reduced the number of black voter
      registrants from one hundred to three. One of the three – the Reverend

Citizens’ Council: A white

supremacist organization

formed after the Brown

desegregation decision.