Haley Barbour has been expounding about 60s Mississippi history again in a bizarre and creative way– recasting the Citizens Council as, uh, a force for racial reconciliation. Mathew Yglesias handles deconstructing this, but possibly not fully.
Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.
“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”
In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”
There’s more on the NYTimes site.
The Citizens Council was founded in the wake of the Brown decision, based on a speech by Judge Tom Brady. That speech was published as a book by the council; a copy of the cover of that book, Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation– America Has Its Choice, is at the top of the post.
That alone should demonstrate that the Council was not the Committee for Racial Reconciliation.
People familiar with the Citizens Council know how it operated. If the council decided someone was attending meetings of civil rights organizations, what the council did was contact the person’s landlord or employer and have them evicted or fired. Anyone who signed petitions about school desegregation were similarly treated. Businesses that did not support the Council were shunned.
Newspaper editor P.E. East in Petal, Mississippi made a point of attacking the council in his newspaper, and was essentially put out of business for it (although he produced an entertaining book about his travails, Magnolia Jungle).
This story is most visible through the papers of the State Sovereignty Commission, a state spying organization founded to fight the civil rights movement, like the Citizens Council, after the Brown decision. There is a folder at the state archives of the commissions interactions with the Council in Yazoo City; I spent some time just now browsing that folder and hit several items that illustrate what I am talking about at that the council was not founded to do anything remotely like Barbour described. Here’s an excerpt from a memo from a trip by a commission investigator to Yazoo City in 1960:
A reading of the commission file for Yazoo County has meeting after meeting where Commission investigators come to town to meet with Citizen Council leaders and local law enforcement to decide what to do about folks who, say, have a car tag that turns up outside a civil rights meetings across the state.
I’ll be posting more about this later….
Maybe some old folks around here can correct me, but I think Tupelo integrated without violence and surely other places did, also?
The Governor insults the large number (probably a majority) of Mississippi communities which desegregated and integrated without violence. Most people accepted the Courts’ rulings, however begrudgingly. The problem now is the resegregation that has occurred as many have fled the public schools. I believe no one who attends or sends their children to private secondary schools should hold public office.
Coercing people to act a certain way, even if it were in opposition to efforts to oppose desegregation, is wrong. People are entitled to their opinion as long as violence is not employed.
I interviewed Gordon Baum (the current head of the C of CC) for the Jackson Free Press last year just prior to their big annual meeting. I’d planned to get a before/after story–that is, write a story introducing the modern C of CC to the people of Jackson and then I was going to report on the meeting itself (which was held in secret at an undisclosed location). Gordon (who insisted I call him Uncle Gordy) told me at one point that if he didn’t like what I wrote about the C of CC in the first article, he’d “introduce me” to some “big ol’ boys” who would know what to do with me.
No mere letters to the editor for them!
I begged off doing the follow up story. The sad fact is, both stories were unnecessary because their website speaks more truth to what they’re about than I or anyone else ever could.
Didn’t they sponsor an essay contest for a college scholarship about why races should be separated? I seem to seeing a flier last year at a meeting – one male and one female winner?
A country that can deny natural selection and global warming will have no trouble accepting whatever lies Barbour retails.
The media will report that some say the Councils were racist, and some say they weren’t, and gosh well people are entitled to disagree aren’t they?
And in September, Mr. Barbour said during an interview with Human Events that the South was largely integrated by the time his generation came of age.
Haley must have been higher than Cheech & Chong if he thinks that’s true.
Btw, you’ve got Yglesias’s name misspelled in the post, tho Yglesias is the last human being with the right to complain about anyone else’s spelling.
Extra “y” removed, Anderson.
I am not defending the Citizen’s Council ( a vile, wrong-headed, racist institution– just to get that out of the way) , and I hate to spoil the glee of bashing Haley and the Republicans via a “straw man” – but the actual quoted words of Haley are in fact accurate and benign.
Haley was asked why Yazoo avoided the violence of other southern towns. His response was that the Citizen’s Council (comprised of town leaders and businessmen) would not tolerate the existence of the more violent Klan (comprised of blue collar violent “red necks” ). Haley did not praise the Citizen’s Council, nor did he suggest the Council was anything other than racist in aim. The NYT deliberately twisted Haley’s words and obscured the distinction he was making.
Franklin, one problem with Barbour’s reply was its omission that the CC’s were much more focused on economic targeting of blacks than of the KKK, assuming the latter actually happened.
It’s like defending the Nazis’ street gangs by saying they kept the Communist gangs away. Well yes, they did, but there was also something about the Jews it would be necessary to mention.
I thought Barbour’s meaning was pretty clear. The violent Klan elements focused their attentions on areas where blacks were openly pushing for civil rights despite campaigns of intimidation (Ole Miss, Neshoba County). They had no need to bring violence to areas where blacks (and pro-civil rights whites) were already fully controlled by more subtle forms of intimidation.
And honestly, none of this stuff really even matters to me, anyway, at least with regards to Barbour. The man made his fortune as a tobacco lobbyist at a time when that industry was one of the most demonstrably evil forces in America. He fought for the rights of tobacco companies to market cancer-causing products to children. If he were a card-carrying member of the NAACP, I’d still have nothing but contempt for him.
First, the picture Barbour presents is a lie: It wasn’t the Citizen Council that made integration finally go down peaceably in some Mississippi towns.
Oxford’s experience is a good illustration. The CC peaked here probably during the Meredith crisis. The names that crop up as CC leaders were NOT at the public meetings about what to do when the Fifth Circuit finally said ENOUGH. Some were involved, I’m sure, in establishing the segregation academy that existed briefly out at College Hill.
Does the name “Council Schools” ring a bell? Those school established by the CC when all else failed?
When the Citizens Council types like Robert Patterson were talking among themselves, they talked like this: We will do stop desegregation from occurring. We would prefer peacable means but will do it by any means.
They were not averse to, saying, having the highway patrol provide Klansmen with Mickey Schwerner’s licence plate and then pretending nothing happened, it was all a plot of outside communist agitators to embarras Mississippi.
There’s a serious ugliness (including, when they start ranting against “communist elements,” antisemitism) to the way the CC folks talked when talking among themselves.
It is part of the picture that they wanted to be basically a sort of Rotary-club-for-segregation, and spent a lot of effort presenting themselves as a bunch of businessmen in suits and ties having luncheon meetings and listening to speakers. But the talk and the methods were both startlingly ugly.
It is an undisputed historic fact that the Citizen’s Council entire reason for being was to promote and enforce racial segregation, not to aid racial integration. Proving this rather well-established truth is an exercise in the obvious, though no doubt wielding the sword of unswerving accuracy provides a certain satisfaction–sorta like prosecuting a confessed child molester.
But no one–including Haley–said: ” the Citizen’s Council made integration finally go down peaceably in some Mississippi towns.” If someone actually said such a foolish thing, it would hardly be worth the print to refute.
Rather than whacking at non-existent straw men, a subject more worthy of print is the unchallenged statement in the Weekly Standard article that “Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence.”– Really?
Pray tell ( save Ole Miss/Meredith ) I seemed to have missed those teeming thousands of Mississippi towns throughout our 82 counties that saw violence upon integrating schools.
Barbour has adopted Franklin’s interpretation:
When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns’ integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn’t tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.
The link provides more evidence that Barbour is going to have problems down the road with his Yazoo ways.
I’ve done a long post explaining my reaction to the Barbour quotes just up.
Old Dog, you need to research a little before you write. My children attend a private school, for the educational opportunity, not for any racial segregation. In fact, the school is much more racially and religiously tolerant than ANY public school in Mississippi.
Until Mississippi can provide an adequate education for my children, and as long as I can afford it, my kids will remain in this private, Christian school
Sorry to move off topic.
I believe no one who attends or sends their children to private secondary schools should hold public office.
That is a bit much. I graduated from a public school, and don’t think much of “academies” set up to avoid attending school with blacks, but there is no reason why families who can afford to do so should not seek private education if they think it’s better. St. Andrew’s in the Jackson area, while not so wonderful a school as they imagine themselves to be, is an obvious example.
While there’s no excuse for Haley Barbour at the same time the left also forgets that it was the Democrat party who supported slaverly and even had members of their own party who were part of the Klan years ago. Folks need to check their history. I’m no huge fan of Haley Barbour, I’m an Independent and I don’t favor either party because as far as I’m concerned the whe way both parties run our country the Dems and GOP are just opposite wings from the same bird. Having said that I think the media is trying to paint the entire Repubican party as racist which isn’t right, racism is ugly and the sad thing is that you can find it in all groups of people. As Christmas is very near I think we should all reflect on the message of Christ and all of us should put more of an effort to love our neighbor has ourselves, the world would be a nicer place.
While there’s no excuse for Haley Barbour at the same time the left also forgets that it was the Democrat party who supported slaverly and even had members of their own party who were part of the Klan years ago. Folks need to check their history. I’m no huge fan of Haley Barbour, I’m an Independent and I don’t favor either party because as far as I’m concerned the whe way both parties run our country the Dems and GOP are just opposite wings from the same bird. Having said that I think the media is trying to paint the entire Repubican party as racist which isn’t right, racism is ugly and the sad thing is that you can find it in all groups of people. As Christmas is very near I think we should all reflect on the message of Christ and all of us should put more of an effort to love our neighbor as ourselves, the world would be a nicer place.
You know, selfishness is ugly and the sad thing is that you can find it in all groups of people. As Christmas is very near, I think we should all reflect on the message of Chrit and all of us should put more of an effort to love our neighbor as ourselves, the world will be a nice place. (does this sound at all familiar?)
Everybody be polite and play nice and all that nasty racism will just go away (somewhere we won’t have to look at it or think about it), besides, everyone does it, so what’s the problem? Especially let’s don’t talk about it near Christmas. ?????
You think it goes away at Christmas, and never rears it’s ugly head at that time of year? Maybe you think selfishness disappears at Christmas, just because it should.
Remind me, what was that little story about the Samaritan?
Christ didn’t mind talking about racism, and I think near his celebrated birthday is a good time to emulate him.
I am as I write beating the drums for a Barbour/Palin ticket. No doubt it would garner anywhere from 70-30 to 90-10 in the sovereign confederacy of Mississippi. Nationwide, on the other hand, the said ticket would render a landslide of epic proportions in favor of the current administration; Donald Duck; Donald Trump; Alec Baldwin, or any Baldwin sibling for that matter. Notwithstanding my personal opinion about His Highness Haley, there was a time when I thought him a shrewd dude indeed. Yet, now that the GOP has no viable candidate (in the sights of anyone, anywhere), I find myself confounded by Barbour’s myopic flirtation with self-destruction on a ginormous scale. While Haley ignites yet another GOP implosion, I quietly practice my drumroll.