The Blood of Emmett Till(33)

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Well over six feet tall with a sheaf of red hair, Tut Patterson was a former Mississippi State football star and proud of his service in World War II. After the war he managed his family’s Delta cotton plantation, but eventually he focused his energies on “states’ rights and racial integrity,” soon to be the banner of the Citizens’ Council.21 In early July 1954, Patterson met with David H. Hawkins, the manager of Indianola’s cotton compress; Herman Moore, the president of a bank there; and Arthur B. Clark Jr., a local attorney with a degree from Harvard Law School. On July 11, two months after the Brown decision, these men met with fourteen of Indianola’s civic and business leaders, including the mayor and the city attorney, at Hawkins’s home. “We elected the banker president. I was the secretary,” Patterson recalled. “And in the space of a few short months, it spread. The organization spread all over the Deep South and into other states.” The manager, banker, and lawyer set it all in motion with a late-July town hall meeting of nearly a hundred people that founded the first Citizens’ Council.22

Judge Brady was the chief attraction at the Indianola town hall, where he delivered another version of his “Black Monday” oration. He first framed the new organization as a legal public group, respectable and law-abiding, that would not encourage or participate in violence. “None of you men look like Ku Kluxers to me,” he told them. “I wouldn’t join a Ku Klux—didn’t join it—because they hid their faces; because they did things that you and I wouldn’t approve of.”23 But thereafter he fed the crowd on the raw meat of sex and race. “School integration is the first step toward racial intermarriage,” he warned. “Wherever white men infused their blood with the Negroes, white intellect and white culture perished. It happened tragically in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, India, Spain and Portugal. When the NAACP petitioned the Court for integration, it was to open the bedroom of white women to Negro men.”24

“I joined the Citizens’ Council,” said one Delta physician. “They would come up with all of this stuff about how the black boys might molest the white girls—that was a fear. Of course, one of the fears expressed by people like Jim Eastland, Ross Barnett, Judge Brady, and the man down in Louisiana, Leander Perez [was that] they always invoked the fear of intermarriage.” And so these reasonable, respectable white men who disavowed Ku Kluxers stewed in their politicized racial fears until they became comfortable, tacitly or directly, with horrors. The doctor continued, “People like Andrew Gainey over in Meridian would say, ‘Well, we can go to deportation, we can go to amalgamation, or we can go to extermination.’?”25

Brady’s screed reflected the spirit of panic that prevailed in white Mississippi and drove the growth of the Citizens’ Councils. “The main way Councils were organized was through the service clubs,” said William Simmons, the leader of the Jackson Citizens’ Council and the son of a prominent financier. “Patterson and I would go and make a talk to Rotary or Kiwanis or Civitans or Exchange or Lions. We’d tell them what the Council movement is, what fellows were doing in different communities. Invariably the response was favorable.” Simmons and Patterson recruited dozens of other speakers for the Council cause, and they fanned out all over the state.26 Membership claims and estimates vary somewhat, but roughly nineteen members in July 1954 grew to twenty-five thousand in October, when Patterson established the first statewide office of the Association of Citizens’ Councils of Mississippi in Winona, though it soon moved to Greenwood. A year after the first meetings in Indianola the Citizens’ Councils boasted sixty thousand members in 253 communities and seven states.27 By eighteen months out, Simmons claimed that the Councils had more than half a million members; independent investigators suggested that the truth was at least 300,000.28 Patterson was astonished, he said, that the gathering of men who vowed to protect white womanhood would “expand miraculously into a virile and potent organization.”29

The feral heart of Citizens’ Council ideology drew almost equally on what W. J. Cash had fifteen years earlier termed “the Southern rape complex” and the delusion that international communism had spawned the civil rights movement.30 On Black Monday, the Mississippi Association of Citizens’ Councils charged, the U.S. Supreme Court “based their decision upon the writings of communists and socialists.”31 The NAACP was “a left-wing, power-mad organ of destruction” that had been “infiltrated by communist sympathizers.” This language presented anew the logic on which American racism has long relied. Like many white citizens over the years, members of the Council believed that anything that weakened white supremacy or challenged the existing social hierarchy in any way was socialism. But this was largely code for preserving the country’s racial caste system, centuries in the making. Animated by this fear, the Citizens’ Council pledged to defeat integration and deliver “a complete reversal of the contrived trend toward a raceless, classless society.”32

The Southern writer Lillian Smith captured the Citizens’ Councils clearly and succinctly: “Some of these men are bankers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, newspaper editors, and publishers; a few are preachers; some are powerful industrialists. It is a quiet, well-bred mob. Its members speak in cultivated voices, have courteous manners, some have university degrees, and a few wear Brooks Brothers suits. They are a mob, nevertheless. For they not only protect the rabble, and tolerate its violence, they think in the same primitive mode, they share the same irrational anxieties, they are just as lawless in their own quiet way, and they are dominated by the same ‘holy ideal’ of white supremacy.”33