What is the White Citizens Council?

December 22, 2010 by Andrew17

I took about five minutes out of my work day to Google the White Citizens Council; AKA The Citizens Council. Why? I wanted to give people a better perspective on Gov Barbour’s comments about the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960’s. Just to refresh your memory, Mississippi Gov Haley Barbour was asked what he remembered about growing up in his hometown of Yazoo City, Miss., during the 1960s civil rights era. Barbour told The Weekly Standard: "I just don't remember it being that bad."

When asked why Yazoo City managed to integrate public schools without any violence, as other Southern cities encountered, Barbour responded that his hometown did so because the town's business leaders "wouldn't stand for it."

"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," Barbour told writer Andrew Ferguson. "In Yazoo City, they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their a-- run out of town."

Here’s my Google search results about the White Citizens Council:

(1) The White Citizens' Council (WCC)—subsequently known as the Citizens' Councils of America after 1956,[1][2] which is how the group referred to itself,[3]—was an American white supremacist organization formed in 1954. With about 60,000 members,[2] mostly in the South, the group was well known for its opposition to racial integration. Its issues involved the protection of "European-American heritage" from those of other ethnicities.[4]

By the 1970s, the influence of the WCC had waned considerably. The successor organization to the White Citizens' Council is the Council of Conservative Citizens,[2] founded in 1988.

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Citizens'_Council

(2) The White Citizens' Council was born in Greenwood, Miss., shortly after the 1954-55 Brown vs. Board of Education decisions were rendered. Sister branches rapidly surfaced throughout Mississippi and other Southern states. Leading citizens joined. The goal was to maintain segregation.

Tennessee's relatively ineffective version of the citizens' council was called the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, of which Madison County had a chapter. The group placed advertisements in The Sun in the 1960s in support of segregation. One was an editorial from another newspaper that said, "The Negro today is the best treated human being in the United States."

Read more: http://orig.jacksonsun.com/civilrights/sec2_citizencouncil.shtml

(3) Southern opponents of racial integration organized white citizens councils to obstruct the implementation of the 1954 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to end school desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Originating in Mississippi, the councils advocated white supremacy and resorted to various forms of economic pressure against local advocates of desegregation.

They attempted to win support for their views by describing the horrors that integrated education would supposedly bring. By the 1960s, as the pace of desegregation in southern schools accelerated, the councils grew steadily weaker. By the 1970s they were only of marginal importance.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/white-citizens-council#ixzz18qx3KtxP

(4) Neil R. McMillen, “The Citizens’ Councils: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-64,” University of Illinois Press, 1971. Kari Frederickson, “the Dixiecrat Revolt and the end of The Solid South, 1932-1968,” University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Hague, Euan (2008) "White Citizens' Council and the Council of Conservative Citizens" in John Hartwell Moore (ed.) Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. 3 vols. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, vol. 3, 220-221.

Read more http://www.citizenscouncils.com/

Great video of people in the White Citizens Council: http://www.thoughtequity.com/video/searchResults.do?search.type=intermed...