Citizens' Councils
Citizens' Councils logo
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| Abbreviation | WCC |
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| Successor | Council of Conservative Citizens |
| Formation | July 11, 1954 |
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Membership
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60,000 (1955) |
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Founder
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Robert Patterson |
The Citizens' Councils (also referred to as White Citizens' Councils) were an associated network of white supremacist organizations in the United States, concentrated in the South. The first was formed on July 11, 1954. After 1956, it was known as the Citizens' Councils of America. With about 60,000 members across the United States, mostly in the South, the groups were founded primarily to oppose racial integration of schools, but they also opposed voter registration efforts and integration of public facilities during the 1950s and 1960s. Members used severe intimidation tactics including economic boycotts, firing people from jobs, propaganda, and violence against citizens and civil-rights activists.
By the 1970s, following passage of federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s and enforcement of constitutional rights by the federal government, the influence of the Councils had waned considerably yet remained an institutional basis for the majority of white residents in Mississippi. The successor organization to the White Citizens' Councils is the St. Louis-based Council of Conservative Citizens, founded in 1985 to continue collaborations between Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist political agendas in the United States. Republican politician and past Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi was a member while North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Georgia Congressman Bob Barr were both strong supporters of the Council of Conservative Citizens; David Duke also spoke at a fund raising event, while Patrick Buchanan's campaign manager was linked to both Duke and the Council. In 1996, a Charleston, SC, drive-by shooting by Klan members of three African American males occurred after a Council rally; Dylann Roof, responsible for the 2015 murder of nine Emanuel AME church members in Charleston, espoused Council of Conservative Citizens rhetoric in a manifesto.
In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. Some sources claim that the White Citizens' Council first started after this in Greenwood, Mississippi. Others say that it originated in Indianola, Mississippi. The recognized leader was Robert B. Patterson of Indianola, a plantation manager and a former captain of the Mississippi State University football team. Additional chapters spread to other southern towns. At this time, most southern states enforced racial segregation of all public facilities; in places where local laws did not require segregation, Jim Crow harassment enforced it. After preliminary post-Civil War Reconstruction efforts led by blacks and poorer whites, the subsequent period from 1890 to 1908 led to disfranchisement of most blacks through the passing of new constitutions and other laws making voter registration and elections more difficult, and led to the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. Despite civil rights organizations winning some legal challenges, most blacks in the 1950s were still retaliated against for registering to vote, as well as for riding buses and sitting at lunch counters, in the South and remained so even after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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