Massive Resistance and Media Suppression : The Segregationist Response to Dissent during the Civil Rights Movement [1 ed.] 9781593327323, 9781593326142

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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression : The Segregationist Response to Dissent during the Civil Rights Movement, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression The Segregationist Response to Dissent during the Civil Rights Movement

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David J. Wallace

LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC El Paso 2013

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Wallace, David J., 1981Massive resistance and media suppression : the segregationist response to dissent during the civil rights movement / David J. Wallace. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59332-614-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Civil rights movements--Press coverage--United States--History-20th century. 2. United States--Race relations--Press coverage-History--20th century. 3. African Americans--Press coverage--History-20th century. 4. African Americans--Civil rights--History--20th century. 5. Segregation--Southern States--History--20th century. 6. Southern States--Race relations--History--20th century. I. Title. E185.61.W18 2013 323.1196'0730750904--dc23 2013014122

ISBN 978-1-59332-614-2 Printed on acid-free 250-year-life paper. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Massive Resistance and Media Suppression : The Segregationist Response to Dissent during the Civil Rights Movement, LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements .............................................................................. vii Chapter 1: Introduction .......................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: The Rise of Massive Resistance and the Suppression of Dissent ......................................................................... 13 Chapter 3: The Way We See It ............................................................ 35 Chapter 4: The Most Southern Place on Earth ..................................... 65 Chapter 5: Beyond the Mississippi Mainstream ................................ 135 Chapter 6: Those South-Hating Propagandists .................................. 157 Chapter 7: The Decline of Massive Resistance.................................. 189 References ........................................................................................ 199 Index ........................................................................................ 209

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Acknowledgements

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This project was made possible with the support of so many people. Although I cannot express gratitude to everyone who played a part, I must give special thanks to Dr. Polly McLean. She has provided me with invaluable guidance and direction that shaped me as a scholar, teacher and a person. In addition, I would like to thank the Journalism and Mass Communication faculty at the University of Colorado and the Fine Arts and Communication Studies faculty at the University of South Carolina Upstate for their support and encouragement. Furthermore, I’d like to thank the staff members, librarians and archivists at the multiple collections to which this project led. The assistance I received at the libraries of the University of Colorado, University of South Carolina Upstate, University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, University of Southern Mississippi, Boston University and the University of North Carolina allowed for a productive and enjoyable research experience. I have also received enormous encouragement and support outside of academia. For this, I must thank my parents, James and Linda, for all they have done to make this project possible. Finally, I must thank my wife, Brianna, for the patience, sacrifice and love she has given throughout this process.

vii

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CHAPTER 1

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Introduction

Throughout the civil rights movement, the media served as a central component in pro-integration advocates’ strategies to bring segregation to an end in the South. However, the media, as well as public opinion, were also areas of significant focus within the strategies of “massive resistance,” the South-wide response to the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling aimed at preventing integration.1 As such, movement advocates and opponents clashed in battles over how both sides would be defined and ultimately received within the public at large. Movement activists worked on a national scale to demonstrate the true inequality and frequent brutality of southern society. Alternatively, leaders of massive resistance defended their segregated way of life and attempted to shift the public’s focus from arguments concerning inequality and injustice to the federal government’s infringement of states’ rights. The media played a central role in each of these efforts. The focus on the media of civil rights movement leaders and organizers of massive resistance stemmed from the understanding that the battle over desegregation would take place not only in the South but also far beyond the Mason-Dixon line. Civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. realized early on the importance of northern opinion in their struggle for racial equality. Although King had initially hoped the movement’s message of peace, nonviolence and equality might awaken what he called “a sense of moral shame” in the white southern public and win its support of integration, this strategy proved

1

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

1

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largely fruitless.2 Therefore, in the midst of the growing segregationist opposition at home, movement leaders quickly realized their goals would be best achieved through the cultivation of support outside of the South. It was believed that winning the support of non-southern citizens and leaders would create a fervor that would be impossible for politicians and the federal government to ignore.3 Beginning with the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, the nation as a whole became increasingly aware of the true conditions and challenges African Americans faced in the South. The Till murder, and the subsequent trial and acquittal of the guilty offenders, especially opened the eyes of non-southern citizens to the cruelty and injustice in the South that transcended the simple separation of the races.4 However, the civil rights movement was not alone in attempting to make its case in the court of public opinion – both inside and outside of the South. From the early days of massive resistance, when the opposition to the Brown ruling and desegregation began to officially organize throughout the South in groups such as the Citizens’ Councils, public opinion was a primary area of focus. Through public relations campaigns and propaganda efforts, segregationists sought to not only discredit the civil rights movement, but to redefine both segregation and the South. Yet unlike the relatively positive reception and portrayal of the movement’s cause within the nation’s media, leaders of massive resistance found it much more difficult to make their case within the American press. Furthermore, as time passed after the Brown ruling and efforts at massive resistance grew more extreme, cracks in the armor of the “solid South” began to emerge as a handful of southerners, including journalists, broke rank with the segregation-at-all-costs

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2

Michael J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 198. Book cited hereafter as Brown v. Board. 3

George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (London: Hoddler Arnold, 2006), 130.

4

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), 86.



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Introduction

3

mentality. It was in such an environment that the true nature of social control in the South was revealed. When it became clear that the argument for massive resistance was falling on deaf ears outside of the South and even being openly questioned in a minority of southern media outlets, the struggle for public opinion expanded beyond traditional means of public and media relations. What emerged were concerted attempts by segregationist leaders to silence dissent and criticism on the issue of segregation and massive resistance. The press, both southern and northern, became a central target in these efforts, leading to widespread suppression of both the media and the freedom of expression overall. This study will argue that the segregationist attacks waged against the media were not simply individual reactions to non-conformity, but were often concerted efforts geared toward purging the South of voices that challenged the status quo. These attempts at media suppression are explained within a broader context of segregationist- and state-supported public relations strategies founded on propagating key ideals concerning race relations and southern society. To illustrate these pressures, this study analyzes the experiences of “moderate” southern journalists in the civil rights hotbeds of Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. It was through events in these locations that the nation as a whole began to witness both the perseverance of civil rights activists as well as the deep-seated resistance of segregationists during iconic events in Little Rock, Oxford, Birmingham and Selma. Particular attention is paid to the trials of seven local southern editors as well as the pressure faced by student journalists on the campuses of the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State, Auburn, and the University of Alabama because of their opinions on civil rights. The experiences of Hodding Carter Jr., Hazel Brannon Smith, P.D. East, and Ira Harkey in Mississippi; Harry Ashmore and Daisy Bates in Little Rock; Buford Boone in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; and the student press at major southern universities demonstrate the lengths to which racists would go to silence local opposition. Although these editors did not necessarily support integration outright, their refusal to conform was enough to initiate reprisal. As a consequence of their support for civil rights, these journalists and their newspapers were subject to boycotts, smear campaigns, social ostracism, and acts of violence and intimidation.



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Combined, the pressures often seriously threatened these papers’ survivals, while challenging the will and resolve of their crusading editors. Previous scholarship has explored the writings and experiences of this small minority of “moderate” journalists in the region. Due to Mississippi’s standing as the most repressive and extremist southern state during massive resistance, a considerable amount of scholarly attention has been paid to both its segregationist press as well as its handful of moderate journalists. Works such as Ann Waldron’s The Reconstruction of a Racist and John Whalen’s Maverick Among the Magnolias, the biographies of Hodding Carter and Hazel Brannon Smith, respectively, demonstrate how the journalists overcame their own prejudiced leanings to serve as beacons of hope for both African Americans as well as other southern moderates.5 Gary Huey’s Rebel With a Cause demonstrates similar bravery in the experiences of the iconoclastic P.D. East, who used his biting wit and satire to draw national attention to the oppressive conditions in which white and black Mississippians lived during the 1950s and 1960s.6 Huey’s work builds upon East’s own record of his time during the movement, The Magnolia Jungle, which was published in 1960 and served as a continued critique of the segregationist South as much as an autobiographical account.7 Similar to East’s Magnolia Jungle is Ira Harkey’s The Smell of Burning Crosses, which, as the title suggests, chronicles the pressures Harkey faced as a result of his views on civil rights.8 Biographical and autobiographical works on higher profile



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5

Ann Waldron, Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 1993); John A. Whalen, Maverick Among the Magnolias: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story (Philadelphia: Xlibris Corp., 2000).

6

Gary Huey, Rebel With a Cause: P.D. East, Southern Liberalism, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1953-1971 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1985).

7

P.D. East, The Magnolia Jungle: The Life, Times and Education of a Southern Editor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960).



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Introduction

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southern journalists such as Atlanta’s Ralph McGill and Little Rock’s Harry Ashmore, as well as broader surveys such as The Race Beat, join these studies of the Mississippi press.9 In addition to demonstrating the existence of moderate voices in the southern press, this scholarship begins to reveal the backlash certain journalists faced as a result of their views on civil rights and massive resistance. Throughout these studies are examples of legal, economic, and social pressures, as well as more violent instances of intimidation, that occurred in response to the journalists’ writings. Yet what has been largely absent from this scholarship is a detailed collective examination of these pressures, along with the pressures against the northern media, within the context of the greater segregationist struggle for public opinion. However, two previous contributions to the study of the civil rights movement press have made inroads toward this more collective examination. David R. Davies 1994 paper, “Mississippi Journalists, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Closed Society, 1960-1964,” only briefly examines the pressures placed on Carter, Smith, Harkey, East and Oliver Emmerich within a larger study of the segregationist press, but establishes nonetheless that the attacks on these journalists were not isolated incidents but evidence of a greater degree of social control.10 Gregory Crofton explored the use of “covert propaganda” in his 2000 University of Mississippi master’s thesis, “Defending Segregation: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and the

8

Ira B. Harkey, The Smell of Burning Crosses: An Autobiography of a Mississippi Newspaper Man (Jacksonville, IL: Harris-Wolfe & Company, 1967).

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9

Harry Ashmore, Civil Rights and Wrongs: A Memoir of Race and Politics 1944-1994 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994); Ralph McGill, The South and the Southerner (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963); Harold Martin, Ralph McGill, Reporter (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974); Leonard Teel, Ralph Emerson McGill: Voice of the Southern Conscience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001). 10

David R. Davies, “Mississippi Journalists, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Closed Society, 1960-1964. Paper submitted to the 1994 paper competition of the American Journalism Historians Association.



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Press.”11 Again, while Crofton collectively explores the backlash against Carter, Smith, Harkey and East, it serves as a side note to his more detailed examination of the Sovereignty Commission’s relationship with segregationist newspapers willing to covertly convey the organization’s propaganda as news. Therefore, while these studies certainly provide a solid foundation, media suppression in the South warrants a greater degree of attention and analysis as a topic in its own right. In documenting the segregationist attempts to silence dissent, this study also explores the pressures and backlash against the northern media. The role of the non-southern media in raising national awareness to southern injustice, and ultimately spurring civil rights legislation, is prevalent through existing civil rights movement histories. 12 As civil rights leaders fought for the equality promised in the Brown decision throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the media provided an invaluable public forum to illustrate the conditions that African Americans faced and discredit the segregationist myths of separate but equal and African-American complacency. Julian Bond, who worked as the communications director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, documented the value of the mass media in expanding the movement’s reach and bringing its cause to Americans

11

Gregory C. Crofton, “Defending Segregation: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and the Press” (master’s thesis, University of Mississippi, 2000).

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12

David Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 4, 212; Raymond L. Scherer and Robert J. Donovan, Unsilent Revolution: Television News and American Public Life, 1948-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 15-22; Julian Bond, “The Media and the Movement,” in The Media, Culture and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, ed. Brian Ward (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001), 26-29; Taeku Lee, Mobilizing Public Opinion: Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes in the Civil Rights Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3, 107, 145; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), xiii; Charlotte Grimes, “Civil Rights and the Press,” Journalism Studies, 6 (Feb. 2005): 118; Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 2-3.



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Introduction

7

throughout the country. In his 2001 essay, “The Media and the Movement,” he recalls, “Newspaper, radio and television coverage brought the legitimate but previously unheard demands of southern blacks into the homes of Americans far removed from the petty indignities and large cruelties of southern segregation. These racial structures were indefensible; once challenged and exposed, they finally crumbled.”13 This was precisely the intent of the movement. First Amendment scholar and former New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis contends that King’s “belief that nonviolent resistance could overthrow white supremacy in the South was premised on the existence of an audience, the American public, whose conscience could be aroused and would be outraged at the brutality used to enforce racial segregation when it was challenged. That belief in turn depended on a press that would tell the story.”14 Steven Smith sums up the impact of this coverage on the myths and ideology of massive resistance. He argues that despite segregationists’ control over the means of communication in the South, the emergence of national television coverage of the movement challenged the segregationist myths and combined with new federal civil rights statutes to serve as “the death knell for the old vision and its power to define and control reality for a region.”15 The relationship between media coverage and the success of the movement is also repeatedly addressed in Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff’s comprehensive study of the press during the movement, The Race Beat. Beginning with the growing national media attention spurred by the murder of Emmett Till, which left northerners “shocked and shaken,” the authors illustrate the impact news and images of southern brutality had on the opinion of the nation.16 The relationship is also supported in previous scholarship focused on more specific civil rights movement events. In his study of the civil rights protests in

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13

Bond, 17.

14

Anthony Lewis, Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (New York: Random House, 1991), 36. 15

Steven A. Smith, Myth, Media and the Southern Mind (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1985), 51, 54.

16

Roberts and Klibanoff, 86.



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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression

Birmingham and Selma, for example, David Garrow credits press coverage, and the movement activists’ ability to exploit the media’s penchant for conflict, as a significant influence in swaying public and political opinion favorably toward the civil rights cause.17 Doug McAdam came to similar conclusions, suggesting that the scenes in the media from the protests in Birmingham, combined with the murder of four young girls in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church soon after, “mobilized public opinion like never before, and in turn, put enormous pressure on President Kennedy to act forcefully on behalf of civil rights.”18 Prior to Birmingham, Kennedy had been hesitant to move forward with federal civil rights legislation, but the images of absolute inhumane segregationist brutality proved too great to ignore. Quantitative studies on the impact of the media on the success of the civil rights movement support these claims. For example, in their analysis of 27 Gallup Polls from 1954 to 1976 asking respondents to name “the most important issue facing the American people,” James Winter and Chaim Eyal found a “strong agenda setting effect” between media coverage of civil rights activities and the priority the public placed on the movement.19 Winter and Eyal’s findings were supported by G. Ray Funkhouser’s 1973 study in which he found a similar correlation between public concern for civil rights and coverage of the issue in Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report from 1964 to 1970.20 These analyses of Gallup Polls were further validated by Taeku Lee’s 2002 analysis of constituency mail to the White House from 1948 to 1964 in which he discovered a .85 statistical correlation

17

David Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 164-165.

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18

Doug McAdam, “The Framing of Movement Tactics: Strategic Dramaturgy in the American Civil Rights Movement,” in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, eds. Doug McAdam, J.D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 353. 19

James P. Winter and Chaim H. Eyal, “Agenda Setting for the Civil Rights Issue,” Political Opinion Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1981): 382. 20

G. Ray Funkhouser, “The Issues of the Sixties: An Exploratory Study in the Dynamics of Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1973): 66.



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Introduction

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between civil rights movement coverage in The New York Times and letters to the president relating to the subject. Lee determined the existence of an “unmistakable ‘collective rationality’ manifested in the close parallels ... between how often and when people write and how often and when the media report on ongoing events.”21 The direct conflict between the northern press and segregationists has also been examined in previous scholarship to a certain degree. This has primarily occurred either in works exploring the legal attacks waged against the northern media in landmark cases such as New York Times Co. v. Sullivan or in studies of violence against the press.22 However, regardless of whether the attacks waged against the media took place through violence in the streets or litigation in the courtroom, the motives were often the same. John Nerone’s 1994 study, Violence against the Press, which documents the circumstances and reasons behind assaults on the media through U.S. history, attributes southerners’ aggression toward northern journalists to multiple factors. In many cases, the advantages northern media coverage provided for the civil rights movement were precisely the catalysts for southerners’ violence against them. Nerone argues that in addition to being seen as outsiders meddling in a local problem, national media were “crucial to the public legitimization of the movement” and worked to “overturn

21

Lee, 106.

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22

For discussions of violence against the press, see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 445-446, 559; Fred Prowledge, Free at Last?: The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (Boston: Little Brown, 1991), 513-518; Raymond L. Scherer and Robert J. Donovan, Unsilent Revolution: Television News and American Public Life, 1948-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 11-15; Thomas Leonard, “Anti-Slavery, Civil Rights, and Incendiary Material” in Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (Lexington, KY: Universty of Kentucky Press, 1995), 123-124. For discussions of Times v. Sullivan, see Rodney A. Smolla, Suing the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Lewis, Make No Law; Kermit Hall and Melvin Urofsky, New York Times v. Sullivan: Civil Rights, Libel Law, and the Free Press (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011).



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local order by focusing national attention on injustices.”23 For segregationists, these functions of the press were catastrophic to their cause and their struggle for public opinion outside of the South. This impact of the northern media also served as the motive behind many of the lawsuits filed by southern leaders, which have been widely documented in studies of both the civil rights movement as well as the use of libel law. First Amendment scholar Rodney Smolla writes, “The last desperate reaction of a clinging Jim Crow regime was to try to suppress the message itself, using whatever pretextual legal devices were at hand, including the law of libel. ... If one could not stop the marches, one might at least keep the marches off television and out of the newspapers.”24 The most comprehensive of these studies of libel law is Aimee Edmondson’s In Sullivan’s Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel Law During the Civil Rights Movement. Unlike many previous studies that have tended to primarily focus on higher-profile cases such as Times v. Sullivan and A.P. v. Walker, Edmondson illustrates the pervasiveness of the use of libel law to silence dissent in a collective evaluation of these better-known examples as well as several lesserknown cases against northern and southern journalists. In doing so, she argues these suits represented an “insidious shackling of free speech rights” and were used “to sustain the cultural norms of white supremacy.”25 Taken collectively, these previous studies of civil rights movement journalism demonstrate not only the lengths to which segregationists would go to try and silence dissent, but also the greater importance media, myth and ideology played within the cause of massive resistance. Just as civil rights activists worked to shed light on the fallacies behind these southern myths and ideologies, leaders of massive resistance sought to propagate and protect them. However, when the movement, the outside media, and a minority of moderate

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23

John C. Nerone, Violence against the Press: Policing the Public Sphere in U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 158. 24

Smolla, 43.

25

Aimee Edmondson, “In Sullivan’s Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel Law During the Civil Rights Movement” (doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri, 2008), 5.



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Introduction

11

vocal southerners challenged these attempts, the freedom of expression and the press in many areas of the South were called into question. This study will build upon the existing scholarship and provide a detailed and collective view of the pressures placed on journalists from both the North and South. Furthermore, it will work to explain these pressures within the context of broader public relations campaigns waged in support of segregation and massive resistance. It will demonstrate the emphasis segregationist leaders placed on certain southern myths and ideology in efforts to uphold the status quo and maintain racial separation and hegemonic control in the South. In doing so, it will illustrate how unfavorable press coverage threatened these myths, leading to widespread pressure and attempts to silence dissent. Chapter 2 documents the rise of massive resistance and the development of an environment of conformity in which the suppression of dissent occurred. Chapter 3 explores the immediate concern segregationist leaders placed on winning public opinion in both the South and North. It also documents the development of organizations such as the Citizens’ Council and Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and their emphasis on propagating the segregationist cause. The relationship between these organizations and the mainstream southern press is also explored. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the specific myths behind massive resistance and how they required and contributed to the suppression of dissent. Chapter 4 details the experiences of the minority of white Mississippi journalists who broke with the official massive resistance line. It will explore how these journalists’ writings directly conflicted with many of the foundational arguments for massive resistance, thus threatening the myths and ideology behind the status quo. The chapter argues that as a result of their dissenting opinions, these journalists were subject to a number of pressures aimed at punishing their intransigence and silencing their voices of reason. These pressures are explored in detail. Chapter 5 investigates the impact the pressures for conformity had on journalists in Arkansas and Alabama. Furthermore, it addresses the role of the student press during the civil rights movement and explores the pressures experienced by journalists at Ole Miss, Mississippi State University, the University of Alabama and Auburn University.



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Chapter 6 is devoted to the pressures placed on the northern media. Again, this pressure will be placed within the context of segregationist attempts to win public opinion outside of the South, but an analysis of segregationist propaganda and journalism will also be used to better explain the vilification of the northern press leading to instances of physical violence and legal attacks. The study will close with chapter 7 in a discussion of the decline of massive resistance and the previous chapters’ findings and arguments.



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CHAPTER 2

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The Rise of Massive Resistance and the Suppression of Dissent

Although the South was still very much segregated by both local law and social customs prior to the Brown ruling, voluntary gradual racial reform had emerged in many areas of the region since the end of World War II. However, Jason Ward, who traced the rise of southern resistance to integration long before the Brown ruling, points out the strategic motivations for these actions. He writes, “By cloaking resistance in a mantle of reform, the region’s leaders had nurtured the myth that meaningful racial change could only happen on a timetable dictated by white southerners. Outside intervention, they warned, would halt educational modernization across the South.”1 Rather than hastening these developments, the Brown ruling in many ways catalyzed a rebirth of racist extremism in the South. Michael Klarman argues this was the case for three primary related reasons. First, while previous progress toward integration in public facilities was less likely to directly affect the lives of white southerners and was much easier to brush aside, the integration of the public school system was impossible to overlook or ignore. Secondly, had it been up to the South, desegregation would not have occurred nearly this quickly in public schools, but would have likely first appeared in other public facilities and services. Finally, the integration of public schools was not only

1

Jason Morgan Ward. Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 140.

13

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coming too soon, but it was being forced upon the South by the federal government.2 After the 1954 Brown ruling, public opinion toward school desegregation in the South was generally overwhelmingly negative. A 1956 American Institute of Public Opinion poll showed that 80 percent of white southerners disapproved of the Brown ruling, a number that was estimated at roughly 90 percent in areas of the Deep South.3 A similar 1958 poll performed in Jackson, Mississippi, by the Citizens’ Council produced evidence of even greater opposition, with findings that 99 percent of white residents in Jackson opposed school desegregation.4 While the accuracy of these polls can be called into question due to the climate of conformity that existed during the period, the lack of tangible results from the Brown decision cannot be denied. By 1964, less than 2 percent of African-American children in the South attended formerly all-white institutions.5 Yet despite the majority opposition to desegregation, the South did not simply fall into line when it came to the “massive resistance” that now defines the white response to the civil rights movement. Many southerners understood it would likely take years for desegregation to actually be enforced, if ever, while others thought that resistance to the Supreme Court was futile and that integration was inevitable. However, the Court’s 1955 ruling in Brown II called for desegregation at “all deliberate speed” rather than immediately, giving hope to many of these southerners. It was believed the Supreme Court had realized its errors and was backtracking from the 1954 decision.6 Klarman writes,

2

Michael J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155-156. 3

Clive Webb, Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6. Copyright © 2013. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

4

Hodding Carter, The South Strikes Back (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1959), 190. 5

Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 17.

6

Michael Klarman, “Why Massive Resistance,” in Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, ed. Clive Webb (New



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“The crucial development of the mid-1950s was the growing conviction among white Southerners that Brown could be successfully defied and segregation preserved. ... Historical memories of the first Reconstruction ... inspired hope that determined resistance could nullify Brown.”7 While a 1956 Gallup poll showed that 55 percent of southerners thought desegregation was inevitable, the number had dropped to only 43 percent by August 1957.8 Therefore, at the very least, optimism for resistance was apparent in many southerners. However, the lengths to which they would go to defend their way of life had yet to be determined. THE ANATOMY OF MASSIVE RESISTANCE

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The leaders of organized massive resistance typically fell into three non-mutually exclusive categories – state actors such as elected and appointed officials, grass roots resistance leaders in organizations such as the Citizens’ Councils, and unofficial community leaders such as educators, religious figures and journalists. It was not uncommon for resistance organizers to take on more than one of these roles, as politicians, lawmen and community leaders commonly joined the ranks of their local Citizens’ Council or other segregationist organizations. Regardless of an individual leader’s affiliations or role in the community, the roots of massive resistance ran deep and wide in many towns throughout the South and encompassed links to the pre-existing power structures. This allowed for extremism to develop both quickly and largely unabated. The shift toward extremism and massive resistance was both demonstrated and forged by the political leadership within the South. Prior to Brown, racial moderation had actually become a defining characteristic in southern politics, with leaders typically downplaying the importance of race in the South while overseeing gradual racial reform. In many cases, these leaders had been elected in political contests in which their opponents had run on more extreme

York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22. Article cited hereafter as “Why Massive Resistance.” 7

Ibid., 29-30.

8

Ibid., 30.



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segregationist platforms.9 However, the Brown ruling, and the subsequent push for immediate integration by civil rights leaders, served as a catalyst for racial extremism as resistance to the emerging movement developed throughout the South. Both politicians and grass roots organizations such as the Citizens’ Councils cultivated this extremism, and southern politics quickly became no place for moderation. Klarman writes, “‘Moderation’ became a term of derision, as the political center collapsed, leaving only ‘those who want to maintain the Southern way of life or those who want to mix the races.’… Most moderates either joined the segregationist bandwagon or retired from service.”10 It was in this political environment that segregationist leaders such as James O. Eastland and Ross Barnett in Mississippi, Harry Byrd in Virginia, Orval Faubus in Arkansas, Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, and George Wallace in Alabama emerged to lead the South into a decade of massive resistance. As extremism flourished and moderation withered away within southern politics, resistance to desegregation from grassroots sources thrived as well, often working “hand-in-hand” with public officials.11 Although various pro-segregation organizations were established throughout the South during the civil rights movement, the most prominent example of grassroots resistance was the Citizens’ Council. Founded in Indianola, Mississippi, in the summer of 1954 by Robert Patterson, a local planter, multiple chapters of the Citizens’ Council throughout the South set out to resist desegregation by any legal means necessary. Unlike the membership of more openly violent organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, members of the Citizens’ Council openly shared their affiliation and often represented some of the most well respected members of southern communities. With doctors, business leaders, lawyers, politicians and educators in its ranks, the Citizens’ Council earned the designation of the “uptown” or “country club” Klan. The organization quickly spread throughout the South, reaching a membership of approximately 250,000.12 Although the Citizens’

9

Klarman, Brown v. Board, 150.

10

Ibid., 155.

11

Ward, 161.

12

Klarman, Brown v. Board, 154.



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Council was not an official state actor, it held considerable political influence throughout the South. This was especially true in the state of Mississippi, in which “the Councils and the ... state government became virtually indistinguishable,” with the Councils becoming the “single most powerful political force” in the state.13 Over the next decade, the Citizens’ Council openly exercised economic, legal, and social pressures to both impede the progress of integration and the civil rights movement as well as challenge any opposition to massive resistance. The third broad category of segregationist leadership during massive resistance consisted of members of the pre-existing power structure within most southern communities. Having been raised in an environment in which segregation and white supremacy were accepted and believed to be natural, community leaders such as educators, ministers and journalists typically continued to support the ideology behind massive resistance after the Brown ruling. For most, it was the only system of values they had known. Journalist Ralph McGill writes, “When the civil rights movement came, most southern newspapers reacted like most southern churches; they reflected their environment, the homogeneity of their local customs and traditions.”14 Southern journalists such as James Ward in Jackson, Tom Waring in Charleston, and Virginia’s James J. Kilpatrick became some of the most vocal proponents of massive resistance. However, a minority of citizens who held these leadership positions would also speak out against the measures and means of resistance, and, because of their prominent roles, their dissent was met with often-severe repercussions. METHODS OF MASSIVE RESISTANCE

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With the decidedly extremist power structure in place in the South, and the general intolerance for moderation limiting voices of reason, the stage for massive resistance was set. However, massive resistance was not a uniform and homogenous strategy, but rather incorporated

13

Francis Wilhoit, The Politics of Massive Resistance (New York: G. Braziller, 1973), 112.

14

Roger Williams, “Newspapers in the South,” Columbia Journalism Review 6 (Summer 1967): 30.



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multiple means and methods to maintain segregation. Over the next several years, the Brown ruling and civil rights movement were challenged on a number of fronts using methods that varied in both severity and legality. The targets ranged from individual movement leaders and organizations to the U.S. Constitution and federal government itself. George Lewis writes, “By the end of the decade segregationists had devised a broad panoply of resistance measures, many of which were to achieve different aims, but all of which worked toward the same ultimate goal: the maintenance of segregation.”15 Using “strands of ideological, rhetorical, legislative and often violently coercive” means of resistance, segregationists worked to cultivate and protect the segregationist sentiment at home while combating any threats to the southern way of life from outside the region. Considering the overwhelmingly segregationist sentiment within southern politics at this time, lawmakers regularly utilized their legislative powers to prevent the progress of integration. This sentiment was captured in what became known as the Southern Manifesto. Officially titled “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” the Manifesto challenged the constitutionality of the Brown ruling, arguing that segregation was protected by the existing “separate but equal” principle and that states’ public school systems were intended to be controlled by the states themselves. Of the Brown ruling and the “unwarranted exercise of power by the Court,” the Manifesto charged: Though there has been no constitutional amendment or act of Congress changing this established legal principal almost a century old, the Supreme Court of the United States, with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land. …We decry the Supreme Court’s encroachments on rights reserved to the States and to the people, contrary to established law and to the Constitution. We commend the motives of those States which

15

George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (London: Hoddler Arnold, 2006), 112. Book cited hereafter as The White Response.



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have declared the intention to resist integration by any lawful means.16 Nineteen senators and 82 representatives from the South would sign the Manifesto on March 12, 1956. Of the 128 total national legislators from states making up the former Confederacy, only 27 did not openly support the Manifesto.17 Many in this minority would later find their position to be a political liability in the elections that followed. Although the Southern Manifesto did not establish any official legislative measures aimed at preventing integration, there was no shortage of laws passed attempting to do just that. The most symbolic of these were the resolutions for interposition passed by six southern states in 1956. Described by historian Numan Bartley as “the battle cry of massive resistance,” the resolutions sought to “interpose” the sovereignty of the states to block the powers of the federal government from enforcing desegregation.18 Like many of the attempts at legislative resistance, interposition, Jason Ward writes, “offered segregationists a veneer of legal legitimacy and another slogan shorn of white supremacist rhetoric. More important, the doctrine fed segregationists’ conception of their crusade as fundamentally defensive and preservationist in nature.”19 In most cases, interposition was supported and passed overwhelmingly in state legislatures as politicians held out hope that segregation could be maintained permanently through legal means. In the three years following the Brown ruling, southern lawmakers passed 450 laws designed to impede or circumvent the Supreme Court decision.20 Perhaps the most extreme legislation passed in regard to school desegregation were laws empowering individual southern states to completely shut down their public school systems if faced with forced integration. However, legislation was not

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16

Wilhoit, 286-287.

17

Bartley, 116.

18

Ibid., 128.

19

Ward, 147.

20

David R. Goldfield, Black, White and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 79.



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just intended to challenge the constitutionality of the Brown ruling and further empower the southern states. From 1956 to 1960, the Southern Regional Council reported that 230 laws were passed in the South aimed specifically at silencing groups or individuals speaking out in favor of desegregation, with a major focus being the NAACP.21 In addition to using legislative power, leaders of massive resistance also found allies within the southern legal and judicial system. The segregationist leanings of law enforcement officials and judges were apparent throughout the South. Numan Bartley writes, “Southern judges cooperated with policemen who arrested integrationists, prosecutors who pressed flimsy charges against them, justices of the peace who summarily convicted them, and juries that were eager to convict ‘outside agitators’ while acquitting klansmen and other segregationist troublemakers.”22 Bartley would go on to argue that the perversion of the justice system occurring in the South was so common and extreme that the courthouse itself served as the center for massive resistance rather than the state house or governor’s mansion. The bias of the southern legal system was well known both inside and outside of the South, and its benefit to massive resistance was twofold. While the bias almost guaranteed civil rights advocates would be prosecuted and convicted, regardless of the validity of the charges, it also served to create an environment of fear within the South. Both African-American and white citizens understood the potential consequences of supporting integration or challenging the methods and message of massive resistance. Therefore, the bias of the legal system worked to deter activism and dissent as much as ensure punishment of those who were actually willing to speak out or take action. Because of this, Bartley estimates that “the rigging of southern legal and judicial institutions against integrationists seems, in retrospect, to have been among the most effective backlash tactics devised by the South’s counterrevolution.”23 The impact of this bias extended beyond what it meant for the prosecution of integrationists and moderates, as it provided a degree of

21

Lewis, The White Response, 92.

22

Wilhoit, 157.

23

Ibid., 158.



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protection for segregationists who were willing to take the law into their own hands. After the Brown ruling, polls showed that 15-25 percent of southern whites “favored violence,” if necessary, as a means to resist school desegregation. From January 1, 1955, to May 1, 1958, over 100 instances of violence could be connected to resistance to civil rights movement activity in Alabama alone. This violence primarily targeted African Americans through the bombings of homes, schools and churches, but Jewish synagogues and white moderates were also occasionally attacked.24 In many cases, southern politicians flamed the pre-existing fires that led to such violence, “explicitly encouraging it, by predicting it, and by using extremist rhetoric that inspired it.”25 Although groups such as the Citizens’ Council were founded with the mission to utilize all legal means to combat integration, existing organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan took full advantage of the deficiencies within the southern legal system. Publicly, more respected segregationist leaders and groups condemned the Klan; however, the KKK’s more lawless and unrestrained strategies served the larger purpose of massive resistance nonetheless. Wilhoit writes, “While they never publicly said so, the South’s leaders were well aware that the Klan was aiding their cause in two ways. It frightened moderate whites into toeing the line of white supremacy, and it provided an organized, secret channel of violence for those segregationist zealots whose crusading zeal could not be restrained within the limits of legal resistance.”26 Although government leaders and members of the Citizens’ Council typically held greater degrees of economic and political power, massive resistance in the hands of the Klan struck a different level of fear within both the African-American and moderate white communities in the South. Liberal white editors such as Harry Ashmore, Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter Jr. repeatedly voiced this concern. Roberts and Klibanoff write:

24

Klarman, Brown v. Board, 192-194.

25

Ibid.,195.

26

Wilhoit, 102.



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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression Massive resistance, once allowed to root, could not be controlled or contained and would lead to a kind of brutal lawlessness that none of its high-minded advocates wanted on their consciences. If you allow the states to thumb their nose at federal edicts, the editors asked, what’s to stop all those poor, angry backward white folks, whipped into a paranoid frenzy by demagogues, from taking the next step?27

As would be seen throughout the movement with the riots at Ole Miss, the murder of Medgar Evers, and the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, among multiple other unthinkable acts of violence, this fear was certainly not unfounded. These events, along with the recurring violent responses during civil rights protests, forced civil rights activists to respond to segregationist intimidation, even that short of physical confrontation, as a true threat.28 However, when this extra-legal activity occurred, Klan members and other radicals were generally safe from prosecution. While this was in part due to the general anti-civil rights bias within the South, and the fact that this bias was typically apparent in all-white juries, the Klan had also been successful in infiltrating local law enforcement organizations on a wide scale. For the Klan, this allowed for “an undeclared guerrilla war against any and all southerners who supported Brown’s implementation” in some parts of the South.29 The combined effect of these multifaceted forces of massive resistance was an environment that was absent the traditional legal, power and social structures that would typically protect and tolerate voices of dissent. The environment of conformity and suppression of dissent that existed in the South has been recorded in multiple studies of the region during the civil rights period. Perhaps the most well-known is James Silver’s Mississippi: The Closed Society. Silver’s book was developed

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27

Roberts and Klibanoff, 207.

28

George Lewis, ‘“Complicated Hospitality:’ The Impact of the Sit-ins on the Ideology of Southern Segregationists,” in From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, ed. Iwan W. Morgan, and Philip Davies (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 43. 29

Wilhoit, 105.



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from a speech given in 1963 to the Southern Historical Association in Asheville, North Carolina. This speech was crafted after the years of backlash Silver experienced for his moderate views on integration and civil rights during his tenure as a history professor at the University of Mississippi. Silver documents the repressive environment that had developed in the state as a result of segregationist organizations such as the Citizens’ Council and Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, describing the state as a “closed society.” Silver writes, “In such a society a never-ceasing propagation of the ‘true faith’ must go on relentlessly, with a constantly reiterated demand for loyalty to the united front, requiring that nonconformists and dissenters from the code be silenced, or, in a crisis, driven from the community.”30 Silver’s assessment of the state has been echoed in more recent studies of the movement. Charles Eagles explored the development of such a repressive environment in his 2001 article, “The Closing of Mississippi Society.” While Silver reflected on the environment in Mississippi in the early 1960s, Eagles argued that the beginnings of such repression were evident as early as the mid-1950s, providing the controversy surrounding Reverend Alvin Kershaw as an example. Reverend Kershaw had been invited to speak at Ole Miss during its 1956 “Religious Emphasis Week,” but the invitation, after much controversy, was ultimately withdrawn due to Kershaw’s alleged support of the NAACP. Eagles recognizes this decision as one of the early steps toward the closed society Silver would observe in 1963, writing, “The course of the three-month uproar over Kershaw revealed how the state, under increasing pressures for racial change in the mid1950s, moved from one in which dissent was allowed toward James Silver’s ‘closed society.’”31 By 1962, and the admittance of James Meredith to Ole Miss, Eagles concluded, “the issue of segregation could not be compromised, and dissent would not be tolerated.”32

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30

James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966), 7.

31

Charles Eagles, “The Closing of Mississippi Society: Will Campbell, The $64,000 Question, and Religious Emphasis Week at the University of Mississippi,” The Journal of Southern History 67, no. 2 (2001): 368. 32

Eagles, 372.



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Although the state of Mississippi was in many ways the most repressive and extreme when it came to the resistance of segregation, broader explorations of the South and massive resistance reveal that similar pressures for conformity and the suppression of dissent existed throughout the region. Neil R. McMillen’s history of the Citizens’ Council chronicles the organization’s sophisticated public relations and propaganda campaigns, but also argues that members believed “the threat of desegregation could be effectively minimized by the removal of those who would ‘stir up discontent.’”33 What began as an attempt to control African-American unrest was soon applied to non-conforming white citizens. McMillen writes, “The ways and means whereby moderate voices in the white community could be suppressed were among the organization’s first concerns.”34 As a result, McMillen, continues, “In many quarters of the embattled South, the right of free expression was one of the earliest casualties in the war to defend segregation.”35 David R. Goldfield’s study of race relations and southern culture, Black, White and Southern, proposed similar conclusions, describing a region-wide fear that discussing “race in terms other than staunch support for white supremacy would lead to ostracism or worse—fear among working class whites of being ‘declassed,’ unemployed, powerless; and fear among white leaders of losing their monopoly to Washington and to other whites.”36 Under such pressure, even a hint of moderation was condemned, leading many whites and blacks to remain silent. HEGEMONY, IDEOLOGY AND MYTH To understand this environment of conformity and the suppression of dissent, one must examine both the relationship between hegemony,



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33

Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 209.

34

Ibid., 251.

35

McMillen, 235.

36

David R. Goldfield, Black, White and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 88.



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myth and ideology, as well as the ways each of these concepts is established, perpetuated and defended. James Joll describes hegemony as one political class “persuading the other classes of society to accept its own moral, political and cultural values.”37 Yet, as argued by Antonio Gramsci, these values are not simply forced upon subordinate parties, but accepted as “natural” and “common sense.” This acceptance is achieved through a combination of coercion and consensus, with the latter being the primary means of hegemonic control in times of relative social stability.38 Within the constraints of the dominant system of meaning, which creates and shapes a subject’s understanding of both himself as well as the reality around him, the hegemonic power of the class constructing these meanings is achieved and sustained. Ideology and myth are central components in this process. Stuart Hall defines ideology as a “way of representing the order of things which endowed its limiting perspectives with that natural or divine inevitability which makes them appear universal, natural and coterminous with ‘reality’ itself.”39 In his study The New South Creed, Paul M. Gaston demonstrates the function of myth as a reflection of ideology, describing myths as “combinations of images and symbols that reflect a people’s way of perceiving the truth. Organically related to a fundamental reality of life, they fuse the real and the imaginary into a blend that becomes a reality itself, a force in history.”40 Therefore, in practice, ideology and myth have similar social functions – to serve as lenses through which meaning is constructed and reality is defined. In terms of hegemony, ideology and myth are relied upon to

37

James Joll, Antonio Gramsci (Harmondsworth, Eng: Penguin Books, 1978), 129.

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38

Antonio Gramsci, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 80. 39

Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of Ideology in Media Studies: Return of the Repressed,” in Culture, Society, and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch (London: Methuen, 1982), 65. 40

Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Knopf, 1970), 9.



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establish the desired consensus and maintain the perception that the status quo is not forced and biased, but natural, and thus largely unquestioned. However, hegemony is not immune to challenge. During the civil rights movement, the control of the white southern establishment was threatened on two interrelated fronts – by the movement itself and by potential federal intervention. In Gramsci’s understanding of the process that leads to hegemony being broken and overcome, liberation is largely dependent on the development of “critical selfconsciousness,” and thus directly related to myth and ideology.41 Through critical self-consciousness, the meanings and ideologies behind the hegemonic consensus are challenged and eventually replaced. In the case of the civil rights movement, the destruction of the southern establishment’s hegemonic control required shifts in consciousness of southerners as well as citizens outside of the South. It was these shifts that would ignite public opinion and spur the federal government into action. However, prior to the movement, much of the nation was either convinced of the region’s myth of “separate but equal” or remained ambivalent toward the true conditions African Americans faced. Therefore, it was unlikely segregation would be challenged on a wide and lasting scale. Although, simply pointing out the flaws within these myths to the rest of the nation was not enough. More “dramatic” or “traumatic” events were needed that would challenge the prevailing myths and understanding of southern society. Gaston writes, “The critique and dissipation of myths becomes possible only when tension between the mythic view and the reality it sustains snaps the viability of their relationship, creates new social patterns and with them new harmonizing myths.”42 Through the marches, protests and campaigns that emerged in the decade following the Brown ruling, African Americans sought not only to demonstrate the true lack of equality in public facilities and services, but also the greater injustices and brutalities fostered and permitted by the South’s longstanding racism. Fortunately over time, this reality was conveyed to the nation as a whole, ensuring that the racial hierarchy in

41

Gramsci, Hoare, and Nowell-Smith, 334.

42

Gaston, 224.



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the South would be forced to change – if not by pressure from the movement directly then by the authority of the federal government. David Chalmers writes that the movement ultimately changed the consciousness of whites and blacks, writing the protests, marches, and segregationist brutality “forced the nation to face its racial problems” and the federal government to take action.43 However, this change did not occur easily, as southern myth and ideology, and ultimately the hegemonic control held by the white power structure, remained central battlegrounds throughout the movement for not only civil rights leaders, but also segregationists looking to maintain them.

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MYTH, IDEOLOGY AND THE SOUTH Prior to the civil rights movement, myth and ideology had long been integral to the South’s power structure and race relations dating back to before the Civil War. Although aspects of southern myth and ideology had changed over time, many parallels existed between the conceptions of the South prior to the Civil War and the region during the civil rights movement. Furthermore, comparisons can also be made between the purposes these myths served and the lengths to which southerners were willing to go to defend the myths and ideology of the South in the midst of perceived outside threats. In the antebellum South, the plantation lifestyle and AfricanAmerican servitude had been based on a multifaceted mythology shaping conceptions of both blacks and whites as well as the institution of slavery. However, this southern mythology pervaded well beyond the gates of the plantations and the minds of the minority that made up the true privileged class in the South. While relatively few southerners actually owned slaves, let alone plantations, a broader identity of the South emerged for whites that transcended social class, and more importantly, differentiated the region from the industrialization of the North. Steven Smith writes, “For as long as there has been any sense of sectional identity, myths have been among the prominent realities of the history of the South. In fact, it is not coincidental that the first South

43

David Mark Chalmers, And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 36, 158.



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and the first Southern cultural myth appear to have emerged simultaneously.”44 This mythology expanded far beyond simple white supremacy. The romanticized antebellum South was perceived as having emerged from noble cavalier origins, with conceptions of the chivalrous southern gentleman and the kind southern belle. Even slavery itself was romanticized in a southern culture that commonly paralleled that of the ancient Greeks in which servitude was almost unequivocally accepted as natural and a symbol of status. This “Plantation Myth” is explored by George Tindall, who describes the mythic images of the “kindly old master with his mint julep,” the African-American slave who is the “embodiment of loyalty,” and the “beautiful” and “graceful” southern belle.45 In his 1972 essay, “The Great Confrontation: The South and the Problem of Change,” John Hope Franklin documents a similar antebellum southern mythology, which in many ways revolved around the benefits of slavery. In addition to the slave system’s “perfect distribution of labor,” it allowed for a more politically active and informed citizenry, as white men, “relieved of the cares and the drudgery of manual toil,” were free to give their attention to the problem of governance.46 However, despite these economic and political benefits, the “principal defense” of slavery ultimately rested on “a sense of racial superiority,” which Franklin describes as “the ‘cornerstone’ of southern civilization,” founded on a number of arguments ranging from the scientific to the religious. Considering this, slaves were fortunate, it was argued, to be “the chattel of an aristocracy characterized by talent, virtue, generosity, and courage.”47

44

Steven A. Smith, Myth, Media and the Southern Mind (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1985), 5.

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45

George Tindall, “Mythology: A New Frontier in Southern History,” in The Idea of the South, ed. Frank E. Vandiver (Chicago: Published for William Marsh Rice University of by the University of Chicago Press, 1964), 4. 46

John Hope Franklin, “The Great Confrontation: The South and the Problem of Change,” in Myth and Southern History, ed. Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 104. 47

Ibid.,106-107.



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As the country progressed toward civil war, southern myths and ideology were targeted and threatened by abolitionism and the perceived interference of the federal government. However, these myths also served as a rallying point in the South’s eventual defense against this “northern aggression.” In the midst of this sectional turmoil, Franklin describes southerners as “zealous guardians” over the perfect society that only seemed to become further idealized when faced with outside threats. He writes, “It was in the context of the sectional controversy that white southerners sharpened their conception of the perfect society; and by the time they defined it they discovered they had achieved it.”48 This protective nature within the South would be fully exploited by southern politicians seeking to rouse support for the eventual Confederacy. With the tide turning against slavery in the western world, southern leaders sought to characterize abolitionists and the intervention of the federal government as a threat not only to the institution of slavery, but to southern culture in general. W.J. Cash explores the use of southern myth and ideology as a galvanizing tool in his influential profile, The Mind of the South. He writes, “It was the conflict with the Yankee which really created the concept of the South as something more than a matter of geography, as an object of patriotism, in the minds of southerners.”49 This sectional identity and southerners’ feeling of “contemptuous superiority” over the culture of the North, Cash observes, “was a nearly perfect defense-mechanism” when the South was threatened.50 Therefore, it was not simply a matter of protecting one’s right to own slaves, or even the sovereignty of the individual states, but rather of protecting a sacred set of values. As such, the stakes were too high for any southerner, regardless of financial status or slave ownership, to ignore such outside interference in the southern way of life. Although the Civil War, and the subsequent changes brought by the abolition of slavery and reconstruction, significantly altered the South and southern way of life, myths and ideology supporting white

48

Franklin, 103.

49

W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1941), 65-66.

50

Ibid., 61.



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supremacy, racial separation and a unique regional pride and identity remained. In many ways, the Civil War and reconstruction further romanticized the South and the “lost cause” of states’ rights for which its citizens fought.51 While slavery itself became a side note in many southerners’ explanations for secession, an ideology of white supremacy and segregation remained as new myths emerged to maintain the South’s racial hierarchy. Paul Gaston explores the development of these myths, and specifically the ideal of “separate but equal,” in his 1970 work, The New South Creed. Founded on this principle of “separate but equal,” the 1890s marked the beginning of multiple statutes and disfranchisements that worked to re-solidify the subordination of African Americans within the South. Gaston writes:

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Accepted widely as the final solution to the conundrum presented by the demands of Negro freedom and the American tradition of equality, this new order was neatly rationalized by the New South myth. Defining each individual’s role in life and the expectations placed on him by society, the myth was adopted by the Supreme Court in 1896, attractively encased in the slogan “equal but separate,” and began a dominion over the American mind that conditioned and controlled the perception and programs of the most disparate groups so that, in its cumulative effect, it worked as a powerfully conservative force, protecting and maintaining the Jim Crow system to which it was wed.52 Although the “separate but equal” myth was readily questioned and discredited within the African-American community from its inception, it would be largely accepted within the United States as a whole during the first half of the twentieth century.53 Jason Ward emphasizes the importance of this myth as many segregationists claimed southern race relations had been on the right track prior to the Brown ruling, largely as a result of a commitment to a separate but

51

Smith, 23.

52

Gaston, 225.

53

Ibid., 225-226.



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equal society. This rationale continued to be used in response to the civil rights movement. He writes, “As segregationists perpetuated the myth of their own good faith, they memorialized equalization as a largely fulfilled, if unappreciated, promise … The portrayal of equalization as an unrequited gesture of racial goodwill became a cornerstone of segregationist mythology.”54 However, despite these claims, the concept of separate but equal served as a site of struggle throughout the civil rights movement. Just as support for the myths and ideology of the South galvanized amidst the threat of civil war and the abolition of slavery, the threat of desegregation produced a similar reaction among southerners. Following the Brown ruling, arguments for the defense of segregation abounded in the South. As the cornerstones of the southern way of life, the protection and propagation of the myths of white supremacy and “separate but equal” became a central component of segregationists’ response to the challenges posed by the Supreme Court ruling. In his 1973 study of the politics of massive resistance, Francis M. Wilhoit writes that segregationist leaders sought to manipulate southern myths to “glorify the status quo, promote social cohesion, indoctrinate the young with merits of prescription, and prevent radical change.”55 Wilhoit describes this mythology as a “counterrevolutionary ideology” that served to legitimate the social system and provide “its adherents with propaganda ammunition for psychological and political warfare against revolutionary opponents.”56 In the case of massive resistance, the counterrevolutionary ideology was supported by multiple myths aimed both at rationalizing segregation as well as vilifying and discrediting the federal government and the civil rights movement. However, regardless of the specific focus of the myths and arguments, the intent was always the same: the preservation of segregation. George Lewis, whose Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement explores the “amorphous beast” that was the segregationist response to the Brown ruling, demonstrates the turn

54

Ward, 140.

55

Francis Wilhoit, The Politics of Massive Resistance (New York: G. Braziller, 1973), 123.

56

Ibid., 57.



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toward myth and ideology as a means of resistance when outright defiance by the South became less tolerated by the federal government. After the initial development of massive resistance in response to the Brown ruling from 1954-1956, Lewis contends that the effort reached its peak from 1956-1960 during a period in which segregationists set the tone for their response. However, by 1960 power had shifted and the massive resistance strategy became dictated by the actions of the civil rights movement and outside influences. Lewis writes, “There was increasing evidence of a totemic shift in the balance of power in the wider struggle over desegregation, as the forces operating outside the immediate control of those local white communities and their elected representatives slowly began to reduce their tolerance for outright resistance.”57 With federal law encroaching upon initial legislative and constitutional measures aimed at maintaining segregation, Lewis argues massive resistance strategy turned toward more rhetorical and intellectual rationales aimed at both southerners as well as Americans living above the Mason-Dixon line.

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MYTH, IDEOLOGY AND THE MEDIA The focus on the media of both civil rights leaders and segregationists is founded on the role of the press in the establishment and protection of ideology and myth. Louis Althusser emphasizes this importance in his exploration of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). According to Althusser, these ISAs consist of institutions such as the family, church, educational system, and communications, including the media, and are central to a class’s probability of maintaining state power. Althusser concludes, “No class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over the State Ideological Apparatuses.”58 The influence and power of ISAs stem from their role in establishing “preferred meanings” within society that serve the interests of one class over others. Stuart Hall terms this meaning-making process as the “politics of signification,” emphasizing its impact on consciousness and one’s

57

Lewis, The White Response, 113.

58

Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 146.



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individual reality, which he argues is constructed rather than a natural phenomenon. Hall explores the function of the media in the process of signification and as a means to constructing consensus. He writes: If the media were not simply reflective or expressive of an already achieved consensus, but instead tended to reproduce those very definitions of the situation which favored and legitimated the existing structure of things, then what had seemed at first as merely a reinforcing role had now to be reconceptualized in terms of the media’s role in the process of consensus formation.59

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Therefore, as a result of the media’s potential influence in manufacturing consent and upholding the dominant ideological and hegemonic codes, they need to be recognized as an essential determinant in the formation of consciousness and the struggle for social change. The function of the media as a means to sustain but also contest dominant ideological and hegemonic codes is apparent in the civil rights struggle. Traditionally, social causes have been dependent on the mainstream media for recognition and legitimization, which often involves challenging the myths and ideology of the dominant class.60 Gamson and Wolfsfeld identify three primary functions of the media for social movements – mobilization, validation, and scope enlargement – each of which applied to the media-civil rights movement relationship. Over the course of the movement, civil rights leaders utilized the media not only to mobilize support of African Americans in the South, but just as importantly to raise awareness and facilitate action throughout the country. This, in turn, required that the movement’s goals be legitimatized in the eyes of the nation, inviting sympathy and support of their cause while demonizing and delegitimizing the efforts of segregationists.

59

Hall.,64.

60

William A. Gamson and Gadi Wolfsfeld, "Movements and Media As Interacting Systems,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 528 (1993): 116.



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However, this legitimization is often challenged or denied, with social struggles alternatively being defined as deviant and thus in need of suppression. This was the case during the civil rights movement as segregationist groups attempted to counter the negative messages and images of the South that spread through the nation. The propagation of segregationist myths and ideology through public relations campaigns and southern media coverage proved to be a major part of this strategy.



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CHAPTER 3

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The Way We See It

From the early stages of massive resistance, the importance of the press and public opinion was clear. In addition to maintaining support for opposition to the civil rights movement in the South itself, both the press and the public outside of the region were targeted by segregationists. It was believed that northern public opinion must either be won to favor the cause of massive resistance, or at the very least, be kept in a state of ambivalence. The importance of public opinion outside of the South was directly related to influencing the actions of the courts and federal government. If northern public opinion could be won over or neutralized, George Lewis argues, “any presidential administration preparing to flex the muscles of federal power or enforce desegregation might instead allow those muscles to atrophy and take no firm action.”1 As a result, both public opinion and the press became primary targets for leaders of massive resistance. Judge Tom P. Brady provided one of the earliest and highest profile responses to the Brown ruling in his 1954 book, Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation … America Has Its Choice, which unabashedly defended segregation on the grounds of white supremacy and provided suggestions for an organized southern response. The book would serve as an early catalyst for massive resistance groups such as the Citizen’s Council and be repeatedly cited by segregationists throughout the civil rights movement. Judge Brady placed considerable emphasis on countering the propaganda attacks waged by communists,

1

George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (London: Hoddler Arnold, 2006), 108. Book cited hereafter as The White Response.

35

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whom he believed were largely responsible for the Brown ruling and resulting racial unrest in the United States. Furthermore, he voiced early warnings of the civil rights organizations’ influence on the national media, claiming that an NAACP boycott against northern publications had already “made it impossible for Southern writers … to have their works published by an outstanding publishing house” when it came to the race issue.2 No other region of the country, he argued, had been “more maligned than the South,” leading to a great misunderstanding “throughout the North and East about the true economic and social position of the negro.”3 As a result, he called for the establishment of an “Editorial Bureau” as part of a larger organization, the National Federation of Sovereign States of America, which would be commissioned with “saving America from Socialism and Communism.” The Bureau, which would be made up of “outstanding editors” from around the nation, would work to “methodically and consistently supply information to Congress, the Supreme Court and other branches of … Government, truthfully reflecting the situation as it now exists.” The United States “should be flooded with this correct information,” continued Brady, “in order that the people of this country may be aroused and alerted to the imminent dangers which we face.”4 Not long after the publication of Black Monday, Senator James O. Eastland, who quickly emerged as a proponent of massive resistance and ally to segregationist groups such as the Citizens’ Council, continued the push for an official southern public relations organization. He repeatedly reiterated the power of public opinion and the dangers of anti-South propaganda in speeches to segregationist groups throughout the South. In a January 26, 1956, speech to members of the South Carolina Citizens’ Council, Eastland proclaimed:

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My friends, we can be crushed by the weight of public opinion. We can only win this fight through favorable public

2

Tom P. Brady, Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation. America Has Its Choice (Winona, Miss: Association of Citizens’ Councils, 1954), 68-69.

3

Ibid., 73.

4

Ibid., 73.



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opinion. The greatest danger is not in the Court. They are politicians and can change their minds. The dangers are the organized pressure groups who stand behind the Court, the groups who manipulate the politicians. Their propaganda must be met. Their power must be counteracted with favorable public opinion. With favorable public opinion we can control politicians. We control Courts. The South’s side must be presented to the nation. We must then mobilize that opinion into political action. That is why an organization of the people, and the Commission to generate favorable public opinion is basic. It is fundamental in this great controversy. This is one great step on the road to victory.5 The “organization of the people” Eastland encouraged marked a continuation of his efforts to create a “Southern regional commission” to “combat the rising crescendo of vicious propaganda against the South and its institutions.”6 As early as October 1955, Eastland began pushing for a taxexempt organization financed by southern states to “meet propaganda with truth” and “offset false-hood with fact.”7 Eastland charged “communist-front and race-minded groups” were devoting “tremendous sums” to a propaganda campaign against the South, and ultimately against the nation as a whole. The campaign, and the civil rights movement itself, sought to divide the American people and destroy the rights of individual states. Therefore, the attack on the South was “in reality an attack upon state powers and, finally, upon the American system of government.”8 The need for a southern information organization stemmed not only from this perceived threat



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5

James Eastland, untiled speech given to South Carolina Citizens’ Council, 26 January 1956, James O. Eastland Collection, University of Mississippi Libraries Archives and Special Collections. Collection cited hereafter as Eastland Collection.

6

“Pro-Segregation Campaign South by Eastland,” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Oct. 29, 1955.

7

Ibid.

8

Ibid.



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alone, but also from the alleged complicity of the American press in such an anti-South campaign. Eastland warned that segments of the American media had become “willing tools” of the anti-South, antiAmerican propagandists. Therefore, the proposed southern commission would attempt to right the wrongs of the American press by “placing the sword of truth in the hands of this last sadly besieged segment of the American press.”9 Eastland’s warnings about the onslaught of anti-South propaganda and the bias of the northern press coincided with similar statements from Tom Waring, staunch segregationist and editor of the Charleston, South Carolina, News and Courier. In an editorial appearing in the News and Courier on October 30, 1955, Waring coined the term “paper curtain” to describe the coverage of the civil rights issue by the northern media, charging that “national magazines and metropolitan newspapers have abandoned an objective approach to one of the biggest news stories of our time.” He warned that public opinion, which he believed would “have much to do with the outcome” of the integration crisis, was being shaped by a “deluge of daily and weekly gazettes with an anti-Southern slant.” Waring would go on to give multiple examples of this biased press coverage, emphasizing the lack of attention the northern media were giving to racial disturbances in areas outside of the South.10 Like Eastland, Waring proposed a “Southern organization” to publicize the facts supporting segregation that were allegedly being ignored by the non-southern media in hopes of earning “the respect of moderate people in other regions.”11 Not surprisingly, both Waring and Eastland took notice of the other’s proposals, with Eastland suggesting, “We must work together unceasingly to obtain a vocal and literate organ of expression, either by public or private funds. With pens as powerful as yours, we will not have to look far to find one individual

9

Ibid.

10

Tom Waring, “Paper Curtain Hides South’s Views,” News and Courier (Charleston, SC), Oct. 30, 1955. 11

Ibid.



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capable of expressing the Southern viewpoint.”12 Throughout the movement, Waring would be one of the most vocal proponents of massive resistance, joining editors such as James Ward at the Jackson Daily News and James J. Kilpatrick at the Richmond News Leader. These journalists not only promoted the cause of massive resistance with coverage that often occurred in direct collaboration with segregationist leaders and organizations, but also consistently warned of the dangers of integrationist propaganda and the complicity and bias of the northern media in spreading messages deemed critical and threatening to the southern way of life. The concern voiced by Brady, Eastland and Waring illustrates the emphasis segregationists throughout the South placed on both public opinion as well as the need to counter negative messages about segregation and massive resistance. As massive resistance developed, this concern would be further demonstrated by the public relations strategies of segregationist organizations such as the Citizens’ Council and Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. These organizations set out not only to counter messages that portrayed the South in a negative light, but that also ultimately called the ideology and myths of massive resistance and segregation into question.

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THE VOICES OF THE SOUTH Although the region-wide information agencies Brady, Eastland and Waring sought never came to fruition, the opinions of massive resistance leaders would be well represented in the decade following the Brown ruling. Despite growing pressure and attention from civil rights organizations and non-southern media outlets, segregationists maintained control of the primary means of communication below the Mason-Dixon line. Therefore, through a combination of official segregationist propaganda and pro-segregation journalism, the southern way of life was defended while the actions of the Supreme Court, federal government and civil rights movement were criticized and called into question.

12

James O. Eastland to Tom Waring, 8 November 1955, Eastland Collection; Tom Waring to James O. Eastland, 31 October 1955, Eastland Collection.



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The Sovereignty Commission and Citizens’ Council

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The most sophisticated of the official segregationist public relations campaigns emerged from groups such as the state-sponsored Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and the grassroots Citizens’ Council. The establishment of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in 1956 demonstrated Eastland’s home state’s commitment to winning the battle for public opinion both in the South as well as outside the region. As its name indicates, the Sovereignty Commission’s primary objective was to protect the rights of the state of Mississippi from an overbearing and encroaching federal government, specifically when it came to issues of integration. However, from its inception, the Sovereignty Commission’s emphasis on public opinion and public relations was clear. Section 13 of the bill establishing the Sovereignty Commission specifically provided the agency the right to utilize funds for advertisements, speakers, “and other persons and agencies” to support Mississippi’s “segregated way of life.”13 The Mississippi State Senate adopted the bill by a margin of 48-0, and the Sovereignty Commission was officially established on March 29, 1956.14 With a two-year appropriation of $250,000, the scope and purpose of the Sovereignty Commission were evident from the start. Yasuhiro Katagiri writes, “With the aura of sophistication and respectability emanating from the word ‘sovereignty,’ the Commission, for all practical purposes was expected ‘to maintain segregation in the State of Mississippi’ and to wreck ‘the NAACP and any other organization which is attempting to advocate integration” and trample states’ rights. To do so, the Commission hired a full-time director and an investigator to carry out “the objectives and purposes” of the Sovereignty Commission and fulfill the organization’s role as the “eyes and ears” of the resistance movement.15 In addition to these positions, the initial organizational structure of the Commission also included a director of public relations. This less-

13

Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 6. 14

Ibid., 8.

15

Ibid., 6-10.



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clandestine position was first filled by Hal DeCell, the editor of the Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. Laura Walton, whose doctoral dissertation explored the public relations efforts of the Sovereignty Commission and Citizens’ Council, writes that DeCell’s position “was created in the belief that the big factor in the preservation of Mississippi’s customs and its sovereignty as a state is the need to win friends and create a better understanding of the true state of affairs existing in Mississippi among citizens and states outside the South.”16 From the beginning, DeCell set out to “combat the animosities against the state” created within the national press and focused the Commission’s attention on winning the public relations battle above the Mason-Dixon line.17 This was accomplished in multiple ways, including a speakers bureau that would send representatives from the organization throughout the country as well as the production and distribution of a short film focusing on the positive state of race relations in Mississippi. The importance of public relations and public opinion was also evident in the actions and strategies of the Citizens’ Council. From the organization’s founding in the summer of 1954, public opinion was viewed as a primary means to challenge the Brown ruling and perhaps even convince the Supreme Court to reverse the decision. Efforts were made not only to maintain the support of southerners, but also to win the support of northern audiences as well. Walton writes, “The information disseminated within ... the South was meant to both inform individuals of the situation and motivate them to action. Information sent to those outside the South was intended to inform individuals with the hope of ‘correcting’ the negative portrayal of southern race relations.”18 These goals were accomplished through two primary official means: The Citizens’ Council, a monthly newspaper, and the organization’s television program, the Citizens’ Council “Forum.” The

16

Laura Walton, “Segregationist Spin: The Use of Public Relations by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and the White Citizens' Council, 1954-1973” (doctoral dissertation, Mississippi State University, 2006), 97. 17

Katagiri, 9.

18

Walton, 52, 63.



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Citizens’ Council began publication in October 1955 and initially borrowed heavily from pro-segregationist journalists such as Charleston’s Tom Waring and Jackson’s Tom Ethridge. However, as time passed, the newspaper produced its own original material, but its focus and tone in terms of segregation remained the same. McMillen writes, “The Citizens’ Council in column and cartoon assailed southern apathy and moderation and recounted stories of perfidious white northern liberals and diseased, depraved, and crime-prone Negroes.”19 The Citizens’ Council newspaper reached an average circulation of 40,000 before being renamed The Citizen in 1961 and transitioning into a magazine format. As The Citizen, it continued to be published until the Citizens’ Council was officially dissolved.20 The Citizens’ Council “Forum” debuted in 1957 as a 15-minute telecast on Jackson, Mississippi’s WLBT-TV. It would eventually be regularly shown on 12 television stations in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia, as well as be broadcast over more than 50 radio stations in the South.21 By 1961, Citizens’ Council director and “Forum” producer William Simmons claimed the program had been shown or heard at some point on more than 300 radio or television stations in 41 states.22 The program featured interviews with more than 60 U.S. congressmen and dealt with issues ranging from integration to the spread of communism. Although the Citizens’ Council was a non-government organization, the support its propaganda campaigns received illustrates the value certain southern politicians and leaders placed on its efforts. In 1961, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett approved a State Sovereignty Commission request to provide funding for the Citizens’ Council’s television and radio programming. The funding included $20,000 up front and a $5,000 monthly stipend thereafter. Walton

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19

Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 37.

20

Ibid., 37.

21

Ibid., 38.

22

Steven D. Classen, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 37.



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writes, “Reaching a total of nearly $200,000, the monetary assistance helped the Citizens’ Council spread the news of resistance to civil rights efforts making its electronic media tactics a key tool in the propaganda campaign of both organizations.”23 Furthermore, to reduce the overall cost of the programming, Mississippi Senator James Eastland and Representative John Bell Williams arranged for the “Forum” to be produced at cost in government recording studios intended for use by congressmen to communicate with their constituencies from Washington.24 The propaganda efforts of the Citizens’ Council and Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission demonstrate the importance segregationists placed not only on galvanizing resistance in the South but also on cultivating support and deflecting criticism outside of the region. In the southern press, they would find many welcome and willing allies. The Southern Press

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The expectations of local journalists in the South during the civil rights movement were simple: protect the status quo and uphold the southern way of life. The press had long served as a constant reminder that African Americans were second-class citizens who did not deserve the rights or attention of the white public. Lee Blackwell, a reporter for the African-American Chicago Daily Defender, observed in 1963, “If you read only the regular [white] press, you’d think Negroes were never born, never got married, and didn’t die.”25 Typically African Americans were excluded from mainstream newspapers, save the negative press that appeared when a black citizen allegedly was involved in a crime. On the rare occasion that African Americans were included, courtesy titles such as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” were rarely used. Roger M. Williams, who served as Time-Life bureau chief in Atlanta during the movement, observed in a 1967 article for the Columbia Journalism Review, “For generations Negroes have been treated in one

23

Walton, 175.

24

McMillen, 39.

25

Robert Hooker. “Race and the News Media in Mississippi, 1962-1964” (Master’s thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1971), 77.



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of two ways by Southern papers – ignored, as if they weren’t there at all, or given separate ‘Negro editions.’”26 During the civil rights movement, the majority of the mainstream southern press served as an asset to civil rights opposition groups, providing citizens with a skewed perspective on the movement. In Mississippi, James Silver described the press as standing “vigilant guard over the racial, economic, political, and religious orthodoxy of the state.”27 The failings of the mainstream southern media effectively denied African Americans access to a public forum, and left the majority of southern citizens inundated with press coverage that often served as anti-civil rights propaganda. Many newspapers did not require motivation to play such a role, with several editors having direct ties to the Citizens’ Council or other racist organizations. The most notorious example of this occurred in the newspapers run by the Hederman family of Jackson, Mississippi. The Hedermans, described in the Columbia Journalism Review as “staunch Southern Baptists and political conservatives, [who] epitomize the white power structure in Mississippi,” owned both the Daily News and Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, the two largest papers in the state.28 With circulations of over 40,000 each, the two papers held considerable clout in both Mississippi and the South. James Silver went so far as to assert that the Hederman press dominated Mississippi thought. He writes, “To read the Hederman press day after day is to understand what the people of the state believe and are prepared to defend.”29 Although the Hederman family held final editorial control, the primary segregationist voices of the papers were editors Frederick Sullens and James Ward of

26

Roger Williams, “Newspapers in the South,” Columbia Journalism Review 6 (Summer 1967): 30. 27

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James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966), 30.

28

Edwin N. Williams, “Dimeout in Jackson,” Columbia Journalism Review 8 (Summer 1970): 58, quoted in Susan Weill, “African Americans and the WhiteOwned Mississippi Press: An Analysis of Photo Coverage from 1944 to 1984,” paper submitted to 1994 competition of the American Journalism Historians Association, 7. 29

Silver, 30.



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the Daily News and columnist Tom Etheridge of the Clarion-Ledger. The beliefs of both the Hedermans and their writers were readily apparent in the newspapers’ coverage of the civil rights movement. In reference to the quality of this coverage, Williams described the Jackson papers as “quite possibly the worst metropolitan papers in the United States.”30 The Hederman papers made no secret of their support of segregationist organizations such as the Citizens’ Council, going so far as to urge their readers to join. According to an aptly titled September 1957 Clarion-Ledger editorial, “Join the Citizens Council,” the organization was described as the “best forward step” toward preparing for the “inevitable battle with the evil forces of integration.”31 It was editorials such as this that would lead some to call the Hederman papers the “voice of the Citizens’ Council.” Such support did not go unnoticed or unrewarded. The Citizens’ Council honored the Hederman papers for their fair reporting on the organization and presented Sullens with a plaque for his defense of the “southern way of life.”32 The segregationist tone of the Hederman press was echoed in newspapers throughout the South, with many standing in direct opposition to civil rights efforts. Of the 1954 Brown decision, Andrews Harmon, editor of the Hattiesburg American, encouraged unity against the court’s ruling, writing, “If all of the people of Mississippi want to retain racial segregation in the public schools they can do it simply by standing together … No power on earth can compel more than a million people to do something that is against the law of God and nature.”33 After Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett’s declaration that James Meredith, or any African American for that matter, would



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30

David R. Davies and Judy Smith, “Jimmy Ward and the Jackson Daily News,” in in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 106; R. Williams, 26.

31

“Join the Citizens Council,” Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), September 1957.

32

Walton, 75.

33

Susan M. Weill, “Mississippi’s Daily Press in Three Crises,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 24-27.



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“never” be admitted to the state’s public schools, the majority of the state’s editors gave him their full support.34 Ira Harkey recalls, “Barnett’s … address was received with bloodthirsty whoops and hollers by the Mississippi press. … Most editors believed, and they so convinced the whites, that if we absolutely refused to admit Meredith to Old Miss, he would go away and Kennedy and the federal government would back down.”35 This sentiment was not unique to the Mississippi press. Throughout the movement, high profile journalists such as Kilpatrick, Waring, and John Temple Graves voiced their support of segregation and served as valuable spokesmen for the segregationist cause. However, the relationship between the southern press and leaders of massive resistance went beyond a shared set of opinions on the Brown ruling and desegregation. Journalists and editors often allowed their papers to be directly used as propaganda machines for segregationist organizations such as the Citizens’ Council. One such instance occurred in March 1959 after Citizens’ Council founder Robert Patterson contacted Tom Waring regarding a strategy to infiltrate the northern press with stories that would present the South in a more favorable light. Upon offering his assistance, Waring organized a secret meeting between openly segregationist southern editors at the Henry Grady Hotel in Atlanta. The May 6, 1959, meeting was attended by a total of nine editors, traveling from Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama. However, despite Patterson’s involvement, by orders of Waring, members of the Citizens’ Council were not present at the meeting itself.36 In addition to agreeing to share feature stories and arrange speaking engagements at press conventions, the editors also moved forward with a plan to pressure the wire services for more coverage of

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34

Ibid., 32.

35

Ira B. Harkey, The Smell of Burning Crosses: An Autobiography of a Mississippi Newspaper Man (Jacksonville, IL: Harris-Wolfe & Company, 1967), 133. 36

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), 216-218.



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racial strife and unrest in the North. The plan was put into action after a story broke of a 14-year-old girl being raped by an African American while five others looked on. The story was initially noticed by Shreveport, Louisiana, editor George Shannon, who had attended the Atlanta meeting. Shannon immediately began sending requests to The Associated Press to provide full coverage of the story and any subsequent developments. Shannon’s requests were followed by others from the conspiring editors, and a story eventually appeared on the national wire later that day. Although the editors were unhappy that the race of the alleged attackers and onlookers had not been a central component of the story, the effort was still considered a success both by Waring and Patterson. In a letter to Waring, Patterson congratulated the Charleston editor and the “Atlanta Nine,” writing, “The needling done by you and others over the past months and years is bearing fruit. If the Northern press continues to give out race and the details of these Northern rape cases, you are going to see a change in public opinion in the North.”37 Although plans were proposed to continue the editors’ efforts, including hiring a major public relations firm to “promote the southern viewpoint through advertising, media exposure, a speakers’ bureau, and placement of news articles in national publications,” the enthusiasm and efforts of the editors died out. Despite Waring’s attempts, the work of the Atlanta Nine did not move forward. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission also sought to covertly utilize the mainstream media for its benefit. This occurred both through outright requests for newspapers to kill stories as well as efforts to incorporate Sovereignty Commission-produced materials into various publications across the country.38 The Sovereignty Commission commonly wrote editorials for the U.S. Press Association, which provided over 3,000 newspapers access to editorials from around the nation.39 Through a connection within the Association, Sovereignty

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37

Ibid., 218-220.

38

Gregory C. Crofton, “Defending Segregation: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and the Press” (master’s thesis, University of Mississippi, 2000), 67, 88. 39

James Dickerson, Dixie’s Dirty Secret: The True Story of How the Government, the Media, and the Mob Conspired to Combat Integration and the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1988), 126.



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Commission Public Relations Director Earle Johnston was able to publish materials without them being attributed to the organization. On one occasion, a Sovereignty Commission editorial appeared in at least 33 papers across the country in locations ranging from South Dakota and Montana all the way to New Jersey.40 Furthermore, this allowed southern papers like the Jackson Daily News to reprint the editorials and attribute them to non-southern media outlets, strengthening the argument that the South was not alone in her opinions on issues of civil rights and race.41 The combined effect of massive resistance propaganda efforts and the willing cooperation of many prominent southern journalists provided a significant platform for the segregationist cause. Whether working separately or in tandem, these information outlets targeted both the South and North with messages meant to protect the southern way of life. Using multiple southern myths and arguments, they propagated the case for segregation and massive resistance.

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THE CASE FOR MASSIVE RESISTANCE Just as white southerners could not be lumped into one homogenous group opposed to desegregation, the arguments to maintain the southern way of life were just as varied. Segregationist leaders utilized a variety of southern myths and rationale, both traditional and novel, to wage attacks against everything from the values of integration as a whole to the powers and intent of the federal government and civil rights movement. Arguments also varied in their target audience. In certain cases, segregationist leaders sought to primarily galvanize southern support for massive resistance through arguments cultivating fear not only of integration but also of the threat outside influences posed to the South. For many, desegregation and the civil rights movement were contemporary reminders of the longstanding victimization of the region at the hands of outside influences. In other instances, the defense of the southern way of life was aimed at a broader national audience as segregationists sought to not only utilize

40

Earle Johnston to W.D. Rayfield, 24 January 1966, Paul B. Johnson Family Papers, University of Southern Mississippi McCain Library and Archives.

41

Dickerson, 46, 125-126.



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constitutional and legal means to discredit the Supreme Court’s attempt to change the South, but to dispel arguments that race relations in the South were in any need of change at all. .

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The Ideology of White Supremacy Despite the diversity in segregationist arguments, at the core was a defense of a society where white supremacy, which Francis Wilhoit described as the basic social philosophy of massive resistance, reigned at the expense of African-American subjugation.42 As such, multiple studies of the period have begun with white supremacy as the foundation of massive resistance. Neil McMillen describes white supremacy as the “primary ideology” of the Citizens’ Council, writing, “Like Negrophobes of an earlier age the Councilors rested their case for white dominance on the postulate that Negroes were inherently different from Caucasians and that this difference, this hereditary inferiority, rendered them unsuitable for free association with white society.”43 As had been the case a century before, this postulate was defended and supported through a variety of means, ranging from scientific and anthropological evidence “proving” the superiority of the white race to biblical references demonstrating that segregation was not only natural but divinely ordained. The reliance on the argument of white supremacy is apparent throughout segregationist propaganda and literature. Aside from Tom Brady’s Black Monday, perhaps the best-known and most celebrated work from the period is Carleton Putnam’s 1961 book, Race and Reason, which utilized scientific racism to defend the superiority of whites just as many southerners had done in the midst of the abolitionist movement. Although Putnam was in no way a legitimate scientist or anthropologist, having worked only as an airline executive during his career, he held a classification just as valuable during this period of regional conflict. He was born and raised a northerner, and thus provided an “unbiased” opinion on white supremacy. As such, Putnam emerged as a northern proponent of the southern way of life

42

Francis Wilhoit, The Politics of Massive Resistance (New York: G. Braziller, 1973), 58.

43

McMillen, 161.



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and was heralded by segregationist organizations and fully endorsed by leaders such as Senators Strom Thurmond and Harry Byrd, as well as outspoken journalists such as Tom Waring and John Temple Graves. The state of Mississippi even went so far as to declare October 26, 1961, as “Race and Reason Day in Mississippi.” Overall, the book would sell 60,000 copies in its first six months in print and 150,000 copies by 1969.44 However, the argument for white supremacy was not simply illustrated through overt pseudo-scientific evidence, but was the underlying theme in segregationist warnings of the horrors integration would bring. Tales of miscegenation and the crime-ridden integrated cities outside of the South became mainstays in segregationist propaganda. “Integration always meant miscegenation,” McMillen writes, “for by lowering the racial barriers in the public schools, the Supreme Court had opened the floodgates of ‘amalgamation.’”45 More tangible evidence of the dangers of integration was repeatedly illustrated through references to race-driven crime and violence in integrated regions outside of the South. These stories were commonplace in segregationist publications such as The Citizen’s Council and ultimately served a dual purpose. Walton writes, “First, the Council was attempting to shift focus away from the violence occurring in Southern states as the civil rights movement clashed with the organized resistance. Second, these stories were intended to be a warning of what could happen … if resistance was not organized and resilient.”46 The publications of segregationist organizations were not alone in printing these cautionary tales, as they appeared in newspapers throughout the South. For example, a May 31, 1961, Jackson Daily News editorial by Editor James Ward documented the crime and dilapidation found in the New York neighborhood of Morningside Park, an area in which the NAACP and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had offices. The article begins by quoting a New York newspaper’s profile of the neighborhood, reading, “The residents of the

44

McMillen,166-168.

45

Ibid., 184.

46

Walton, 132.



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community wish only to live in peace and safety; but many of them have been the victims of street assaults and now, terror-stricken, they are afraid to leave their homes at night. ... The once-beautiful Morningside Park is now looked upon by residents as a jungle.” It was this “way of life,” the editorial commented, that was a direct result of the integration being “forced upon” the South by civil rights activists and the federal government. This outcome, Ward concluded, was exactly the reason southerners were fighting to save segregation and insisting on “maintaining established, tested social customs.”47 The Myth of States’ Rights Despite the salience of the white supremacy argument in the South, the Supreme Court’s intervention in the southern way of life required a segregationist response that went beyond simple racial ideology. For segregationists, the decision for integration was not simply in conflict with laws of nature and God, but also those established by the United States Constitution. Although the specific arguments for this proposition varied, the central focus remained the same: Tzhe Supreme Court and federal government did not have the legal right to infringe upon the choice of individual states to maintain segregated public facilities.48 This argument for states’ rights offered segregationists a more intellectual and respectable defense than simply espousing philosophies of white supremacy, and it therefore served as the public foundation for massive resistance. Despite many southerners’ belief in the constitutional validity of their states’ rights defense, Bartley writes the argument functioned primarily “as a cloak for white supremacy and economic favoritism and an instrument for blunting the threat of an open society.”49 However, on the surface, it allowed massive resistance to be portrayed not simply as a countermovement founded on issues of

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47

James M. Ward, “Here Is Why We Guard Those Southern Customs,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), 31 May 1961. 48

Wilhoit, 63-70.

49

Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 241.



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race, but rather as a crusade to protect true southern, and even American, freedoms and values. The states’ rights argument was reflected throughout segregationist propaganda and journalism. For example, the Citizens’ Council “Forum” often closed with an overt states’ rights warning to viewers. One such closing announcement cautioned, “We Americans are threatened with the loss of many of our hard won freedoms: The historic right of the individual to choose his associates without the prodding of federal bayonets; and the right of each citizen to make up his mind in the American way, free from propaganda.”50 Susan Weill’s 2001 examination of the Mississippi daily press found a similar tone in the media’s coverage of the James Meredith controversy at Ole Miss, during which the press as an aggregate rejected the desegregation of the state’s universities. Weill writes, “The editorial consensus in opposition to the federally mandated desegregation of Ole Miss was the ‘us against them’ theme,” using “the preservation of the traditional Southern way of life and states’ rights” as rationalization.51 Perhaps the best-known example of the states’ rights argument in mainstream southern journalism appeared in the Richmond News Leader. Editor James J. Kilpatrick was a diehard proponent of interposition and frequently used his newspaper as a platform to promote the states’ rights strategy for preventing integration. On November 21, 1955, Kilpatrick began a six-week series of “lengthy, pedantic and passionate editorials that declared the right and obligation of the individual states to stand between the people and their federal government in order to take back power seized unconstitutionally from the states.”52 The interposition series frequently addressed and reprinted speeches, acts and resolutions dating back to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, in which the states interposed themselves in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts.53 According to a collection of editorial reprints published by the News Leader soon

50

Classen, 37.

51

Susan Weill, In a Madhouse’s Din: Civil Rights Coverage by Mississippi’s Daily Press, 1948-1968 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 92. 52

Roberts and Klibanoff, 109.

53

Ibid., 117.



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after the series originally appeared, Kilpatrick’s interposition campaign “succeeded phenomenally,” noting interposition had become a household word and encouraging other states to “ponder soberly the grave Constitutional problem” at hand.54 As discussed, six states would eventually adopt interposition resolutions and the argument of states’ rights would remain a dominant theme in massive resistance mythology throughout the movement. Roberts and Klibanoff write, “The concept of interposition, with its scholarly masquerade, had a profound impact. Kilpatrick, by propagating a whole vernacular to serve the culture of massive resistance—interposition, nullification, states’ rights, state sovereignty—provided an intellectual shield for nearly every racist action and reaction in the coming years.”55 The Myth of Separate but Equal

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Although white supremacy and states’ rights represent the two primary defenses of segregation, the argument for massive resistance cannot be fully understood apart from the overarching southern myth of separate but equal. As discussed, since its endorsement in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, the concept of separate but equal had served to dissuade any need for outside intervention in the South. According to segregationists, the ruling allowed blacks and whites in the South to live harmoniously, although separate, and maintain race relations to which the integrated cities of the North could only hope to aspire. Inherent in this argument was not only the assumption that African Americans enjoyed the same rights, freedoms and privileges of white southerners, but that they were ultimately satisfied with their quality of life in the South. If the nation could be convinced of this, it was believed, the federal intervention stemming from the Brown ruling would not only be seen as unnecessary but would also be opposed by the American public. The separate but equal argument would be manifested in many ways, but ultimately was founded on the belief that neither blacks nor whites in the South wanted change.

54

“Interposition: Editorials and Editorial Page Presentations,” News Leader (Richmond, VA), 1956. 55

Roberts and Klibanoff, 119.



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Dating back to the myths of the loyal, dependent, and appreciative slave, the concept of African-American complacency had long been central to defenses of the southern way of life. The defense of segregation would be no different, and was in many ways just as dependent on conceptions of white supremacy as the pro-slavery arguments. In his overview of the ideology of white supremacy, Wilhoit recalls a specific segregationist proposition, writing, “Knowing their weakness, most blacks neither wish nor seek the end of segregation. They realize it’s a protective device that shields them from the competition of superior whites.”56 However, the arguments that appeared in segregationist propaganda relied less on overt racism and instead emphasized the free choice of African Americans. For example, in pamphlets distributed to northern media outlets and organizations, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission argued African Americans were the original segregationists after reconstruction and were not forcibly separated from whites. This point is supported by references to AfricanAmericans’ decisions during reconstruction to maintain separate educational facilities and even establish new all-black colleges. The pamphlet concludes, “The fact that private institutions for Negroes have been established and voluntarily remain segregated is proof that Negroes prefer the company of their own race in the classrooms.”57 The Citizens’ Council also regularly ran stories documenting statements from African Americans throughout the country that could be construed as supportive of segregation. One such series of articles raised the question directly, running under the headline “Do Negroes Really Want Integration?” The headline was followed by three separate articles reporting on statements from African Americans that left little doubt as to the answer to the question posed. According to The Citizens’ Council, integration was “emphatically” opposed by southern African Americans and was instead being pushed by outsiders and the NAACP.58

56

Wilhoit, 61.

57

Walton, 178.

58

“Do Negroes Really Want Integration?,” The Citizens Council (Winona, MS), September 1959.



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The quality of southern race relations was also an oft-repeated theme in segregationist propaganda throughout the movement. It was believed that pressure to integrate would subside if the nation could only see a true picture of the South. Therefore, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and Citizens’ Council went to great lengths to enlighten the nation to the region’s racial climate. The most publicized propaganda effort of the Sovereignty Commission occurred in October 1956. While attending a convention of the New England Press Association, Sovereignty Commission Public Relations Director Hal DeCell organized a tour of Mississippi for 20 small-town New England newspaper editors and publishers. The purpose of the tour, the Commission would later report, was to “breach the wall of sensational journalism which has stood for so long between the South and a national understanding of its problems.” The Sovereignty Commission believed the South’s portrayal in the North was unfair and incorrect and wanted these journalists to see the situation first hand, and according to DeCell, the state had “nothing to cover up.” The tour consisted of a visit to the Mississippi Delta, the all-black town of Mound Bayou, a steamer trip down the Mississippi, and finally a two-day weekend stay in Biloxi. While a few of the journalists concluded that integration would never occur, most were not convinced and left with the impression that Mississippians were simply ignoring an obvious problem. Yet the Commission publicly viewed the effort as a success.59 The Sovereignty Commission’s efforts continued into the 1960s with the establishment of a speakers bureau and ultimately the 1960 production of A Message from Mississippi, a 29-minute film shot and set in Public Relations Director Earle Johnston’s hometown of Forest, Mississippi. The speakers bureau, which included state officials, legislators, judges, attorneys, newspaper editors, and businesspeople, was not meant to convert audiences to segregationist thinking but rather to provide a “better understanding” of the situation in Mississippi. Over the course of the next three years, the bureau sent speakers to 120 engagements throughout the nation.60 Although the speakers bureau only utilized an African American on one occasion, the Sovereignty Commission film featured interviews with both white and black

59

Katagiri, 15-16.

60

Katagiri, 81.



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citizens, attempting to convey the “message that Forest was an ideal, racially segregated community, and that both blacks and whites loved ‘the Mississippi way of life.’”61 Over the next several years, the film was distributed throughout the North, with showings in 43 cities and 27 states outside of Mississippi.62 The Myth of the Noble but Embattled South Despite segregationists’ efforts to portray southern African Americans as content with social conditions in the South, massive resistance leaders could not overlook the growing racial unrest in the region. However, to explain the developing civil rights movement and demands for desegregation, southern leaders did not look within the South itself, but rather at nefarious outside forces and influences. Clive Webb observed this phenomenon in many segregationists’ responses to the sit-in protests of the early 1960s, writing, “Deluded by their own propaganda about the mutual trust and understanding between black and white southerners, they could not initially comprehend the indigenous nature of the student revolt.”63 Regardless of how the unrest would be explained, segregationists insisted the source was not internal to the South. Throughout massive resistance rhetoric and propaganda, the theme of “outside agitators” emerged, placing blame for the racial unrest not on whites or blacks in the South, but rather on interlopers from the North, and at times as far away as Moscow. Bolstered by white supremacy arguments citing scientific and biblical defenses of segregation, leaders of massive resistance portrayed the South as being vilified and attacked only for upholding what was right by the laws of nature and God. In his review of Citizens’ Council propaganda pamphlets, George Lewis concludes:

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61

Ken Lawrence, “Mississippi Spies,” Southern Exposure 9 (Fall 1981), 82-83.

62

Katagiri, 84.

63

Clive Webb, “Breaching the Wall of Resistance: White Southern Reactions to the Sit-ins,” in From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, ed. Iwan W. Morgan, and Philip Davies (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 59. Article cited hereafter as “Breaching the Wall.”



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Segregationists argued that they were being persecuted for what was not in fact a sectional problem at all, but rather was a localized outgrowth of an international battle against a godless, un-American foe. It was therefore outside agitators – who at best had little understanding of the South’s peculiar historical practices and who at worst were paid members of the global communist conspiracy – that were most intent upon fomenting racial hatred in the region.64

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Therefore, according to segregationists, the South was in many ways the victim of an invasion. This characterization of the civil rights struggle served a dual purpose. It first allowed southerners to deflect criticism of their way of life, maintaining the illusion of separate but equal and African-American complacency, but also, much like the plantation myth a century before, it worked to galvanize southern whites for a collective defense of their cherished values and customs. For segregationists, the “southern way of life” constituted much more than simply the separation of the races and states’ rights. The South was often idealized as a bastion of conservatism, purity, freedom, and an American value system that had been lost by much of the nation. Throughout massive resistance, segregationists worked to capitalize on these romantic notions of the South and its pre-existing sectional identity.65 As the last line of defense for true American values, the South could not capitulate to the demands and pressures of outside agitators, but had to stand strong in defense of states’ rights, freedom, and ultimately segregation. This characterization proved extremely effective for proponents of massive resistance. Michael Klarman writes, “As a general rule, external threats tend to unify a polity. ... Historically, white Southerners were especially sensitive to outside interference with their ‘way of life.’”66 Therefore, it was relatively easy for opposition leaders to

64

Lewis, The White Response, 121.

65

Bartley, 17.

66

Michael Klarman, “Why Massive Resistance,” in Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, ed. Clive Webb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 34.



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capitalize on this sensitivity and “play on the Southern fear of ‘Northern liberals,’ the ‘NAACP from New York,’ and as the Cold War grew hotter and hotter in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘the Commies.’”67 These fears were reflected and perpetuated by opposition leaders, politicians, and throughout segregationist propaganda. The concern only grew as civil rights efforts progressed after the Brown ruling, uniting the white South, according to Hodding Carter III, “as it had not been united since the Civil War.”68 Events such as the use of federal troops to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957 and segregationists’ violent clashes with U.S. marshals at Ole Miss in 1962 perpetuated massive resistance claims that the South was under attack. Under these conditions, an “us against them” mentality developed and flourished in the civil rights South, leaving little room for middle ground. Those who stood anywhere but in staunch support of the southern way of life were often viewed with suspicion and condemned. The Myth of the Solid South and the Suppression of Dissent

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A final myth promoted by leaders of massive resistance was the concept of the solid South. Although this myth served as a defense of segregation in its own right, suggesting that forced integration was neither wanted nor would be tolerated by white southerners, it also served as an endorsement of the collective myths and arguments of the massive resistance movement. Therefore, according to the myth of the solid South, arguments concerning white supremacy, African-American complacency, and outside agitators were not simply the fictional creations of extremist rhetoric, but represented the beliefs and understandings of the South as a whole. From the early stages of the resistance movement’s development, the need for an organized South-wide response to the Brown ruling was emphasized. Books such as Brady’s Black Monday and the formation of the Citizens’ Councils were intended to spur this unity and provide

67

Stuart W. Towns, “We Want Our Freedom”: Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 232. 68

Hodding Carter, The South Strikes Back (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1959), 17.



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southerners with a means to collectively resist desegregation and voice their opposition to the Supreme Court ruling. Bartley writes, “The maintenance of white supremacy required not only the efforts of political leaders but also a united public led by the Citizens’ Councils.”69 In its first annual report in 1955, the Citizens’ Council stressed the power of a united front, telling readers, “Forty million white Southerners, or a fraction thereof if properly organized, can be a power in this Nation, but they must be thoroughly organized…”70 Maintaining the appearance of a solid front not only sent a message to civil rights leaders, but it also allowed southern politicians to operate in a position of power when dealing with the federal government. Antiintegration rhetoric and policies became much more substantive when it appeared these leaders had the full support of their constituencies.71 As discussed, the propaganda campaigns put forth by the Citizens’ Council and other groups were intended in part to galvanize southern opposition and create this united front. In addition to utilizing arguments such as white supremacy and African-American complacency, as well as placing the blame for racial unrest on communists and other outside agitators, segregationist propaganda ultimately defined what it truly meant to be a southerner. Lewis writes that segregationists were “particularly keen to hand their many supporters what amounted to be a ready-made definition of southern identity, in an attempt to bring a veneer of homogeneity to the many strands of the region’s resistance effort.”72 Journalist William Peters captured the degree of uniformity in the typical segregationist argument in his 1959 book, The Southern Temper. Peters writes:

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The argument generally begins with the assertion that the Supreme Court has usurped the rights of the several states, proceeds to a glorification of “the Southern way of life,” continues into an exposition of how well Southern whites and Negroes got along under segregation until “outsiders and

69

Bartley, 191.

70

McMillen, 49.

71

Wilhoit, 160.

72

Lewis, The White Response, 10.



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Communists” began stirring up trouble, and ends on a warning to “look at what happened to Portugal, Egypt, and Brazil—all major world powers until racial intermarriage turned them into nations of backward, lazy, ignorant people.” Peters attributes this uniformity to the litany of segregationist slogans and rationalizations to which southerners were exposed, comparing this typical response to a classroom of children who have memorized the same poem and then recite it one after the other.73 However, despite the majority opposition to the Brown ruling, what must be understood is that the South was not a homogenous group of citizens. Bartley estimates that only 25 percent of southerners would have been classified as “bitter-end” segregationists who would willingly use force to prevent social change. Alternatively, he estimates that one-third were moderates or liberals who were either not totally committed to segregation or actually favored integration. The remaining segment of the population was committed to “strict segregation,” but not necessarily to massive resistance, and could possibly have been swayed to oppose the more extremist strategies that would eventually develop.74 Francis Wilhoit proposed a similar breakdown in his 1973 examination of the politics behind massive resistance. Wilhoit argues that at the time of Brown ruling southerners could be divided into three categories: traditionalists, opportunists and zealots. Traditionalists, Wilhoit writes, sought simply to avoid rocking the boat and would resist desegregation only when it appeared there was no other alternative. The second group, opportunists, lacked a deep-seated fear and hatred of African Americans, but jumped on the massive resistance bandwagon when it was beneficial to them or became clear this was “necessary to avoid having their loyalty to the southern way of life impugned.” Finally, there were the zealots, the “uncritical defenders of the status quo” who acted “from a blazing certitude of their own virtue and of the total depravity of their opponents.” Of the three groups, Wilhoit estimated that most southerners, including the majority of

73

William Peters, Southern Temper (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1959), 206.

74

Bartley, 16.



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journalists, initially fell into the category of traditionalists. However, in the face of the growing extremism and the resulting fear of the “zealots’ reign of terror,” Wilhoit concludes most of these traditionalists began to fall into the categories of opportunists and zealots by 1956.75 Although Wilhoit’s and Bartley’s categorizations differ in some respects, and may oversimplify the southern response to the civil rights movement, what is clear is that racist extremism was not necessarily the norm at the time of the Brown ruling. However, in the months and years that followed the Brown decision, extremists and zealots began to sway, and in some cases force, southerners away from any sense of tolerance and moderation. Or, at the very least, the willingness to voice support of such tolerance and moderation. Jason Sokol argues against using categorizations such as those employed by Wilhoit and Bartley, but still captures the impact of extremism on the majority of the southern population. He writes, “Most white southerners identified neither with the civil rights movement nor with its violent resisters. They were fearful, silent, and often inert.”76 While hegemony is ideally founded upon the establishment of consensus, hegemonic crises such as the civil rights movement can lead to an increased reliance on force and domination. Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts write:

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When the temporary balance of the relations of class forces is upset and new forces emerge, old forces run through their repertoires of domination. Such moments signal, not necessarily a revolutionary conjunction nor the collapse of the state, but rather the coming of “iron times.” It does not follow either that the “normal” mechanisms of the state are abrogated. But class domination will be exercised, in such moments, through a modification in the modes of hegemony; and one of the principal ways in which this is registered is in

75

Wilhoit, 119-121.

76

Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1954-1975 (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2006), 4.



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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression terms of a tilt in the operation of the state away from consent towards the pole of coercion.77

With the Brown ruling and civil rights activists’ eventual grass roots push for integration and equal rights, both white supremacy and the ostensible consensus to racial separation were threatened, leading to overt force and coercion that would challenge the freedoms of all southerners regardless of race. In the effort to promote the appearance of the solid South, segregationists not only used emotional and fear-based appeals to galvanize southern support, but also sought to silence those southerners who questioned their arguments and methods. Bartley writes, “Efforts to silence internal dissent were a part of the quest for solidarity. ... The resistance attempted to systematize southern society by stamping out dissent and organizing the entire regional community in defense of the ‘southern way of life.’”78 Within this environment, any acceptable middle ground on the race issue disappeared. The push for the solid South further perpetuated the region’s “us against them” mentality, but rather than focusing on external influences and outside agitators, the emphasis on southern unity often targeted those from within the region. C. Van Woodward writes, “All over the South the lights of reason and tolerance began to go out under the resistance demand for conformity. ... A ‘moderate’ became a man who dared open his mouth, an ‘extremist’ one who favored eventual compliance, and ‘compliance’ took on the connotations of treason.”79 Those white southerners willing to stand with African-American activists in protest were often specifically targeted by segregationists as their presence threatened the argument “that segregation was only understood by those who grew up

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77

Stuart Hall, J. Clarke, C. Critcher, T. Jeferson, and B. Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Critical Social Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 216. 78

Bartley, 190.

79

C. Van Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 165-166.



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within its complex and peculiar customs.”80 The targeting and criticism of non-conforming white southerners was both reflected as well as perpetuated by segregationist propaganda and journalism. A 1955 Jackson Daily News editorial exemplified the growing polarization in the South in no uncertain terms, writing, “Senator James O. Eastland, Congressman John Bell Williams and Circuit Judge Thomas Brady have issued a call to arms. What are you going to do about it? There is no middle ground. You are either for us or against us. Pick your side.”81 In this environment, moderation from southerners was not simply seen as a difference of opinion but was characterized as a significant threat to the southern way of life. Segregationist propaganda and journalism frequently emphasized the dangers of anything but unadulterated support of massive resistance. A 1961 article in The Citizen reads, “These home-grown moderates, a few of whom exist in every community, pose a more serious threat to our bi-racial social, political and economic structure than all the combined outside forces of racial destruction. They must never be permitted to gain the initiative.”82 The vilification of southern moderates became a central component in segregationist groups’ efforts to maintain the appearance of a solid South. From their inception, racist organizations such as the Citizens’ Councils stressed the importance of suppressing moderate voices. Hodding Carter III writes: With the rise of the Citizens’ Councils came the decline of the Southern liberal. ... The moderate became first an isolated figure, then more and more the subject of comprehensive efforts to silence him. Just as in any area at war, the white South’s majority had no need for respect or tolerance for neighbors who did not believe wholeheartedly in its efforts.

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80

George Lewis, ‘“Complicated Hospitality:’ The Impact of the Sit-ins on the Ideology of Southern Segregationists,” in From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, ed. Iwan W. Morgan, and Philip Davies (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 49. 81

“You’re Either for Us or Against Us,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), 14 December 1955. 82

“We Have a Plan!,” The Citizen, October 1961.



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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression Those who spoke out in opposition were pasted with the labels of “traitor” and “nest-fouler,” “Red” and “nigger lover” and coveter of “Yankee dollars.” The device was greatly effective.83

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The fourth annual report of the Citizens’ Council in 1958 highlighted the segregationist strategy against moderation, writing that as a result of “segregationists’ energetic and skillful work” moderates “have been placed on the defensive, so much that they are scarcely heard in public. There is almost no debate. ... And needless to say, the white man who speaks out directly for prompt integration is virtually a sideshow freak.”84 While the clearly biased source of this assessment should be taken into account, segregationists’ focus on silencing both outright opposition as well as moderation is clear. Taken collectively, these myths demonstrate the rationale behind both segregation as well as massive resistance. They illustrate the multifaceted nature of opposition to the Brown ruling and provide insight into the driving forces behind the South’s response. In addition, the sophisticated public relations efforts of organizations such as the Citizens’ Council and Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission show the importance of propagating and defending these myths within the greater strategy of massive resistance. It is within this context that the experiences of the northern and non-conforming southern media can be understood. Despite segregationists’ best efforts, these myths would be repeatedly challenged within the press. As a result, the media, both southern and northern, became a central target within the greater suppression of dissent and push for conformity. These myths, and the threat the media posed to them, not only help explain why the press was targeted, but also how this targeting occurred. Southern journalists operated in an environment in which the slightest departure from the philosophies and myths of massive resistance could result in their being condemned as unfaithful traitors to the South. Alternatively, the northern press operated within an atmosphere in which outsiders were viewed with suspicion and memories of reconstruction still ran deep.

83

Carter, III, 18.

84

Citizens’ Council 4th Annual Report, July 1958.



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Therefore, in both cases, the myths of massive resistance would serve not only as a valuable commodity segregationists sought to propagate and protect, but also as an effective means to strike down those deemed to threaten these myths and ultimately the southern way of life.



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CHAPTER 4

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The Most Southern Place on Earth

Although the environment of conformity and suppression of dissent impacted southerners from all walks of life, primary targets of segregationist pressures were often opinion leaders and those with access to means of mass communication. During massive resistance, C. Van Woodward writes, “Books were banned, libraries were purged, newspapers were slanted, magazines disappeared from stands, television programs were withheld, films were excluded. Teachers, preachers, and college professors were questioned, harassed, and many were driven from their positions or fled the South.”1 In a situation in which the massive resistance argument was based so heavily on contested myths and assertions, segregationists often targeted individuals and organizations that would fall into the category of Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses. According to Althusser, controlling these outlets of opinion and information is central to the maintenance of state power, and in this case, the power of the white southern establishment. Therefore, it was rare for southerners with any public platform to question or challenge the myths and methods of massive resistance without experiencing some form of backlash. It was in the midst of such pressure for conformity that a minority of southern journalists sacrificed their own personal gain in order to serve as voices of caution, tolerance and morality. They proved to be a chink in the armor of the solid South, promoting reason in a time when emotion seemed to rule the day. James Silver writes that even in a closed society, “There always have been and there always will be

1

C. Van Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 166.

65

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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression

dissenters, doubters who will point to the road not taken. They are the hope of the present and the future, and even when they are wrong, their presence is required if the social order is to avoid intellectual stagnation and to escape the excessive belligerence of totalitarianism.”2 For many Mississippians during the civil rights movement, Hodding Carter, P.D. East, Ira Harkey, and Hazel Brannon Smith served as this beacon of hope. The experiences of these journalists illustrate the most extreme lengths to which segregationists would go to silence dissent. Operating in Mississippi, which served as the bastion for segregationist thought and extremism during massive resistance, these journalists worked in an environment in which responsible leadership was either largely absent or silent in the decade following the Brown ruling. Although these journalists were not all outright integrationists, they provided Mississippi and the South with a moderate’s perspective on both integration as well as rising white extremism. However, in doing so, they called into question many of the assumptions and tactics of massive resistance, exposing not only the flaws of the basic arguments for segregation but also the myth of the solid South. In addition, their writings received notoriety nationwide, further threatening segregationists’ attempts to win support for the massive resistance cause above the Mason-Dixon line. As a result, their “moderation” was met with coordinated segregationist responses that sought to discredit their opinions and silence their voices of dissent. Hodding Carter III recalled, “They targeted the media because anything which could call into question the validity of the segregationist critique was a fundamental danger.”3 Although Hodding Carter Jr. had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for editorials advocating fairer treatment of Japanese Americans after World War II, when it came to the question of desegregation, his record was mixed. Carter, who owned and edited Greenville, Mississippi’s Delta Democrat-Times, was a staunch defender of justice and human rights, but he never went so far as to support the integration of all public schools. After the Brown decision, while many southerners were

2

James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966), 141. 3

Hodding Carter, Author Interview, 18 November 2010.



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calling for outright defiance, Carter urged law and order. Although he acknowledged that southerners were not yet ready for integration, he wrote that the farce of “separate but equal” needed to be replaced “with an honest realization that every American child has the right to an equal education.”4 It was this facet of Carter’s personality that would repeatedly conflict with civil rights opposition groups. Ginger Rudeseal Carter writes that he “wanted all humans of all races to have the rights promised them by the Bill of Rights, and he made this his lifelong platform of his newspapers. Tame as this may seem four decades later, his position went much further than white Mississippians were willing to go in the 1950s and 1960s.”5 Over the course of the civil rights movement, Carter’s criticism of the anti-integration efforts and groups such as the Citizens’ Council prompted the most severe backlash from the organizers of massive resistance. Perhaps his best-known assault on the developing Councils was his 1955 article for Look magazine titled “A Wave of Terror Threatens the South.” The article documented the ongoing rise of the Citizens’ Councils and warned of the groups’ dangerous potential for extremism, including highlighting previous attacks on the organization’s critics. His criticism of the Councils was blunt and straightforward:

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I don’t like the Councils. That is not to say that I am blind to the fears that prompt them or to the dilemma of the South today. What I am sure of is that the Councils’ way is not the right way. It is not American to say that unless you are with me you are in the enemy’s camp; it is not American to deprive or seek to deprive any group of the franchise. It is not American to invoke the doctrine that there is a master race. ... If I were a Negro or a Jew or even a Catholic, I might be even more disturbed, though it

4

Ann Waldron, Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 1993), 235.

5

Ginger Rudeseal Carter, “Hodding Carter Jr., and the Delta Democrat-Times,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 278.



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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression is uncomfortable enough to be labeled simply a “niggerlover.”6

As will be discussed in detail below, this article spurred a coordinated segregationist response. However, Carter would continue to speak out against the Council’s pressures and the threat the organization posed to all southerners regardless of race. He would often do so on a national stage, further drawing attention to the developing extremism in certain areas of the South and the lengths to which segregationists would go to force compliance and defend their way of life. As a result, segregationist leaders and organizations condemned Carter as not only an integrationist but as a scalawag and traitor to the South. Like Carter, Hazel Brannon Smith, owner and editor of the Lexington Advertiser in Lexington, Mississippi, as well as three other smaller newspapers, encouraged calm after the Brown ruling but spoke out in defense of segregation. However, although she wrote that separate schools were in the best interest of both blacks and whites, she took the opportunity to stress the need for justice and equality regardless of race.7 Despite such counter-cultural opinions and a previously turbulent relationship with local law enforcement surrounding her writings on a liquor and gambling ring, Smith considered events occurring two months after the Brown ruling as the true catalyst for her prolonged troubles with the Holmes County legal system and civil rights opposition groups. In July 1954, after Holmes County Sherriff Richard Byrd reportedly shot an unarmed AfricanAmerican man, Smith used her newspaper to chastise both the sheriff as well as the double standard of justice in the South. In an editorial titled “The Law Should Be for All,” she declared, “The laws of America are for everyone—rich and poor, strong and weak, white and black and all the other races that dwell within our land.” She went on to accuse the sheriff of shooting the unarmed man and even called for Copyright © 2013. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

6

Hodding Carter, “A Wave of Terror Threatens the South,” Look, 22 March 1955, 36. Article cited herafter as “Wave.”

7

Arthur J. Kaul, “Hazel Brannon Smith,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 237-241. Hazel Brannon Smith, “Through Hazel Eyes,” Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), May 20, 1954.



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Byrd’s job. A week after the editorial’s publication, Byrd responded with a libel suit seeking $57,000 in damages. The case would eventually be decided in Smith’s favor, but not before a costly legal battle.8 Arthur J. Kaul views Smith’s stand against Byrd as a turning point both in her personal fight for justice as well as the resulting conflict with segregationists, writing, “She had crossed the color line ... and embarked on the new vocation of liberal civil rights advocate.”9 During the following years, Smith’s stand for equal justice regardless of race would bring her into frequent clashes with civil rights opposition groups. She never fully supported integration, a position she stated repeatedly, but consistently spoke out against the extremism of leaders such as Governor Ross Barnett and the pressure tactics used against both blacks and whites by groups such as the Citizens’ Council and Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. She utilized her personal column, “Through Hazel Eyes,” and the Advertiser’s editorial page to draw attention to the dangers “home grown” dictators and “Gestapo” tactics posed to the “personal freedom, peace and security of every living Mississippian.”10 Jan Whitt writes: Hazel Brannon Smith considered her role to be clear-cut. She was not agitating. She was not pushing her readers to espouse social perspectives they were not ready to consider. Instead, her actions were keeping with how she defined the responsibility of a small-town weekly editor: The editor should speak truth to power. The editor should write stories that advocate for the disenfranchised. Her goals were consistent with her Christian beliefs; they were also at the

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8

Hazel Brannon Smith, “The Law Should Be for All,” Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), July 15, 1954.

9

Kaul, 242.

10

Hazel Brannon Smith, “Crusade for Freedom Should be Carried on Abroad,” March 17, 1960; Hazel Brannon Smith, Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), “This Newspaper Protects Your Freedom,” June 20, 1963.



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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression heart of what she perceived to be the reason for media to exist.11

As a result of her stand against extremism, she, too, became a target and endured years of attacks on both her newspapers and her reputation. P.D. East, owner and editor of Petal, Mississippi’s Petal Paper, was perhaps the most idiosyncratic of the southern journalists advocating civil rights. His satirical approach to exposing segregationist flaws garnered as much national attention and acclaim as it did local racist backlash. Like many of the journalists to be discussed here, the attacks waged against P.D. East were not a result of his specifically opposing segregation, but rather his criticism of the injustice and inequality that accompanied the defense of such mandated separation. A 1957 profile of East in The Reporter reads, “He is not so much concerned with integration, which to him is a secondary issue. The basic issue, in East’s view, is whether Mississippi and the rest of the Deep South, in a desperate effort to avoid dealing with the racial problem, will rip out the entire structure of the Constitutional democracy as we understand it.”12 After the Supreme Court’s ruling, East tried to straddle the fence and find middle ground on the issue of segregation. In the months that followed, he published outside material supporting both sides of the argument. By November 1954, as he celebrated a prosperous first year of business with the Petal Paper, his approach had proved successful.13 Yet over time, East’s conscience began to take precedence over the paper’s bottom line and his standing in the community. After the Brown decision, an amendment was introduced in Mississippi that



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11

Jan Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Lanham: University Press of America, 2010), 25. 12

Albert Vorspan, “The Iconoclast of Petal, Mississippi,” The Reporter, 21 March 1957, 34.

13

P.D. East, The Magnolia Jungle: The Life, Times and Education of a Southern Editor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 127. Book cited hereafter as Magnolia Jungle.



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would allow the Legislature to abolish the public school system in the event of forced integration. Proponents of the amendment stated in no uncertain terms that a vote against the measure equated to support for integration, while opponents described the amendment as the first step toward destroying the public school system. At first, as he had done before, East ran stories from both sides of the issue, but eventually found himself printing only those in opposition. He realized that his strategy of fence straddling was unraveling as he was unable to dismiss the injustices of “separate but unequal” that surrounded him.14 On December 16, 1954, the Thursday before the amendment was to be decided at the polls, East made his first editorial stand against the actions of segregationists. East warned that it was simply not sound business “to try to swindle the Supreme Court of the United States,” cautioning that although he did not agree with the Brown decision, he respected it “as the highest court in the nation ... .” The biting wit East would use against massive resistance over the next several years was already apparent in this early dissenting editorial, as he referred to the Mississippi Legislature as “Mississippi’s Brain Department.” He closed the editorial simply stating two things: “We oppose the proposed amendment, and that the greatest thing needed in the Mississippi Brain Department is brains.”15 East almost immediately began losing advertising for his stance. Despite these early repercussions, East attributes a 1956 satirical advertisement for the Citizens’ Council in the Petal Paper as “the greatest single step” toward his persecution.16 In response to word that the Citizens’ Council was forming a chapter in nearby Forest, Mississippi, on March 15 East published one his most famous jabs at segregationist groups, which is now known simply as the “jackass ad.” The satirical full-page advertisement featured a cartoon donkey and encouraged whites to attend the upcoming organizational Council meeting. It listed several advantages of joining the group, including the “freedom to interpret the Constitution of the United States to your own

14

Ibid., 129-131.

15

Ibid., 129-131.

16

P.D. East, “How to be a Man of Distinction,” Harper’s, Jan. 1959, 16. Article cited hereafter as “Man of Distinction.”



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personal advantage” and “freedom from fear of having economic pressure exerted against you.”17 Needless to say, the advertisement caught the attention of the Citizens’ Council and essentially marked the beginning of an extended organized effort to ruin P.D. East. Throughout the civil rights period, East withstood fierce pressure in Mississippi from segregationists, sacrificing his paper’s profits as well as his own health and well-being. Of the four Mississippi journalists discussed here, only Ira Harkey openly supported integration at the time of the Brown ruling.18 He had long been a pioneer in the struggle for racial equality, repeatedly challenging the norms of southern journalism during his career. After purchasing the Pascagoula Chronicle in 1949, Harkey angered local citizens by refusing to use race tags when writing about African Americans. He also began to address African-American women by “Mrs.” or “Ms.” and treated blacks and whites equally in the Chronicle’s news coverage. He differed from other pro-civil rights journalists in that his support for the movement stemmed from his beliefs that blacks and whites were truly equal and not simply out of a defense for equal rights. In a 1949 Chronicle editorial, Harkey declared that his paper would “uphold unfailingly the rights of every man ... whether he be white, black, yellow, green or pastel shades in between. ... We believe that the only classes of people are male and female, good and bad.”19 Although a six-foot cross was burned in Harkey’s yard after he publicly lauded the Supreme Court for its Brown ruling, the Pascagoula Chronicle surprisingly continued to find success and by 1961 had expanded into a daily. It was not until the controversy surrounding James Meredith’s admittance to Ole Miss in 1962 that Harkey felt the full brunt of segregationist force. Up to that point, many Mississippians had been convinced that desegregation could be avoided, or at least postponed for several more years through legal maneuvering.

17

East, Magnolia Jungle, 154-158.

18

David L. Bennett, “Ira Harkey Jr., and the Pascagoula Chronicle,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 177. 19

Ibid., 181-183.



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Meredith’s admittance quickly brought this wishful thinking to a halt and marked a significant swing toward extremism. For months after voicing his support for Meredith, it seemed the entire community of Pascagoula had turned against Harkey. Yet he confronted the opposition head on and continued to express his opinions without restraint, earning him the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. In questioning and critiquing the methods and arguments of massive resistance, these journalists challenged many of the myths upon which segregationists relied. In the discussion that follows, a more detailed exploration of these journalists’ experiences will illustrate the true level of social control sought by segregationists during the period of massive resistance. As demonstrated by these editors’ decisions and ability to dissent, this social control was by no means total. However, in the midst of the ideological battle between white supremacy and racial equality, segregationists sought to silence threats and viewpoints that challenged the myths of massive resistance and ultimately their hegemonic control. This was especially true when opposition came from within what was argued to be the “solid South.” As a result, the same myths that were used to uphold segregation were in many ways utilized to discredit and persecute those brave enough to challenge them. Dissenters were chastised publicly, attacked economically and legally, and forced to live in an environment in which their opinions brought not only the pain of isolation but also the constant fear of retribution.

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DISCREDITING AND DEFAMING THE SOURCE Although many dissenting southerners experienced attacks on their personal background and character during the period of massive resistance, the public nature of the journalists’ dissent drew a much more extreme response. Through propaganda and public statements, segregationists often exploited many of the fears and prejudices they had worked to cultivate in the South, denouncing these moderate journalists as race mixers, scalawags, and even communists. The breadth and organization of the pressure tactics varied, but the general motivation behind them was the same: to discredit the journalists and generate an atmosphere of condemnation that would challenge their roles as both members of the media as well as their own communities.



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Liars, Scalawags and Integrationists The response to Hodding Carter’s 1955 Look magazine article, “A Wave of Terror Threatens the South,” demonstrates the steps segregationists were willing to take to condemn such high profile public critiques. Mississippians responded to Carter’s denunciation of the Citizens’ Council soon after the article’s publication. Columnist Tom Ethridge of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger remarked that the piece had given the state “another black eye” and that it “should delight the Communists, who seize every available propaganda weapon in exaggerating alleged racial tensions in the United States.” Ethridge also expressed his suspicion that northern profit and publicity motivated Carter to take such a stand, a charge that would be directed toward dissenting southern journalists by several segregationist critics through the years.20 To many southerners, Carter had become the equivalent of a modern-day Judas. Less than two weeks after the Look article’s publication, Carter learned that his opinions had even garnered the attention of the state legislature. On April 1, while turkey hunting with friends about 40 miles away from Greenville, he received news that the state legislature had voted 89-19, with 32 lawmakers abstaining, to censure him and deem his comments in Look a lie, and in turn, him a liar. In the debate that preceded the vote, Carter had been described as “a Negro lover and a scalawag, a lying newspaper man, a person who ‘as far as the white people of Mississippi are concerned, should have no rights.’” In the eyes of segregationists, he had sold out the South and the southern way of life for “50,000 pieces of silver.” Carter later wrote that the news was “like being kicked in the stomach by 89 angry jackasses.”21 Despite the ease with which the censure passed, Carter had been defended, including support from Greenville’s two state legislators, Representatives Joe Wroten and Jimmy Robertshaw. When asked by Carter what he thought of the legislative action, Wroten expressed disdain but also hope, responding, “The resolution was abortive thought control by legislation against facts. ... But maybe those venomous attacks on freedom of the press may wake people to the

20

Waldron, 244.

21

Hodding Carter, “The South and I,” Look, 28 June 1955, 74.



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danger of a clandestine government of men.” Joe Blass of Stone County also voted against the censure and affirmed the article’s truth during the debate, noting that he too had felt the Citizens’ Council’s pressure when holding opposing views in the past.22 Carter voiced his response in an editorial printed two days later entitled “Liar by Legislation.” He stated that he stood by his opinions, arguing that the censure only served to add substance to what he had written. Carter showed optimism, but also resolve, writing, “I am hopeful that this fever, like the Ku Kluxism which rose from the same kind of infection will run its course before too long a time. Meanwhile, those 89 character mobbers can go to hell ... and wait there until I back down. They needn’t plan on returning.”23 This clash with legislators would not be his last as leaders continued to use their political power to condemn Carter’s beliefs. Seven years later, in December 1961, Carter endured a less organized attack when comments he made during a speech at Brown University were taken out of context by the segregationist Jackson Daily News. Carter was speaking during a period of widespread violence in McComb, Mississippi, in which fellow-liberal editor Oliver Emmerich and other reporters had been assaulted. During his speech, an audience member asked Carter what he thought should be done in a case where a journalist like Emmerich had been attacked. Carter replied, “If the local police protection isn’t enough, they should call out the National Guard ... and if the guard can’t do it, they should call out the marshals, and if the marshals can’t do it, send in the Marines.”24 The Associated Press story on the speech, which was run by the Daily News, opened with a paragraph that misconstrued Carter’s statement. It read, “The federal government should not hesitate to send U.S. marshals and even troops into Mississippi if more racial violence breaks out there, Hodding Carter ... said Thursday night.” To complicate the matter, the Daily News capitalized on the prevailing

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22

Waldron, 212; Hodding Carter III, The South Strikes Back (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 147. Book cited hereafter as South Strikes Back. 23

Hodding Carter, “Liar by Legislation,” Delta Democrat-Times, April 3, 1955.

24

Waldron, 291.



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southern myth that the South was under attack by external forces, placing the article under the headline “Hodding Carter Urges Force to be Used to Integrate State.” 25 The article spurred outrage in Mississippi and Carter’s newspaper lost 10 percent of its circulation in a matter of only three days after the story broke.26 Carter objected to the headline for two different reasons. First, he was intent on avoiding the label of an integrationist, as he had publicly stated many times that he was not in favor of universal desegregation. Second, he simply did not favor the use of troops. Carter had actually stated this in the speech, saying that true change would only come from the people of Mississippi and not from federal intervention. This statement was accurately reported by the AP, but readers in Jackson seemed unable to look beyond the headline. Even those officials that had access to the speech’s transcript continued to publicly address the matter as if Carter specifically called for troops. For example, Mississippi Secretary of State Heber Ladner, who said he had read the speech multiple times, commented, “To me it is incredible that any Mississippian who really loves this state and the American tradition would advocate as Hodding Carter did the use of federal force in order to deny our people the peace, happiness and tranquility as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.”27 The uproar extended beyond the state’s high-ranking political circles as Carter was also burned in effigy by the citizens of Glen Allan, Mississippi. It was reported that the townspeople gathered in a downpour for 45 minutes to set ablaze a five-foot dummy bearing Carter’s name, along with hundreds of copies of the Delta DemocratTimes. Four days later, 75 citizens in Indianola gathered in support as the mayor and Board of Aldermen voted to censure Carter for his

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25

“Hodding Carter Urges Force to be Used to Integrate State,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), Dec. 6, 1961, 1-68-0-2-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

26

Hodding Carter III, Keynote address given at the Civil Rights and the Press Symposium, Syracuse University, Apr. 25, 2004.

27

“Ladner Says ‘Astounded’ By Carter Speech,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), Dec. 9, 1961, 1-68-0-4-1-1-1, MSSC Records.



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comments.28 In addition, a broadside was printed in the town bearing the original Associated Press article under the heading “Is Hodding Carter In Step?” Below the article was a statement condemning Carter’s comments along with the signatures of 95 residents. The statement read, “With reference to the forgoing news story, we, the undersigned, citizens of Indianola, Sunflower County, Mississippi do hereby publicly repudiate the forgoing statements of Hodding Carter and charge that such statement and views are in no way representative of the responsible people of our community.”29 Carter responded to the outcry with a Delta Democrat-Times editorial, writing that the Daily News was guilty of “dishonest journalism, pure and simple, and a lie.” He argued that the headline bore no resemblance to the facts in the story and emphasized that the final paragraph made it clear that he believed true change would not come from government intervention. The editorial closed with the suggestion that “those who disagree with [Carter’s] belief in this matter also say publicly that they believe uncontrolled lawlessness should prevail if local or state law officials cannot or will not enforce the peace.”30 Sevellon Brown, editor of the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin, and witness to the speech, also released a letter to the press defending Carter in late December. It read, “Mr. Carter most emphatically did not say, imply or even hint that he favored intervention by federal marshals or troops to enforce integration in the South. ... Mr. Carter made perfectly plain his own belief that all-out integration never could be and never should be forced upon the South



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28

“Carter Effigy, Papers Burned At Glen Allan,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), Dec. 9, 1961, 1-68-0-1-1-1-1, MSSC Records; “Editor is Censured By Indianola Board,” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Dec. 13, 1961, 1-68-06-1-1-1, MSSC Records; James Ward, “Oh, Come On, Mr. Carter; We Aren’t That Terrible,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), Dec. 13, 1961, 1-68-0-11-1-1-1, MSSC Records. 29

“Is Hodding Carter In Step,” undated, Hodding Carter and Betty Werlein Carter Papers, Mississippi State University. Collection cited hereafter as Carter Papers. 30

“Carter Charges Daily News Published Lie In Headline,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), Dec. 12, 1961, 1-68-0-6-1-1-1, MSSC Records.



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from without.” Although Brown’s letter was released to the wire services, in a further effort to clear his name, Carter mailed the statement to several thousand people.31 The method of baseless public condemnation was also repeatedly used against Hazel Brannon Smith. In November 1957, her photograph appeared in Ebony magazine, a traditionally African-American publication. The photo accompanied an article entitled “The Plight of Southern White Women,” and was given the caption “U. of Alabama graduate Hazel Brannon Smith edits two crusading Mississippi papers. ... She has campaigned for equal justice for all, regardless of race.”32 The photo, which was taken in 1955 for a Time magazine piece, had been used without Smith’s knowledge. Time was in the practice of providing photos from past issues upon request, but did not allow publication without the approval of the photographer and the subject who had been photographed. In this case, Ebony had not obtained approval from either.33 Upon the magazine’s publication, the Citizens’ Council circulated copies of the article around Holmes County and the state to portray Smith as an integrationist, a claim which she had repeatedly denied. The Council also used the article during its tours of Mississippi high schools as part of a presentation entitled “Integrationists Within Mississippi.” The negative publicity resulted in Smith losing several of her advertisers, which seriously threatened the Lexington Advertiser’s survival. In an attempt to rectify the situation, Smith published both a letter she had written to Time as well as the magazine’s explanation of the mistake. Fortunately, her effort paid off, as she was able to regain some of the lost support.34 Five years later, in December 1962, Smith would again fall victim to an organized segregationist smear after she was observed meeting with representatives from the Mississippi Free Press, an AfricanAmerican newspaper which openly supported integration. On

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31

“Letter from Sevellon Brown,” Dec. 29, 1961, 1-68-0-15-1-1-1, MSSC Records; Waldron, 294. 32

Kaul, 246.

33

John A. Whalen, Maverick Among the Magnolias: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story (Philadelphia: Xlibris Corp., 2000), 107. 34

Carter III, South Strikes Back, 155.



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December 21, a report was filed by Sovereignty Commission investigator A.L. Hopkins and Director Albert Jones documenting a meeting between Smith, her husband, and several African-American men, including Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers. According to the report, the meeting took place on the night of Friday, December 15 at the Jackson office of the Free Press. On January 2, 1962, an affidavit was released to the public describing the meeting between Smith and the others, which had been signed by Jones, Hopkins and Secretary of State Ladner, who served as the notary public. In the days that followed, the Citizens’ Council mailed this affidavit and a copy of the Mississippi Free Press to state legislators, the media and residents of Holmes County, again implying that Smith was working for integration.35 On January 3, Senator T.M. Williams took the floor of the Mississippi Senate to call attention to the affidavit. In his speech he said, “If you read her newspaper you would know why we have this attitude toward her. We are no longer proud of her paper.” He went on to accuse Smith of dictating “the policies of the county,” describing her as “smart, shrewd and—we later found out— scheming.”36 Smith classified the accusations as another attempt by the Council to prevent her from printing her paper in Holmes County. She acknowledged that the meeting took place, but explained that she was only delivering papers to the office. Smith regularly printed the Mississippi Free Press on a contractual basis in her Lexington plant, but assured that she had no involvement with the paper’s content.37 Smith provided a detailed response to the charges in a January 11 editorial, proposing that the attack was likely in retaliation for a December 28 Lexington Advertiser piece in which she compared the Council’s attempts to tell residents of Holmes County what to “think,

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35

“Investigation of Tarl Brooks,” Dec. 21, 1961, -76-0-15-1-1-1, MSSC Records; Affidavit, Jan. 2, 1962, 3-76-0-11-1-1-1, MSSC Records; “Lexington Editor Target of Attack,” State Times (Jackson, MS), Jan. 5, 1962. 36

“Publication of Negro Paper Explored,” Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), Jan. 5, 1962, 7-0-5-2-1-1-1, MSSC Records. 37

“Lexington Editor Attacked By Segregation Supporters,” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Jan. 5, 1962, 1-76-0-28-1-1-1, MSSC Records.



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say and do” to Hitlerism. In her January rebuttal, she wrote that both personal and press freedom were being threatened by the Council’s actions and that a choice needed to be made. Smith writes: The question Holmes County citizens must decide now is whether they want to continue to have a newspaper open to all the people of the county, a newspaper that will honestly protect and defend their right to know, a newspaper that will not bow down to a boss-controlled clique which uses economic pressure, reprisals and intimidations of all kinds to hold an entire county in terror.38 Controversy again surrounded a photograph of Smith the following year when it was used to head a Citizens’ Council circular containing information on leaders of the integration movement. The photograph in question was taken during a mass meeting at the Pearl Street A.M.E. Church in Jackson by a photographer from the Meridian Star, although it was never used in the paper. The gathering, which took place at the onset of racial demonstrations in the city, had been covered by over 40 reporters. Yet the photo focused only on Smith meeting with Reverend Edward King, a white civil rights leader. Below the photo were excerpts from four past Star news stories, which had been taken out of context to give the impression that Smith was involved with the push for integration.39 Three of the four excerpts discussed civil rights leadership, with specific reference to Reverend King’s role as a racial demonstrator. The fourth reported on Smith’s actions at the church meeting, saying that she had been ushered to her seat and later shook

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38

“Through Hazel Eyes,” Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), Dec. 28 1961; “Holmes Editor is Target of Vicious Smear Campaign,” Lexington Advertiser, Jan. 11, 1962, Hazel Brannon Smith Papers, Mississippi State University. Collection cited hereafter as Smith Papers; Hazel Brannon Smith, “Personal And Press Freedom Are At Stake,” Lexington Advertiser, Jan. 11, 1962, Smith Papers.

39

“Paul Tardy Exposed as Key Man in Attack on Smith,” Lexington Advertiser, June, 27, 1963, Smith Papers.



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hands with King and Medgar Evers.40 It did not mention that she was attending as a member of the press. The circular was mailed to residents from the Council office in Greenwood, Mississippi, as well as handed out personally. It was intended to appear that the document had been put together by the Meridian Star, although it was later revealed that it had been the work of the Holmes County Herald, a pro-segregation rival newspaper, and the Citizens’ Council. Apparently, Paul Tardy, editor of the Herald, had purchased the photo of Smith from a staff member of the Meridian Star for $25 in order for it to be used in the circular. 41 Smith addressed the smear campaign in a letter of protest to Star Editor James Skewes, which she printed in the Lexington Advertiser. The letter stated, “The obvious purpose of this actionable circular is a continued effort by the Citizens’ Council and certain supporters of the organization in Lexington ... to destroy me and my business. This attempted smear of me, containing wholly false and malicious implications, is a vicious conspiracy.”42 Unfortunately for moderates like Smith, attempts at such smears would extend beyond simple charges of integrationist leanings. Red Bait If an evil greater than integration existed in the South during the civil rights movement, it was communism. With the nation gripped by the Cold War, the threat of communist infiltration and a subsequent attack on the American way of life was of paramount concern. Although many viewed the racial injustice that plagued the South as detrimental to the country’s fight against communism, segregationists often employed the Cold War anxiety to their advantage. The Citizens’ Council frequently made connections between the communist party and groups it judged to be pro-integration. This included not only organizations such as the NAACP, but even the Supreme Court. Neil

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40

“Excerpts from the Meridian Star,” Circular distributed by the Citizens’ Council, June 1963, 10-35-2-15-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

41

“Paul Tardy Exposed as Key Man in Attack on Smith,” Lexington Advertiser, June 27, 1963, Smith Papers.

42

“Letter from Hazel Brannon Smith to James Skewes,” reprinted in the Lexington Advertiser, June 27, 1963, Smith Papers.



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McMillen writes, “Almost from its inception, Council spokesmen equated the drive for Negro equality with a Marxist plot to destroy America by sapping its Caucasian energies through miscegenation.” 43 In a 1955 speech, Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland declared that the Supreme Court had “responded to a radical, pro-Communist political movement in this country” and that the Brown decision was “dictated by political pressure groups bent upon the destruction of the American system of government, and the mongrelization of the white race.”44 For many southerners, the connection between the communist party and those journalists speaking out against massive resistance was not difficult to make, and it proved to be an easy method of attack. In 1959, Hodding Carter became the target of an investigation of communism by the Mississippi Legislature. On November 18, testimony was given in front of the General Legislative Investigating Committee “to determine to what extent, if any, un-American or subversive activities have been and are now conducted within the state.”45 The hearing reportedly followed months of preliminary investigations, and was centered around the testimony of only one man, Dr. J.B. Matthews of New York, who had previously been part of similar studies involving the U.S. Congress. Carter was among eleven Mississippians Matthews named in the probe. He was implicated for his involvement with the Southern Regional Council, Southern Conference Education Fund and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Although he openly admitted involvement with the Southern Regional Council, Carter denied affiliation with latter two organizations. Matthews explained that being named did not indicate these 11 Mississippians were active communists, but only that the organizations to which they belonged had reportedly been infiltrated.46



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43

Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 195.

44

Ibid.,195.

45

Kenneth Toler, “11 Mississippians Are Linked In Red ‘Infiltrated’ Groups,” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Nov. 19, 1959, 6-7-0-7-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

46

Ibid.



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Despite Matthews’ qualification of his testimony, Carter understandably went on the defensive, calling the investigator a “damned liar.” He continued, “I doubt that any reasonable person who knows me could believe that I am or ever have been connected with any communist, communist-front or other subversive organizations. I have fought such groups all of my adult life.” He then listed his previous and ongoing service to the U.S. government, much of which required security clearance. At the time, he was a member of the National Defense Executive Reserve and was Mississippi’s civilian aide to the secretary of the Army. He went on to argue, “If the Government of my country ... does not view me with suspicion, I cannot be too concerned over the paid testimony of a man who reminds me of what is found in wet places beneath a rotted log. And this goes for those who hired him.”47 Three days following the attack on Carter and the others, a group of citizens from Greenville, including local politicians and several business leaders, spoke out in the editor’s defense. The group released a statement attesting to Carter’s patriotism, honesty and right to differ in opinion. The statement also addressed the pressure tactics that had been used, charging, “We strongly condemn the smear technique by which a man’s good name can be dragged in the mud. And we earnestly hope the recent hearings in Jackson have not set a pattern for the future.”48 Oliver Emmerich also came to Carter’s aid, describing him as a whipping boy. Emmerich writes, “Differences of opinions are essential to growth. But there is a wide difference between the American concept of differing and the use of smear campaign tactics which have characterized the campaigns of countries whose ideologies do not embrace that of individual liberty.”49 One month later, the Mississippi House of Representatives took another swing at Carter when it passed a resolution praising the work

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47

“Communist Links Denied by Carter,” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Nov. 19, 1959, 6-7-0-12-1-1-1, MSSC Records. 48

“Greenville Group Supports Carter,” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Nov. 22, 1959, 6-7-0-36-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

49

Oliver Emmerich, “Smear Campaign Can Hurt Cause of Mississippi, State Times (Jackson, MS), Nov. 28, 1959, 6-7-0-46-1-1-1 MSSC Records.



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that had been done by Matthews and the committee. Carter took the action as a personal attack, writing that “if the moral morons who apparently constitute a perpetual majority of the Mississippi Legislature think they can drive me out of our state by resolution, they have another thing coming.” A small group of legislators did speak out in Carter’s favor.50 Representative Joe Wroten claimed that the resolution essentially gave the Legislature’s approval to the allegations against Carter.51 Representative John French of Panola County was even more to the point, telling legislators that they were “condemning a man for writing what he thinks” and making themselves “look ridiculous” in the process.52 The argument largely fell on deaf ears, as the resolution was adopted 101-10. It would not be the last confrontation Carter would have with Mississippi leaders over alleged communist ties. In late 1960, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission began planning a communist witch hunt of its own, initiating what historian Yasuhiro Katagiri would later call “a desperate search for any evidence that could possibly connect ‘the world communist conspiracy’ with the state’s civil rights movement.” By March 1961, the Commission had conducted over 230 investigations on individuals who could potentially be tied to communism or communist-front organizations. 53 Hodding Carter III discussed the segregationist smear tactics in a November 1961 New York Times Magazine article, writing: Lately, a new weapon has been added to the Council’s arsenal. Professional anti-Communists have been brought into the state, usually under Sovereignty Commission auspices, and while they deal chiefly with the alleged Communist penetration of every facet of American life, they earn their fee

50

“Lawmakers Differ on Dig at Editor,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), Dec. 18, 1959, 6-7-0-53-1-1-1, MSSC Records. Copyright © 2013. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

51

“House Praises Study of Reds,” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Dec. 18, 1959, 6-7-0-51-1-1-1, MSSC Records. 52

“Lawmakers Differ on Dig at Editor,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), Dec. 18, 1959, 6-7-0-53-1-1-1, MSSC Records. 53

Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 88.



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in Mississippi by implying that those who challenge the segregationist line are members of the Communist apparatus. This ... has been effective in neutralizing the Council’s opponents, for Mississippians are no less prone to see Communists behind every demand for change than are many of their fellow Americans.54 Earlier that year, Carter’s father had fallen victim to this type of attack during the speaking tour of professional anti-communist Meyers G. Lowman. Lowman, who served as the executive secretary of Circuit Riders Inc., a group originally formed to combat socialism and communism within the Methodist Church, was hired by the Commission for a two-week statewide speaking tour in January and February 1961. 55 Lowman’s speaking engagements were promoted under the title “Subversion Challenges Sovereignty,” and for his services he was paid nearly $4,000.56 The tour’s official purpose was to alert “the people to the Communist threat to the State of Mississippi and to the United States.” Lowman spread his message through numerous meetings at universities and with civic groups, as well as through television interviews. According to Lowman’s presentation, Hodding Carter was part of the communist threat in Mississippi. As in the legislative hearings, the editor was implicated for his alleged connection to the Southern Conference Education Fund.57 Carter commented on the Commission’s efforts in a February 17 editorial, writing, “The information collected by the commission is undigested and raw material, much of it lies and imaginative cock-and-bull stories gathered by men trying to earn their keep. But it is used across the state to smear some men, to squeeze

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54

Hodding Carter III, “Citadel of the Citizens’ Council,” New York Times Magazine, Nov 12, 1961, 126, 1-68-0-7-1-1-1, MSSC Records. 55

Speaking Engagements of Meyers G. Lowman, undated, MSSC Records, 70-3-80-2-1-1.

56

Katagiri, 90-92.

57

Speaking Engagements of Meyers G. Lowman, undated, MSSC Records, 70-3-80-2-1-1.



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others out of their jobs, and to scare others into unthinking adherence to ‘our way of life.’”58 Carter’s observations were supported after Lowman turned his attention to Hazel Brannon Smith in a November 29, 1961, letter to Representative Wilburn Hooker. Lowman addressed the potential for using communist accusations as a weapon against Smith, writing, “Persons interested in opposition or attacks, regarded as funneled or in effect coming through Hazel Brannon Smith, could take a look at some of the situations or facts related to a major newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as the St. Petersburg Times, a man in Baltimore, and an editor in Atlanta.” Lowman specifically mentioned Carl Braden, who was “allegedly a person who was in the employ of a Louisville, Kentucky daily newspaper at the time he was allegedly caught in Communist orbit.” He suggests that Hooker might look to newspaper clippings from the Louisville paper in order to learn what “defense a newspaper might have been expected to make if one of its news room persons was being tried for sedition and had been convicted and given sentence,” presumably to prepare for any effort Smith might make to defend herself against similar charges.59 Lowman also directed Hooker’s attention to Nelson Poynter of the St. Petersburg Times, who was a financial supporter of Smith in the midst of the segregationist economic attacks against her. Lowman described the Times as a paper that had been “observed for many years to hold editorial and news interpretation positions not in parallel in many instances with the American Legion and other patriotic society leadership persons in north Florida.”60 Less than two weeks after Lowman’s tip, the Holmes County Herald unleashed a virulent attack against Poynter’s support of Smith in a story headlined “Lexington Advertiser, Durant News Receiving Assistance From Member of Top Communist Front Organization.” The story reported that Poynter was a member of the National Citizens Political Action Committee, a group

58

Hodding Carter, “Big Brother is Watching,” Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, MS), Feb. 17, 1961, 7-0-3-55-1-1-2, MSSC Records. 59

“Letter from M.G. Lowman to Wilburn Hooker,” Nov. 1, 1961, 3-44A-0-212-1-1, MSSC Records.

60

Ibid.



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that had been found to have communist ties for 25 years by the Committee on Un-American Activities of the United States House of Representatives.61 Although to a lesser extent, P.D. East and Ira Harkey were also subject to communism-based attacks. East dealt with these charges from both the southern press and local citizens. In July 1962, he came under fire in Hattiesburg after Theron Lynd, a voting registrar, was charged in federal court with discriminating against African Americans. Lynd’s supporters quickly identified East as the impetus for the charges, and Lynd himself attacked East during his hearing. The registrar would further his revenge a few months later in October when speaking at a Methodist Men’s Club in Lamar County, saying, “There is one known communist in Hattiesburg, and that’s P.D. East.” Although East considered suing Lynd for libel, his attorney advised against it, leading East to demand either a public apology or proof that the accusations were true. East wrote Lynd, “For a good number of years, Theron, we’ve been acquainted; I cannot believe for one second that you believe such a statement. Needless to say I am given to speculation as to your motive. Such a statement can do and does great damage to the person against whom it’s directed.” East was given neither the apology nor the proof that he requested.62 Communist accusations surfaced again after East received the Lasker Civil Liberties Award and a $1,000 prize from the ACLU in late 1962. In response, Roger Miller, editor of the Petal-Harvey Dispatch, a paper described by East biographer Gary Huey as “virulently racist,” reported that the ACLU was a communist front. As evidence, Miller cited both J. Edgar Hoover and the California Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, among other legislative committees. The following week, Miller also implicated comedian

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61

“Lexington Advertiser, Durant News Receiving Assistance From Member of Top Communist Front Organization,” Holmes County Herald (Lexington, MS), Nov. 30, 1961. 62

Gary Huey, Rebel With a Cause: P.D. East, Southern Liberalism, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1953-1971 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1985), 178; “Letter to Theron Lynd,” Nov. 22, 1962, P.D. East Papers, University of Southern Mississippi. Collection cited hereafter as East Papers – USM.



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Steve Allen as a communist sympathizer, and reported that East and Allen had become friends.63 Similar to East, Harkey was vilified in the southern press upon winning national recognition for his coverage of the civil rights movement. In April 1963, for his writings on the James Meredith crisis at Ole Miss, Harkey received a $500 Sidney Hillman Foundation award, named after the former president of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. In response, the editor of the North Mississippi Herald wrote that the award was one “which approximately 98 per cent of the editors in Mississippi are happy not to receive.” A letter from a Columbus, Mississippi, reader that was printed in the Jackson Daily News elaborated on this, deeming the foundation and its president, Jacob S. Potofsky, as outright communists. The letter, which had been given a generous 11 inches of space in the paper, accused the Foundation, Potofsky and the union of “consciously preparing the overthrow of the capitalistic class and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in America.” The writer agreed with the North Mississippi Herald editor, writing that “anyone should be ashamed to accept such awards.”64 Harkey would soon find that this type of criticism was not unique to the Hillman Foundation. In May 1963, it was announced that Harkey had won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, which also recognized his work during the admittance of James Meredith. Southern journalists both lashed out at Harkey and downplayed the award itself. The Vicksburg Evening Post ran the headline, “Anti-State Editorials Win Prize,” while the Starkville News stated that it seemed “Pulitzer journalistic awards now deal more with subject matter than quality of writing. And, as we see it, the distinction is not nearly so great as it once was.” Other journalists would go a step further and imply a direct connection between the Pulitzer and communism. Tom Ethridge claimed the award was “made each year under auspices of New York’s Columbia University, a fountainhead of race mixing ideologies and one-world radicalism.” He went on to note that he found it peculiar that the award was never given for any anti-communist editorializing. Louisiana’s Monroe World echoed this sentiment, charging that “any

63

Huey, 183-184.

64

Harkey, 118-119.



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Mississippi editor who craves and seeks the national spotlight can easily have it focused upon him ... simply by writing what conforms to the socialistic and communistic trends of the hour.”65 Public accusations such as these demonstrate the myths of massive resistance on the offensive. According to segregationists, the two greatest evils facing the South at this time were integration and communism, with both being driven by outside support and agitation. These evils were used to condemn and discredit these moderate journalists, portraying them not as voices of dissent and reason from within the South, but as traitorous scalawags and the corrupted pawns of integrationists and the communist party. In addition to impacting these journalists’ standing within their communities, these smear campaigns and accusations ultimately worked toward larger efforts aimed at their papers’ bottom lines. ECONOMIC LYNCHING

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From the early stages of organized civil rights opposition, economic pressure, or economic lynching as it came to be known, had been an effective weapon for segregationists.66 Arthur Clark Jr., founding member and vice president of the original Citizens’ Council in Indianola, Mississippi, introduced in July 1954 the intended role of economics as a deterrent to integration. McMillen writes that Clark planned to suppress any threat to segregation “through the careful application of economic pressure upon men who cannot be controlled otherwise.” Clark’s plan quickly gained acceptance and implementation throughout Mississippi as well as in other areas of the South. A spokesman for the Citizens’ Council in Selma, Alabama, announced similar plans in November 1954, vowing to “make it difficult, if not impossible, for any Negro who advocates desegregation to find and hold a job, get credit or renew a mortgage.”67 This strategy would be repeated in cities across the South, with economic lynchings victimizing non-conforming blacks and whites alike. As early as May

65

Ibid., 117-121.

66

“Economic Lynching,” New York Times (New York, New York), Nov. 19, 1960. 67

McMillen, 209.



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1955, Hodding Carter had a solid understanding of what the coming years would bring economically for dissenting southern journalists, predicting, “I personally think ... that economic terrorism is the worst kind. So far they have been able to hurt us very little, and I don’t think they are going to do any better but a whole lot of small folks, particularly those dependent on the people involved, can get hurt.”68 Be it through organized boycotts or the collective effect of individual subscriber reactions, during the decade following the Brown ruling, Carter, Smith, Harkey and East often experienced drastic drops in circulation and advertising, in many cases creating a significant financial burden. Carter publicly expressed his concern over this issue during a Joseph Pulitzer Memorial Lecture at Columbia University in April 1958. He warned, “The pressure groups frighten advertisers, and the papers come under the gun of the local merchants and local political bosses. ... Any threat to the more than 10,000 weekly newspapers also endangers the democratic concept of individual dignity and individual worth.”69 No matter how steadfast these liberal journalists appeared in the face of smear campaigns, this economic pressure posed a more immediate threat. Although certain journalists like Hodding Carter had built a financial foundation outside of the South strong enough to weather these attacks, others were pushed deeply into debt and to the verge of bankruptcy.

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Hazel, the Sheriff and the Holmes County Herald Of the journalists discussed here, Hazel Brannon Smith experienced the most diversified economic pressure, ranging from an advertising boycott to a spite-induced bill in the Mississippi Legislature. However, as mentioned, Smith first experienced attacks on her financial stability in 1954 after criticizing Holmes County Sheriff Richard Byrd for his involvement in the shooting of Henry Randle, an African-American man. As a result, Byrd filed a $57,000 libel suit against Smith. Although Byrd denied responsibility for the shooting, Smith used a Lexington Advertiser editorial to place the blame on the sheriff, writing

68

Hodding Carter to Fred C. Berger, May 10, 1955, Carter Papers.

69

“Publisher Warns that Pressure Groups Threaten Survival of Small Weeklies,” New York Times (New York, NY), April 26, 1958.



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that Byrd had denied the victim the rights he was guaranteed by the constitution. Smith chastised Byrd for failing to do his job, declaring that he was not fit to occupy the office and should resign. The editorial continued, “In our opinion, Mr. Byrd as Sheriff has violated every concept of justice, decency and right in his treatment of some people in Holmes county. ... The vast majority of Holmes county people are not rednecks who look with favor on the abuse of people because their skins are black.”70 Despite the suit’s potential to devastate her paper financially, Smith took the legal action in stride, writing on July 22, 1954, that she did not “know whether to be flattered at being sued for so much—or surprised that the sheriff places the value of his reputation at so little.” She also established that the suit would not impede on her goals for the Advertiser, writing, “This newspaper has in the past, and will continue in the future to print the truth as we know it to be—and as it is reported to us, fearlessly and unafraid. No damage suit can shut us up so easily.”71 The case went to trial in October 1954, with each side presenting conflicting stories of what happened the night of the July 4 shooting. Although Byrd admitted to striking the Randle, he denied shooting him. According to the sheriff, only three shots were fired, and they were warning shots from his deputies. Byrd also testified that despite being available for comment in his office, Smith had not once tried to contact him for his side of the story. On the other hand, Smith testified that she stood by the accuracy of her account, with an employee supporting the editor’s claims that she had repeatedly attempted to reach Byrd for comment. The testimony proved largely ineffective, as the all-white jury voted 10-2 in favor of Byrd’s claim of libel, awarding him $10,000. When the jury was polled, only one of the two dissenting members would admit to his support of Smith. It also was later alleged that the $10,000 award had been drawn out of a hat, in which each of the jurors had placed an amount they felt Byrd deserved.72 Despite the

70

Hazel Brannon Smith, “The Law Should Be for All,” Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), July 15, 1954. 71

Whalen, 81.

72

Ibid., 89.



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early setback, Smith continued her criticism of Byrd even as the case was appealed. Throughout the judicial process, Smith’s attorney, Vardamann Dunn, made no secret of the racial undertones of the suit. In the Circuit Court trial, he illustrated the widespread prejudice that existed in Holmes County, pointing to the fate of David Minter and Eugene Cox, who had literally been forced out of town after accusations surfaced that the two encouraged race mixing and even allowed blacks and whites to swim together. In such an atmosphere, Smith’s critique of the local establishment would not stand. Dunn argued, “Could anyone believe that this lady could get a fair trial in a situation like this, when the vast majority of people in Holmes County look with disfavor on any kind of criticism and feel that any newspaper that criticizes an officer for mistreating a Negro should be punished?” Dunn continued along these lines in front of the state Supreme Court in October 1955, suggesting that the $10,000 award had simply been punishment for Smith having criticized a white man’s abuse of an African American.73 An emphasis on the case’s threat to the freedom of the press was also evident in Dunn’s argument. He stated that a decision for Byrd “would stigmatize the halls of justice as an instrument for the imposition of economic sanctions against a newspaper who, right or wrong in her thinking and outlook, honestly presented her views, opinions and criticisms for public acceptance or rejections.” Fortunately for Smith, the Mississippi State Supreme Court agreed, unanimously reversing the $10,000 judgment on Monday, November 7, 1955.74 In his opinion for the Court, Justice Percy Lee cited “the right to publish the truth with good motives, and for justifiable ends” as provided by the Mississippi State Constitution of 1890. Lee concluded, “Under the testimony of the officers themselves, the news item and editorial comment in question appear to be substantially true and the plaintiff was, therefore, not entitled to recover anything.”75

73

Ibid., 95.

74

Ibid., 94.

75

Hazel Brannon Smith v. Richard F. Byrd (225 Miss. 331, 83 So. 2d 172), Justice Percy Lee’s opinion reprinted in the Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), Nov. 10, 1955. Smith Papers.



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Smith ran the story of the Court’s decision in the November 10, 1955, edition of the Advertiser under the headline “Editor Wins Libel Suit: Right to Print The Truth Is Upheld By State Supreme Court In Reversing Holmes Court.” In addition to recounting the events of the trial, the story included the state Supreme Court’s opinion in its entirety. Smith also reprinted an editorial written for the State Times by Oliver Emmerich entitled, “Freedom’s Safeguard.” Emmerich wrote that the decision “reaffirmed the people’s right to a free and unintimidated press, without which all freedoms are endangered,” stating that the “real point at issue was the right of an editor to criticize a public official in the performance of his official duties. If that right is abridged, the opportunity for people to know and to understand the actions of public officeholders will be seriously weakened.”76 In the weeks that followed, Smith concluded that the primary motivation for the suit was not simply racism, but ultimately stemmed from her 12-year battle against bootlegging and gambling, which included criticism of local law enforcement. Regardless, she continued to communicate her resilience, writing:

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Never again will we fail to act should that Hitler-like technique be employed against us on any issue. ... Make no mistake, there are persons who are using these [racial] tensions to their own advantage. ... We are living in an atmosphere where citizens are honestly afraid to speak their opinions because they are afraid of being misunderstood.77 Smith would be victim of a second racially charged libel suit in 1963, in which she was sued by two police officers for $50,000 in response to a story she had written after the shooting death of 38-year-old Alfred Brown, an African American. After interviewing witnesses, Smith determined that “from all accounts of reliable eyewitnesses the killing was senseless and could have been avoided by officers who either knew or cared what they were doing.” Although the officers would be given the right to publish a response to Smith’s article, which they acted on,

76

Hazel Brannon Smith,“Through Hazel Eyes,” Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), Nov. 10, 1955, Smith Papers.

77

Kaul, 244.



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the libel suit never went to trial and was dismissed in 1967 after a string of continuances.78 Although these lawsuits ultimately ended in Smith’s favor legally, they demonstrate the ease with which the southern legal system could be used to challenge dissent, often creating significant financial burdens even for the victorious party. After the lengthy legal battle with Sheriff Byrd, Smith was left with substantial fees that took years to pay off in full. In June 1957, nearly 18 months after the state Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the libel ruling for Byrd, Smith reported that she still owed her lawyers $2,538 for their services on the case.79 The economic pressures against Smith continued after the Byrd suit was resolved with an attack on her husband, Walter D. Smith. At the time of his wife’s stand against Byrd, Mr. Smith, who was known as Smitty, had been employed as the administrator at the Holmes County Community Hospital for over four years. But, in January 1956, despite a resolution from the medical staff suggesting that no changes be made in the hospital administration, a special meeting of the Board of Trustees was called and Smitty was fired. The resolution had mentioned him specifically and deplored “the effort to inject politics in operation or management” of the hospital. The document stated, “Smitty’s innate fairness and ability to get along with people, inspiring them to do their best on the job, has been a great asset to the hospital and [had] earned for him and the hospital universal respect from the people of Holmes County and the people of Mississippi.”80 Along with this resolution, 40 local business leaders also publicly supported Smitty’s being retained, yet the hospital board moved forward with its decision to end his employment without providing any immediate reason for the dismissal. When questioned further, a prepared statement was released citing the alleged unpopularity of Smitty’s administration in the community. However, hospital Trustee Dave Gulledge of Goodman, Mississippi, was quoted a week earlier as saying that there were no administrative problems and that Smitty’s dismissal stemmed

78

Whalen,157-159.

79

Ibid.,105.

80

“Administrator is Fired,” Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), Jan. 12, 1956; Whalen, 98-99.



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“from the fact his wife [had] become a controversial figure.” After the firing, Smitty joined his wife in the newspaper business.81 Hazel Brannon Smith later discussed the role of Smitty’s firing in the greater scheme of the opposition’s efforts, saying, “The significance ... was that we would be dependent on the newspaper for our living and then the next thing was to put an advertising boycott on the newspaper.” This second stage of the economic attack was implemented once the Citizens’ Council realized Smith would continue to speak freely as if immune to its pressure. To initiate the official boycott against her, members of the Citizens’ Council personally contacted Smith’s advertisers. Although a number refused to comply with the Council’s demands citing the necessity of the advertisements to their own economic well-being, Smith’s advertising income did steadily drop after the boycott began.82 By 1957, local volume had decreased by 50 percent. One former customer, a beautician who had regularly purchased a small “Business and Personal” ad for $2.25 in the Advertiser, explained to Smith why she could no longer do business with the paper. Apparently, the woman had received calls warning her that if she continued to use the Advertiser, her beauty parlor would be bombed. Outside advertising from larger companies with interests in the area remained, but could not compensate for the combined effect of the smaller local losses.83 After two years of attacks, it had become clear to Smith that her papers were in financial straits. On September 17, 1956, she wrote Hodding Carter to discuss the idea of applying for a study grant through the Ford Foundation and expressed concern about her papers’ survival until a grant could be awarded. She writes, “Some way or another I must find some help before then – or I won’t even be in business.” Smith even mentioned thoughts of leaving the newspaper industry completely, writing, “Sometimes I feel like just going on and selling out to the would be Ed Crump of Holmes county and turn the

81

“Administrator is Fired,” Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), Jan. 12 1956; Whalen, 100-101. 82

Whalen, 103.

83

“Mississippi: Determined Lady,” Columbia Journalism Review 2 (Fall 1963): 38; Whalen, 109.



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county over to him. But if I did I feel that I would be compromising everything I have ever stood for and believed in and I can’t do it.”84 By June 1957, Smith reported $4,000 in “past due obligations,” not including the $2,500 in legal fees. 85 In late November 1958, Smith learned that the Citizens’ Council was taking another drastic step to drive her out of business. Thirty-five Holmes County citizens, many with connections to the Council, had come together to form a competing paper, the Holmes County Herald. The group had raised $30,000 up front, selling shares at $25 each. To make matters worse, Chester Marshall, general manager of Smith’s Advertiser and Durant News, was the largest shareholder and became the new paper’s first editor. The Herald’s founding increased the number of local papers to three, and it was clear that there was not enough business for them all to survive. The closure of the FourCounty News, the third local paper, the following year proved this to be true.86 From the Herald’s establishment, Smith lashed out at the newspaper and its obvious intentions. In December 1958, she wrote, “The new newspaper is being established for one primary purpose— and that is to try to force Hazel Brannon Smith out of the newspaper business in Holmes County.” She would go on to discuss the more serious implications of the paper’s establishment, describing the founding group as a kind of Gestapo formed to “determine how people should think and act and pressure them into it. ... These same people will next be trying to tell the free people of Holmes County what newspaper they should read, what newspaper they should advertise in.”87 The Herald soon began to have an effect on the Advertiser, as local merchants withdrew their advertising from Smith’s paper. The conspiratorial nature of Smith’s opposition became even more apparent in February 1960 when the contract to print the county’s legal

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84

Hazel Brannon Smith to Hodding Carter, September 17, 1956, Smith Papers; Ed Crump was a political boss in Memphis, TN that wielded substantial power and influence during the first half of the 20th century. 85

Whalen, 105.

86

Kaul, 246-247.

87

Ibid., 247-248.



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advertising and public notices came up for bid. Smith submitted a competitive offer of $30 per month to the Holmes County Board of Supervisors, which was headed by W. Leslie Smith, a member of the Citizens’ Council. Not surprisingly, the Advertiser’s bid was undercut by the Herald, which offered a bid of one cent.88 This would not be the last time that Smith’s access to county printing contracts was the focus of opposition attacks. On March 2, 1962, Senate Bill 1828 was introduced to the Mississippi Legislature by Senators Ben Hilburn Jr. of Starkville; John C. McLaurin of Brandon; and E.K. Collins of Laurel. The bill moved to allow municipality business, such as the legal notices mentioned above, to be printed in a newspaper outside of the municipality as long as it was within the same county. At that time, a municipality’s business had to be printed within that municipality if a paper was available to do so. If passed, the bill would have effectively allowed the Holmes County Herald to print the business of Durant, Mississippi, which was also in Holmes County. To that point, this duty had been assigned to Smith’s Durant News, and had proven increasingly valuable in the face of the falling private advertising.89 On March 27, 1962, the bill passed the Senate and moved on to the House of Representatives, having been backed by Senator Tom Williams of Lexington County, who happened to be an incorporator of the stock company that published the Herald. Any questions as to the bill’s true purpose were answered once it moved into the House Municipalities Committee. Representative Bedford Waddell of Copiah County, who headed the committee, described the bill to the press as one that “concerned a woman editor who has been writing things which don’t go along with the feelings of the community.”90 When the bill was considered, committee members would not agree to recommend it without changes, as they did not want to punish the editors in their own

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88

Ibid., 248.

89

Erle Johnston, Mississippi’s Defiant Years, 1955-1973: An Interpretive Documentary with Personal Experiences (Forest, MS: Lake Harbor Publishers, 1990), 399. 90

“Bill Would Take Ads from Paper,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), April 28, 1962, Smith Papers.



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districts. After hearing this, Representative W.G. McMullen of Holmes County “insisted” that a bill of some kind be reported out of the committee for passage. In order to do this, the bill was amended to be a “local and private” measure, which could only be applied to Holmes County.91 In response to this development, Representative Karl Wiesenburg of Jackson County released a statement on April 29 supporting Smith and opposing the bill. It reads: If the Legislature can enact laws to discriminate and encourage economic reprisal against one newspaper for its views or editorial policy, your newspaper may very well be the next subject of legislative attack. The right of freedom of the press is equally as sacred as those other fundamental rights of which Americans are so justly proud.92 Fortunately for Smith, the bill ultimately died on the House calendar when the Legislature adjourned on May 26, but not before further shedding light onto the lengths to which segregationists were willing to go to silence their opposition. Throughout her financial struggles, Smith remained optimistic as to her eventual triumph over these pressure tactics. A July 1961 Advertiser editorial reads, “These men, and there are only a few of them, who seek to control the people and merchants and force them to support the newspaper of their founding and choice, have by now found it will not work. There is no way in God’s world they can force the people of Holmes County to read their newspapers and support its advertisers.”93 Despite her positive outlook, Smith’s prolonged economic battle with the Citizens’ Council put her further into debt with each passing year. For the month of July 1961, her total expenses, including both business and personal items, amounted to nearly $8,000.

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91

“Spite-Inspired Bill Dies on Legal Calendar,” Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), May 31, 1962, Smith Papers. 92

“Defends Critic of C-Councils,” Press-Scimitar (Memphis, TN), April 30, 1962, Smith Papers.

93

“Pressure Group is Responsible, Not the Merchants,” Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), July 31, 1961, Smith Papers.



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During this same time, the Lexington Advertiser and Durant News brought in a total of just over $3,200, marking a continuation of her steady financial decline.94 From 1954, when her troubles with Sheriff Byrd began, to 1960, a repeated drop in both advertising and printing profits occurred. It was estimated that these services brought in approximately $25,000 in 1954, fell to $12,500 in 1958, and finally down to $7,500 by 1960. In response to her financial troubles, Smith had also taken out a loan for $7,000 from the First National Bank of Greenville and owed another $26,000 to a bank in Jackson.95 Yet had it not been for the assistance of friends such as Hodding Carter, Smith would have found it impossible to survive. Even with Carter’s support, and eventually the entire Tri-Anniversary Committee, an organization formed solely to keep Smith’s papers in operation, she was forced to mortgage her buildings, home, and also cut her full-time work force at the Advertiser. By 1965, she had fallen $100,000 in debt.96 Ira Harkey and the “Unit”

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Ira Harkey first experienced the economic repercussions from challenging the norms of the southern social system before the Brown decision. In the late 1940s, the Pascagoula Chronicle began to take bold steps toward equality by discontinuing its use of “the Negro tag” when writing about African Americans. While this largely went unnoticed at first, a story printed on January 13, 1950, brought it to the attention of many readers. Harkey reported a 4-year-old boy had been beaten by his 32-year-old stepfather, but he did not include that the family was African American. After the article had been picked up by the wire services and reprinted across the South and nation, sympathy poured in for the child and mother. That changed, however, when it was revealed they were “just niggers,” whereupon the story seemed to completely disappear. Whites soon voiced their discontent over having been duped into showing concern for a matter as inconsequential as an African-

94

Lexington Advertiser Operating Statement, July 1, 1961, Carter Papers.

95

Francis Harmon to Hodding Carter, Nov. 9, 1961, Smith Papers.

96

Mark Newman, “Hazel Brannon Smith and Holmes County, Mississippi, 1936-1964: The Making of a Pulitzer Prize Winner,” Journal of Mississippi History 54 (February 1992): 72, 87; Kaul, 260.



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American family. Harkey writes, “I had broken a rule and from then on was regarded as an incomprehensible lowbrow and ‘niggerloving cur’ by my wellbred brethren of the Mississippi press.” This condemnation extended beyond the media, as Harkey temporarily lost the business of his largest advertiser. Although the customer eventually returned, Harkey permanently lost much of the man’s printing business.97 Harkey and the Pascagoula Chronicle continued to meet opposition in the years to come as a result of his use of courtesy titles for African Americans and later for his support of the Brown decision. While the paper suffered limited subscription cancellations as a result of Harkey’s criticism of school segregation, the most trying challenges came after his editorials concerning the admittance of James Meredith to Ole Miss in 1962. The events occurred at a prosperous time for the Chronicle, with the paper having recently made the jump from a weekly to a daily after building a circulation of 7,500—up from 3,600 when it was purchased. After the change, circulation continued to increase and stood at 8,400 before Meredith’s admittance.98 Not long after Harkey voiced his support for Meredith did repercussions begin to surface. In response to Meredith’s enrollment, a group of local Pascagoula citizens, known as the Jackson County Citizens Emergency Unit, had begun holding meetings at the county courthouse to organize resistance to integration. The meetings were led by the local sheriff, James Ira Grimsley, and at their peak were attended by as many as 400 people.99 The group soon turned its attention to Harkey. Although Grimsley denied that “the group planned to oppose the federal government or to destroy The Chronicle,” its topics of discussion suggested otherwise.100 Don Broadus, a Chronicle writer who had been turned away from earlier meetings, was finally admitted after interviewing Grimsley and subsequently reported to Harkey what he witnessed. During the October 16 meeting, the previous night’s

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97

Ira B. Harkey, The Smell of Burning Crosses: An Autobiography of a Mississippi Newspaper Man (Jacksonville, IL: Harris-Wolfe & Company, 1967), 62. 98

Ibid., 111.

99

Ibid., 146.

100

Ibid., 146.



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minutes were read, which specifically mentioned plans aimed at Harkey’s economic well-being. During the meeting, a long discussion took place concerning the idea of asking Mobile or Jackson papers to print special Pascagoula sections, which would ultimately take away from the Chronicle’s advertising. Broadus’ memo reads, “It was mentioned that outside papers would be more interested in a Pascagoula edition if merchants would sign an agreement to advertise. They talked about putting pressure on advertisers.” Grimsley’s comments during the meeting left little doubt as to the group’s feelings toward Harkey and the Chronicle. The sheriff reportedly described the paper as “the state’s leading niggerlover,” saying, “they actually call niggers ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ and Harkey’s all the time ridiculing our great governor.”101 This planned economic pressure moved Harkey to publish an editorial as a counterattack. He warned citizens of the group’s activities and closed with a realistic assessment of the situation, writing, “We are under no illusion that anybody here cares what happens to Ira Harkey. But think long on this: what happens to him can happen to you. You may be next.” The editorial inspired a limited reaction, with only 10 people voicing their support for Harkey, and only doing so privately. During this same period, Grimsley and the Unit were also was taking steps to prevent further information from leaking to Harkey. Meeting attendees were met by a “gorilla-sized man” at the door of the courthouse and asked both for identification and specifically if they worked for Ira Harkey.102 Grimsley discussed the Unit’s alleged attacks on the Chronicle in a statement addressed to Harkey that was printed on page one of the paper. Grimsley said that while he had “no knowledge” of any Unit plan to destroy the Chronicle, an alternative paper was needed. He claimed: Discussions have arisen at meetings that we can use another paper. The only way to get it is through subscribers and advertisers. Because The Chronicle has ridiculed the governor and his stand and has repeatedly refused to identify persons by

101

Ibid., 147.

102

Ibid., 153.



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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression race are the main reasons they want another newspaper. ... There have been several people who have asked me why we can’t have a paper that will print the truth and state the facts. They will get another paper, I believe, and I believe they will squeeze him out of business. ... A man told me that 500 to 1,000 men in Jackson County are ready to put up $500 to $1,000 to finance another newspaper that will print the truth and not ridicule our governor who has stood by the people of the South and not listen to Northern liberal Democrats.103

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Although the plans for a second paper never came to fruition, the Unit’s efforts soon began to affect the Chronicle’s business. Within the next few days, Harkey recalls that seven of the paper’s newsboys quit without any explanation and circulation dropped 12 percent. Advertising was also affected, and there was reason to suspect that organized pressure was responsible. “The advertising was just down to nothing,” Harkey later recalled. “They took the papers away from the carriers, knocked the carriers down and threatened the advertisers.”104 Similar to Smith, Harkey received word that several local businesses, including two department stores and a grocer, had been warned that if they continued to advertise in the Chronicle, they would be boycotted. Harkey also received a call from an African-American woman whose son was a Chronicle carrier. When collecting dues from his customers in a white neighborhood, the boy had been stopped by Grimsley and told that he had no business in the area and that he needed to leave.105 In response to this pressure, Harkey published an editorial on October 29 under the headline “If Goons Threaten You, Here is What to Do.” He informed readers that at least four of his advertisers had been warned that the Unit would “not be responsible” for anything that happened to their businesses if they continued to advertise with the paper. He also wrote of another incident in which a Unit “strongman”

103

Ibid., 154-155.

104

Maurine Hoffman Beasley and Richard R. Harlow, Voices of Change: Southern Pulitzer Winners (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979), 73. 105

Harkey, 157.



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told an advertiser that he represented “a union of 300 families that would boycott the store” if he placed ads in the Chronicle. Harkey directed advertisers and readers on what action to take if they became the target of such threats. He advised, “If you are threatened or even talked to about dropping your advertising in the Chronicle, call the Chronicle immediately and give us the name of the goon, his description and a report of what he said.” He assured advertisers that they had nothing to fear and that “help was on the way.”106 Throughout the ordeal, Harkey continued to publicly address the economic pressure that was being placed on his paper. He informed readers that while in one week two customers had cancelled their advertising contracts and that three others had previously withdrawn their ads, the paper was “still sailing under a full head of steam carrying a full cargo of advertising.” He went on to ensure local businessmen that when they bought space in the paper they were doing only that and not “buying the editor of The Chronicle or his opinions.”107 Despite this public optimism, the economic pressure was taking its toll. Harkey’s profits for December 1962 fell below those of the previous two months, a significant decrease considering the boost in advertising that generally came with the Christmas season. In his autobiography, Harkey described the paper as crippled, writing that “a small newspaper that carries less advertising in December than in other months has lost a year’s profits.” Yet Harkey fought back, utilizing his newspaper as “a clearing house and publishing organ for anti-Barnett opinion in the state.” Ultimately, after a much-needed demonstration of support from a local union leader, the Chronicle emerged from the storm and the organized opposition crumbled. By February 1963, the Jackson County Citizens Emergency Unit had diminished to only 25 members. Harkey later reflected on his paper’s perseverance, writing, “As March arrived, The Chronicle still survived, strong with a new confidence born of having weathered perhaps the cruelest attack a newspaper can suffer, one stemming from race hate and sanctioned by its community’s constituted authorities. Had we not fought back ... we would have gone down.”108

106

Ibid., 157-158.

107

Ibid., 164.

108

Ibid., 172-173.



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“The Lowest Per Capita Circulation in the World”

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The economic pressure that was brought against P.D. East and his Petal Paper was considerably more prolonged and damaging than that against Harkey. Before the Brown decision, the Petal Paper had built a circulation of 2,300 and maintained a steady advertising income, bringing in nearly $1,500 from advertisers during May 1954.109 Though East remained silent on the question of civil rights in the early months of 1955, he did take unpopular positions on issues such as liquor laws and organized labor which worked to contribute to his financial woes. Despite this, he returned to the topic of civil rights on June 9, 1955, with a satirical piece concerning the Supreme Court’s “second Brown decision” and Mississippi’s response. The article was a mock news story reporting on a speech given by a fictional character named “Jefferson D. Dixiecrat,” president of the “Mississippi Chapter of the Professional Southerner’s Club.” The speech was made up of passages such as “a Nigger is a Nigger and must be kept as such and in his place as a Nigger. As Professional Southerners we have kept him from voting, we have kept him fairly well ignorant and we kept him in debt to us.” While there were a few cancelled subscriptions after the article, it was hard to pinpoint the cause considering the lingering grumblings as a result of his non-civil rights opinions.110 After losing additional advertising over his criticism of Governor Fielding Wright during the ongoing gubernatorial campaign, East came to a realization about the pervasiveness of economic pressure. In a July 14, 1955, editorial headlined “Freedom of the Press and the Mighty Buck,” East addressed the issue, writing, “We have only six words to say to those who would attempt to put economic pressure on us; the words are GO TO HELL IN A BUCKET!”111 The advice did little for East’s business, as advertising revenue and subscriptions continued to drop. In an effort to boost his readership, he offered a local Baptist church one-third of his gross profits if it would help in a subscription

109

The Petal Paper Income and Expense, May 1954, East Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Collection cited hereafter as East Collection – BU. 110

East, Magnolia Jungle, 149.

111

Ibid., 152-154.



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campaign. The church refused and business continued to suffer throughout the year. As 1955 came to a close, East was forced to borrow $2,000 from a friend in order to pay his bills. 112 The hard times continued into 1956, as his January earnings would be $300 less than in the previous year.113 After the publication of the “jackass ad” in March 1956, a more direct connection between East’s criticism of the Citizens’ Council and his financial problems developed. East understandably did not attend the Citizens’ Council organizational meeting that the ad criticized, but he did ask a friend to go and report back to him. East described the events of the meeting in his column the following week, writing that Earle Wingo, a local attorney and the meeting’s main speaker, “held up a copy of The Petal Paper dated March 15, and told his audience of approximately 100 persons that he was going to cancel his subscription that night.”114 Although it turned out that Wingo’s subscription had been cancelled nine months earlier due to “non-payment,” advertising and subscriptions did fall in the weeks after the ad appeared. Within a month of the jackass ad, local circulation fell to below 25 and only three advertisers remained in Petal. East wrote that he felt guilty for taking money from these remaining advertisers considering the limited exposure his paper could provide.115 Fortunately for East, his acclaim had spread to areas outside of the South. For every cancelled local subscription, close to three would come in from out of state, although this did not completely compensate for the losses in advertising.116 As East sustained his attack on the organized resistance to integration, his financial hardships continued. Total circulation dropped below 1,000 readers for the first time since he purchased the paper, and by mid-June 1956, local subscriptions stood at 15, with only one remaining advertiser from the area. The paper’s business spiraled throughout that year, forcing East to raise the annual subscription rate

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112

Ibid., 154-158.

113

Huey, 90.

114

East, Magnolia Jungle, 180.

115

Ibid., 180-182.

116

Huey, 104.



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from $2 to $3 in October.117 In November 1956, as his third year in business came to a close, East was left without any local advertising and a local circulation of only nine. East later recalled, “With the coming of the issue of November 22 I was confronted with a problem which I did not know how to handle. I simply didn’t have enough advertising for my usual four pages. Actually, I didn’t have enough for three pages.” He would make good use of the excess space, printing this statement at the top of an otherwise empty page: “We present below our views on the good that has been and is being done by the Citizens Councils of Mississippi since they went into business. The appreciation of the councils, as presented here, is not likely subject to change.”118 Over the next month, while outside subscriptions held circulation steady near 1,000, the Petal Paper lost half of its standing weekly advertisements, which constituted “the backbone of his paper.”119 With this development, East was determined to learn if and how the Citizens’ Council was pressuring his advertisers. Although it would take him several months to do so, he eventually was given a first-hand account of Council pressure by a Hattiesburg merchant. East recalls, “He told me members of the Citizens Councils had made the rounds ... and suggested that advertising with P.D. East’s paper was an economic liability.”120 With threats such as this having a significant impact on his business, East began to consider ways to reduce his financial burdens. He even briefly contemplated reversing his stand on the race issue, an idea he later said was dismissed “without hesitancy” because he honestly felt his opinions were correct. East also thought about closing the paper completely and leaving Mississippi for the West Coast, but realized he could not escape his rebellious nature that easily. East ultimately decided on a less drastic alternative and simply reduced the size of the paper to a tabloid-style layout. This meant abandoning his traditional eight-column, 21-inch deep page for one of only five columns and a depth of 16 inches. The change was implemented in

117

Ibid., 104.

118

East, Magnolia Jungle, 208.

119

Huey, 109.

120

East, Magnolia Jungle, 211.



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March 1957, but proved to be a difficult pill to swallow. Though he often joked about the change publicly, East admitted that the humorous spin served only one purpose: “to keep from breaking down and weeping like a bankrupt publisher.” He went on to write, “I regretted changing the format and size of the paper, but I had brought it on myself by the cancellation of advertising. I knew the rules by which my fellow citizens played, but I was not capable of playing by them. ... I was so close to being out of the game that it made me wonder about my I.Q.”121 At this point, the paper was losing approximately $300 per month. His advertising income for March 1957 was just over $500, down from more than $1,000 the year before.122 In October, after months of persistent stress, East’s ulcer hemorrhaged, but he was unable to receive treatment as a result of his financial situation. By the end of 1957, East was $4,000 in debt and was forced to embark on a lecture tour to make ends meet.123 Although the combination of his speaking revenue with private loans and an ongoing subscription drive allowed the Petal Paper to remain in print, it hardly compensated for the loss of local support. Only two local subscribers remained and advertising from Petal residents was literally non-existent. In March 1958, total advertising had fallen to $300, far from enough to cover his mounting business and personal debts for the month. That September, East informed friend and supporter Will D. Campbell that he “could no longer carry on the operation of the Petal Paper because of financial destitution” and inquired about alternative employment options. By the end of the year, East showed losses of over $3,000, forcing him to borrow an additional $4,000 from friends to stay afloat.124 The challenges East faced as a result of the economic pressure were also taking a toll on the quality of the paper. Fundraising, speaking tours and subscription drives had become very time

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121

Ibid., 224.

122

Advertising Income, undated, Will D. Campbell Papers, University of Southern Mississippi. Collection cited hereafter as Campbell Papers. 123

Huey, 119.

124

Advertising Income, undated, Campbell Papers; Dictation by Will Campbell, Sept. 10, 1958, Campbell Papers.



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consuming, which forced East to either republish older material in the Petal Paper or postpone publication altogether. Many of his remaining out-of-state readers began to complain, and it was said by some that East had lost his spark and become lazy and unconcerned. While East apologized for the quality of the paper, he assured readers that if anything, he was too concerned. In October 1959, he showed the signs of a man fighting an uphill battle, writing, “After six years of flinging my head against the wall of stupidity, I look around to see what has been accomplished and what I see is Senator Eastland and Governorelect Barnett. I sort of ask myself one question over and over again— what the hell’s the use?” Despite receiving $8,000 in supplemental income from donations and a television appearance, East was still unable to break even in 1959, losing $1,000 for the year. As a result, he was forced to increase the annual subscription price once again, this time from $3 to $5, which would prove too high of a price for many would-be subscribers.125 Over the next three years, East’s problems with the Citizens’ Council were compounded by mounting medical bills and personal expenses. He lost over $4,000 in 1960 and the failure of his second marriage in March 1961 further complicated matters, as it forced him to move into an apartment. After paying the first month’s rent, East could claim only $2.56 to his name. Although he quickly remarried in October 1961, his third wife turned out to be suicidal and mentally unstable. Much of the money that had been raised to support the paper during this time would be used to pay off medical bills stemming from her condition. Aside from this, business continued to struggle, as advertising revenue consistently fell, at least partially as a result of Citizens’ Council efforts. During the congressional elections of 1960, specific measures by the Council had again been brought to East’s attention. After a local candidate decided against buying space in the Petal Paper, but advertised in every other paper in the district, East inquired as to what motivated this decision. The candidate replied that a local Petal merchant, who happened to be in the Citizens’ Council, had advised against running an ad in the Petal Paper.126 Under these conditions, advertising revenue fell steadily, dropping to $63 by

125

Huey, 141-142, 148, f 161.

126

East, “Man of Distinction, 18.



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January 1962 and only $25 the following March. With these financial and personal burdens, East only managed to publish the paper sporadically over the next few months, without any issues appearing from June through October 1962.127 Like Smith, East’s financial woes were compounded by segregationists’ creative use of the legal system. On October 21, 1962, he was charged with civil contempt for failing to pay child support to his son, Byron. East had discontinued payments the previous March, but only after Byron’s nineteenth birthday, a decision he had first cleared with his lawyer, Harold Cubley.128 The citation notifying him of the charge demanded that he pay both $450 as well as attorney’s fees. During his initial hearing on November 9, East inquired into whether his wife had been responsible for the charges and was assured that she had nothing to do with the matter. He had reason to suspect that the charge might have been motivated by the recent controversy surrounding Theron Lynd and his own alleged association with the NAACP. Although East had not paid child support in eight months, legal action was not taken until after the Lynd controversy surfaced. In addition, East had a history of conflict with his wife’s attorney, William Harelson, who he believed had initiated the charges. Harelson had previously pursued legal action over East’s failure to pay child support in 1959 after he had fallen behind on his monthly payments of $75. As if it were not apparent already, Harelson took it upon himself to inform East that he would have most likely been able to make the payments if he had taken a different stand on the race issue.129 Harelson’s contempt for East continued to be apparent during the 1962 hearing. After a meeting between Cubley, Harelson and the trial judge, Cubley remarked to East, “I’ve never tried to talk with such a nut as Harelson in my life. He won’t listen to anything. He told Judge Ott that he didn’t care if you paid the money or not, that he wanted to see you in jail and then tried to get the Judge to have you locked up.” In a private negotiating meeting between East and the two attorneys, Harelson angrily warned that he was “tired of fooling” with the editor

127

Huey, 165, 174.

128

Huey, 180; P.D. East to Friends, Nov. 12, 1962, East Papers - USM.

129

P.D. East to Friends, Oct. 21, 1962, East Papers - USM.



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and would have to put him in jail if he could not pay. Although Harelson first offered to settle the case for an exorbitant $900, an agreement was ultimately made that East could avoid jail time if he paid $500 before December 9.130 This settlement included the original $450 as well as $50 in attorney’s fees. East was able to pay the amount by the deadline, but only after returning to public speaking, which he despised, and receiving financial assistance from his nationwide support organization, the “Friends of P.D. East.”131 With a debt of $1,800 for printing alone, the Petal Paper consolidated into a monthly publication in November 1962 to reduce spending and pay off this balance. East addressed this issue in an editorial the following month, writing, “The Petal Paper, however bad the journalism, however infrequently it appears, however [sic] all its faults, is a symbol of moderation (even sanity, sometimes) in an area where such symbols are all too limited.” While readers responded with encouragement, the Petal Paper lost over $5,000 a year from 1963 to 1968, at which point East found himself $25,000 in debt. His failing health limited his ability to print new material or embark on speaking and fundraising tours, which further reduced his income.132 Protected but Not Immune

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As the highest profile southern journalist to speak out against civil rights opposition, Hodding Carter was both blessed and cursed when it came to economic pressure. He was lucky in the sense that he had achieved distinction and success as a writer outside of the South, and had reaped the financial benefits for such standing. However, his numerous national publications and speeches on civil rights repeatedly served as fuel to opposition groups’ fire. Fortunately for the Carters, these groups did not have the same stronghold in Greenville that they had in areas such as Hazel Brannon Smith’s Holmes County.133 Tom Hederman once took it upon himself to remind Hodding Carter III that his family would not have survived anywhere in Mississippi other than

130

P.D. East to Friends, Nov. 12, 1962, East Papers - USM.

131

Huey, 180.

132

Huey, 182, 191, 199-201.

133

McMillen, 255.



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Greenville.134 Yet, although they did not face the constant threat of bankruptcy like some, the family felt pressure nonetheless.135 In 2004, while speaking at Syracuse University’s “Defining US: Civil Rights and the Press” symposium, Carter III recalled, “We were surviving essentially on his skill as a writer outside that place. The pressures were real.”136 In this same address, Carter spoke of a 14-year boycott against his family’s paper, which began in 1955 after his father published “A Wave of Terror Threatens the South.”137 Yet despite the boycott, the Delta Democrat-Times was able to prosper during this period and boasted a circulation of 15,000 by 1960. While the Carters seemed to avoid the downward economic spirals that Smith and East experienced, significant drops in circulation did occur as a result of their comments. As mentioned, after the elder Carter’s 1961 speech at Brown University, and the subsequent smear campaign, the Delta DemocratTimes experienced a 10-percent drop in circulation over the course of three days. A similar reaction occurred in 1962 when Hodding Carter III commented on the Ole Miss riots, suggesting that the governor of Mississippi was “guilty of sedition” and must “be put in a federal penitentiary.” Carter III later estimated that the paper lost 15 percent of its circulation the day this article was printed. 138 Similar to Harkey and Smith, the Carters also dealt with the threat of a segregationist-organized rival start-up newspaper. To prepare for such a development, Hodding Carter actually went so far as to establish a “shadow” competitor to determine if the Greenville area wanted an alternative to the Democrat-Times. In July 1954, the Mississippi Pilot was established to test the waters. Although printed by the DemocratTimes, the paper was editorially independent and no one in the area was aware that Carter was responsible. However, after only three months in print, the Carters’ concerns were alleviated and the Pilot ceased

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134

Hodding Carter, Author Interview, November 18, 2010.

135

McMillen, 255; Johnston, 398.

136

Hodding Carter III, Syracuse keynote.

137

Hodding Carter, “Wave,” 32; Waldron, 263.

138

Waldron, 291; Carter III, Syracuse keynote.



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publication.139 Yet the threat of a rival paper remained throughout the period of massive resistance. The topic was repeatedly discussed at Citizens’ Council meetings, with members even going so far as to bring in a media consultant. There was no secret to the motive. Hodding Carter III recalled, “It was always to get rid of us. They weren’t dumb. They knew there wasn’t room for two newspapers. Economically, there was hardly room for one. The initial impulse was always we’ve got to have somebody in this town saying what we believe. ... They could just never get the critical mass in Greenville.”140 The Carters also experienced financial troubles with the IRS, having personal and business returns come under audit. It was later revealed that this was a common tactic of harassment used by the government, as civil rights activists—both black and white—were “lumped with mobsters and racketeers.” Hodding Carter III recalled the IRS pressure in a 1976 interview, saying, “We always assumed it was harassment, but there was no way to prove it. Reputable accountants have always handled our books. We never had to pay adjustments, but, God, what a nuisance.”141 Correspondence between the elder Carter and freelance journalist William Peters in May 1958 further illustrates the problem. Peters had contacted Carter concerning an idea for an upcoming article in Look magazine and informed him of a trend he had noticed during previous research in the South. Peters writes, “I discovered in my talks with both white and Negro Southerners identified as opponents to the segregationists in the South an undue and disproportionate number who had recently had their federal income tax returns audited by the Internal Revenue Service.” Peters told Carter that he was “completely convinced” there was a correlation between these audits and the subjects’ views on civil rights, adding that it seemed clear Carter also had been selected for the audits as a means for harassment. Of the civil rights advocates he had previously met, Peters reported that roughly one-fourth to one-third of those who had spoken out publicly against segregation had been subject to audit. At the time

139

Waldron, 252.

140

Hodding Carter, Author Interview, November 18, 2010.

141

Jason Berry, “The IRS Bullies the New South,” The Nation, March 6, 1976, 271.



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of the letter, Peters was conducting additional surveys of a number of agencies involved in race relations work to find out if this trend existed with their staffs as well. Since his own case with the IRS was still pending, Carter did not feel it would be prudent to provide Peters with further details, as was his request, but did agree with the journalist’s assessment, responding, “I do believe that your thesis is correct. They have been throwing the book at us on very minor points for two years now.” Carter qualified this statement by pointing out that the harassment was not unique to civil rights advocates, citing that the president of the Citizens’ Council in Greenville had been met with the same amount of IRS scrutiny.142 Throughout the South, the combination of these boycotts with the financial repercussions of the smear campaigns and legal attacks left many newspapers fighting for their lives. Regardless of a journalist’s determination and resolve, their papers ultimately relied on the support of the public. Segregationists fully understood this relationship, forcing editors to choose between their beliefs and the future of their newspapers. The damage that was inflicted by these economic pressures came dangerously close to silencing some of the most important southern journalistic voices of the civil rights movement.

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PARIAHS, OUTCASTS AND TARGETS Although the attacks on these journalists’ reputations and financial stability demonstrate the more calculated repercussions of their opinions, the backlash they endured also took a more personal psychological and emotional toll. No matter how resilient they might have appeared in the pages of their newspapers, not one was immune to the social repercussions that accompanied their challenges to massive resistance and the racial status quo. Their writings alienated them not only from advertisers and subscribers but also many friends, neighbors and fellow southerners in their community. Although this may have been a natural reaction to the “for us or against us” mentality cultivated by leaders of massive resistance, the Citizens’ Council had gone so far as to explicitly encourage the “gentle weapon” of social ostracism as a

142

Hodding Carter to William Peters, 5-20 May 1958, Carter Papers.



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means to punish dissent.143 For some of these journalists, this weapon was experienced in full force. In his autobiography, Ira Harkey recalled the local public’s reaction to his stance on James Meredith, writing, “At home in Pascagoula, the silence was deafening. I had been since the Ole Miss riots a pariah. My company was avidly unsought, the stream of favor seekers, publicity seekers and advice seekers that long had lapped against my door trickled off to nothing.”144 Harkey received support from virtually no one in Pascagoula, and became accustomed to old friends passing him in the streets without saying a word. Although he was able to weather the financial storm that accompanied his support of Meredith, this social response was much harder to overcome. Harkey writes: I found I could not remain in Pascagoula, could not bear to exist in the vacuum of an ostracism that remained in force even after victory. ... I was a pariah. I do not know whether this was because the hate had become a permanent attachment to my person and accompanied me everywhere ... or whether I had become an ambulatory and ubiquitous monument to the shame of my fellow townsmen galling their late blooming consciousness.145

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Harkey would later comment that although this ostracism was not the only motivation for him to leave Mississippi, it played a significant part.146 P.D. East experienced a similar reaction from the residents of Petal and Hattiesburg. Behind his humorous front was a man deeply affected by the isolation he encountered in response to his writing. In a 1959 article for Harper’s, East wrote of friends who would no longer invite him into their homes, saying there were only four houses in the entire

143

“The Gentle Weapon,” The Citizens’ Council (Jackson, MS), June 1956.

144

Harkey, 124.

145

Ibid., 18.

146

Beasley and Harlow, 75.



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county that he could visit and not have to stand outside.147 East said that although he was not afraid of physical violence, he couldn’t understand how people could be so “abusive and nasty” simply because of a difference in opinion. This ostracism weighed heavily on him. East writes: I took note of the fact that persons with whom I’d attended high school and college refused to speak to me when we’d meet on the streets. It stung—it cut deep into me and it hurt. My depression grew deeper and for the first time in a year I let the thought of suicide cross my mind. Vicious, nasty, dirty letters did little to help raise my spirits. I cried, Dear God, what the hell am I doing here?148

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East desperately tried to avoid the contempt he found close to home by frequently taking long drives to get away. In 1956 alone, he traveled 25,000 miles just within the state of Mississippi.149 The national recognition and social nature of Hodding Carter and Hazel Brannon Smith prevented the type of isolation experienced by Harkey and East, but did not protect them completely from the impact of widespread condemnation. Carter commented to a friend in 1955 that he was meeting “the most serious criticism” everywhere he went.150 The ramifications of his opinions appeared in ways both large and small. In 1962, as a result of his stand against the Citizens’ Council, he was voted off the board of the Delta Council, an economic development group for the region. In addition, that same year, he was not re-elected to the vestry of St. James’ Episcopal Church after voicing his opinion that no one should be turned away from services, regardless of race. Ann Waldron writes, “As time passed after the Supreme Court’s decision, Hodding was more morose and pessimistic than he ever had been. The angry letters he received, the pummeling he

147

East, “Man of Distinction,” 14.

148

East, Magnolia Jungle, 160, 181, 163.

149

Ibid.,, 208.

150

Hodding Carter to Anthony V. Ragusin, Dec. 5, 1955, Carter Papers.



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took from neighbors affected him.” 151 Carter’s son, Philip, would later recall that he dreaded coming home for vacations from school because of how much the opposition was affecting his father. He said, “I could feel the social strain. ... It infuriated him to have people he knew and cared about denounce him for what seemed a defensible attitude.”152 Although these social attacks were often only the beginning of the segregationist backlash, their impact at times proved the most testing. Of the reaction to his father’s writing, Hodding Carter III remembers, “The condemnation, the boycotts, the incessant nighttime threatening phone calls were all hard to take. Harder, however, was the sense of isolation from the conforming majority. He spoke ever more vigorously, and he suffered ever more intensely from the hate and scorn of his clansmen.”153 Hazel Brannon Smith’s pride often veiled her reaction to social pressure, but she was a victim nonetheless. After Smith’s death, her sister recalled the social backlash of her opinions, stating, “Although she had some very, very good friends that stuck with her through it all, they were afraid to stand by her publicly ... for fear they’d be blacklisted too.”154 In 1965, Smith jokingly described the dynamic in her hometown, saying, “It isn’t all that bad. If you walked down the streets of Lexington with me everyone would be real friendly. You’d think I was on the best of terms with everybody. You wouldn’t see the knife in the back.”155 For years, she had been the focus of multiple smear campaigns from the Holmes County Citizens’ Council and fully understood the power of such pressure and its effectiveness in silencing dissent. In 1963, she emphasized this tactic, writing, “Our personal opposition to the Citizens’ Council ... has been vindicated time after time in the past nine years as one after another good Mississippian has

151

Waldron, 247.

152

Ibid., 252.

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153

Hodding Carter III, “The Difficult Isolation Courage Can Bring,” Nieman Reports 60.2 (2006), 27. 154

Newman, 73.

155

Phyllis Battelle, “A Woman Stands Up to the Ideas she Believes in,” “Assignment America” syndicated column, Nov. 10, 1955, 10-36-0-22-1-1-1, MSSC Records.



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been smeared, lied about and given the CC treatment—many of them now living in other communities or states. That we have survived at all is a miracle that we attribute only to God.”156 The social pressure that was used to intimidate and chastise journalists for speaking out during the civil rights movement demonstrates the fanaticism with which southerners held onto to their segregationist values. This fanaticism was cultivated through segregationist propaganda and journalism, sending southerners the message that the South was under attack and that the consequences of defeat would be dire. Integration was portrayed to be such an enormous evil that all other factors seemed to fall to the wayside when the issue was raised. Friendships were forgotten and the truth became inconsequential as southerners closed their ranks to protect their way of life. It was this reaction that segregationist groups tried to exploit through smear campaigns and public condemnation in order to push liberal journalists to the fringes of society. However, the extremism that developed was not always easily controlled or tempered, leading to an environment in which southern moderates not only had to fear for their social and economic well-being, but also their lives. Although the segregationist organizations behind many of the attacks on these journalists publicly stated their intent to remain within the constraints of the law, their extreme rhetoric portraying the victimization of the South and the unthinkable evils of desegregation cultivated a dangerous atmosphere for integrationists and moderates. The more clandestine tactics of the Ku Klux Klan further exacerbated this extremism and potential for violence. Bartley writes, “Violence was more than an occasional phenomenon. It was a real and everpresent threat to anyone who became publicly identified with dissident behavior or thought.”157 Although the journalists discussed here were never seriously harmed, they understood that it only took one extreme and violent individual to lash out. This concern was further substantiated by the murders and attacks of civil rights leaders and protesters throughout the South.

156

“Mississippi: Determined Lady,” 38.

157

Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 210.



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Despite being largely spared from any physical harm, these journalists endured multiple threats of violence and intimidation. In addition to having a cross burned in her front yard in 1960, Hazel Brannon Smith’s Jackson newspaper, The Northside Reporter, was bombed in 1964 while she attended the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. There were no injuries, but the office sustained $1,000 in damages. However, her steadfastness remained, as she vowed to continue printing the truth “in spite of the bombing or other pressures and threats made by those who do not want the people to know, those who would arrogantly force all of us to live in a valley of fear, afraid to express an opinion if it does not conform to their selfish dictates.”158 Unfortunately for Smith, this would not be the last act of violence against her newspapers, as the Lexington Advertiser was bombed in 1967. Considering Smith’s vitriolic condemnation of the Citizens’ Councils and her unwillingness to back down to segregationist pressure, more severe retribution was certainly a concern. After Smith’s death, journalist Bill Minor observed, “I’m sure that if she’d been a man, that they would have lynched her.”159 As the Mississippi public schools opened during the fall after the Brown ruling, Ira Harkey also experienced intimidation in the form of a burning cross.160 However, as discussed, it would be Harkey’s support for the integration of Ole Miss, as well as his criticism of James Meredith’s opponents, that would bring the harshest response from readers and civil rights opposition. In a September 14, 1962, Chronicle editorial he wrote, “Mississippians are mature enough to recognize the inevitable, to accept it and adapt to it with good enough grace. The political faction that rules them is not.”161 For his shot at the state’s power structure, Harkey experienced intensified reactions, including death threats. He recounts one call in particular in which he was told, “We’re ready to take care of the situation in this country. ... We need

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158

“Through Hazel Eyes,” Lexington Advertiser (Lexington, MS), Sept. 3, 1964. 159

Newman, 72.

160

David R. Davies, The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 26. 161

Harkey, 134.



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about two hundred killings starting with Kennedy and working down to you.”162 Soon after, he received another anonymous call warning him that local meetings were being held between people who “want to see you get killed.”163 With the growing extremism in the state, Harkey could not simply disregard the warning. He recalled, “A few weeks before I might have dismissed the call as from a nut and without substance. But ... after the Oxford riots and with the state indulging in a carousal of hate, I knew it could be true…”164 For his safety, Harkey purchased a .38-calibur pistol and, at the advice of Hodding Carter, moved from his isolated and easily targeted home to a hotel, a precaution he would take for four months. He also hired a former FBI agent as a bodyguard.165 The threats did not stop at phone calls, however. A single rifle shot was put through the door of the Chronicle, followed by a shotgun blast through the window of Harkey’s private office. The threats against him would get so severe that the FBI was eventually called in to investigate.166 However, although rattled, Harkey continued to voice his opinions and support desegregation. The Carter family also experienced acts of intimidation and specific threats of violence. Byron De La Beckwith, who later murdered Medgar Evers, reportedly threatened to kill Carter multiple times and even went so far as to ask a Carter-family friend on several occasions about the layout of their home and property.167 De La Beckwith had contacted Carter personally in 1956 in regard to his standing on integration, at which time Carter reiterated in a personal response that he continued to support segregation in Mississippi.168 In preparation for a possible attack, the Carters installed an alarm bell that could be used from their main house to notify the guesthouse of any impending trouble. It was during this time that Carter began carrying a

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162

Ibid., 136.

163

Ibid.,140.

164

Ibid., 141.

165

Ibid., 151; Beasley and Harlow, 73.

166

Harkey, 163.

167

Waldron, 250.

168

Hodding Carter to Byron De La Beckwith, March 15, 1956, Carter Papers.



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pistol as well as keeping guns in every room of their home and in the glove compartment of their cars. Of this preparation, Carter would later recall, “I didn’t want to have somebody shooting at me without having a chance to shoot back.”169 On September 30, 1962, the night after Carter III had written a scathing editorial concerning Ross Barnett’s actions at Ole Miss, the Carter family prepared for the worst, staying up all night to guard the house. After nothing out of the ordinary occurred that evening, the Carters let their guard down only to have a cross burned on their property the following night. It was later revealed that three local kids were responsible, leading Carter to ponder the potential tragic results had they come the previous evening. In 2004, Hodding Carter III recalled, “I’ll always thank God they didn’t come that [previous] night because we were scared out of our skulls. We all had shotguns, we all had pistols. ... We would have killed them. ... I was scared enough to shoot a rabbit if it had jumped, let alone a guy coming with a cross.”170 Not surprisingly, violence and intimidation were also prevalent in the experiences of P.D. East and played a significant role in his decision to leave Mississippi in 1963. On multiple occasions, East was warned about his safety, with angry segregationists suggesting that he should and would be killed. After the jackass ad, he recounted a phone call that came the night after the ad was published. When East’s wife answered the phone, as he no longer answered calls himself due to harassment, a woman told her that East should not stick his head out of the house “else her husband would knock it off.” Other calls accused him of being a communist and suggested that he should be killed.171 In 1962, amid the controversy surrounding Theron Lynd, East’s estranged wife called to invite him to move in with her in Texas. When asked why she was making the offer, his wife responded that her attorney in Hattiesburg had informed her that a group was offering $25,000 to anyone who could “get P.D. East one way or another.”172

169

Hodding Carter, UT Oral History Project, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, November 8, 1968. 170

Carter III, Syracuse keynote.

171

East, “Man of Distinction,” 18.

172

Huey, 179.



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After the murder of Medgar Evers in June 1963, East became even more fearful for his life and went into hiding for a week in Louisiana.173 It was in the midst of this growing atmosphere of violence that East made the decision to leave Mississippi. However, after years of financial struggles, he was unable to afford to move. To assist in this effort, and potentially save East’s life, friend John Howard Griffin sent out an emotional plea to Petal Paper readers and supporters across the country asking for donations, reading:

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Bluntly, I feel that serious violence is inevitable in this area, and soon. P.D. East is the living symbol of everything that racists hate. Their rage will be turned against him. ... P.D. has already had to go into hiding this year because sources warned him of actions planned against him. ... It is simply too evident that he will be the one against whom concerted hatred will be turned at any moment now. In order to function, he must move – go into hiding.174 The plea was successful and East permanently left Mississippi in December 1963, moving to Fairhope, Alabama, although he continued publishing the Petal Paper. He briefly considered a return to his home state the following year to assist in the Freedom Summer, but canceled his travel plans after being warned by a friend that he remained “a marked man in Mississippi.”175 In addition to the legitimate threats to East’s life during the early 1960s, he also feared repercussions within the South’s corrupted legal system. The tactic of framing was a well-known weapon that had been used against African Americans throughout the civil rights movement, with cases such as that of Clyde Kennard demonstrating the ease with which charges could be fabricated against dissidents. After attempting to gain admission to segregated Mississippi Southern College in 1959, Kennard, an African-American man, had liquor planted in his car during a traffic stop and was jailed. By late 1962, amidst the

173

Ibid., 186.

174

John H. Griffin to “Dear Friends,” undated, East Collection – BU.

175

Huey, 192.



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accusations of communism, East had become seriously concerned with the possibility that such an attack would be waged against him. Biographer Gary Huey writes, “Such allegations of communism, he felt, invited a legal frame from the area’s superpatriots.”176 In response to the growing resentment, East sought the advice of his attorney, Harold Cubley. Cubley advised East to keep the doors of his car locked at all times and check under the hood and seats and in the trunk before driving anywhere. This was to ensure that liquor, or some other illegal contraband, was not placed in his car as it had been in Kennard’s. East understood the relative ease with which his adversaries could prompt legal action against him and discussed this threat in a letter to friends, writing, “I have no desire to be dramatic ... but I am of the firm opinion that a legal frame can be executed here without too much trouble and, frankly, I’m not alone in this position.”177 He reiterated his concern, and the effect it was having on him, in a letter to Maxwell Geismar, writing, “I don’t mind telling you, Max, right now I’m scared shitless; these bastards are experts at framing people.”178 To make matters worse, East soon discovered that he was also being investigated by a private detective agency in Hattiesburg. Although he had been warned for over two months that the investigation was taking place, East accepted the fact only after learning that a woman living across the street from him was being paid to record the license plate numbers of every car that stopped at his home. The constant threat of a legal frame was taking a toll on East’s health, as he suffered from severe headaches and a hemorrhaging ulcer during this time. After a speaking engagement at Vassar University in early November, the threats prompted East to stop in Washington, D.C., and express his fears to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy advisor and Petal Paper subscriber. Schlesinger referred East to Burke Marshall, assistant attorney general for civil rights, who assured him that he could count on the support and assistance of the Justice

176

Ibid., 183-184, 147; The possession of liquor was illegal in Mississippi at this time. 177

P.D. East to Friends, 21 Oct. 1962, East Papers - USM.

178

Huey, 179-180.



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Department in the event of a legal frame.179 Fortunately for East, he was never forced to pursue the offer.

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GOING NATIONAL Although the pressures these journalists faced often left them in dire financial and social states, the local backlash they experienced ultimately further elevated them onto the national stage. Hodding Carter had long been well-known nationally, having won the Pulitzer Prize and served with editors Ralph McGill and Harry Ashmore as spokesmen for the South leading up to the Brown ruling. However, East, Harkey and Smith emerged largely as a result of the pressures they faced within Mississippi. Therefore, ironically, the segregationist pressure that was meant to silence these journalists ultimately provided them with a more prominent platform to attack the spread of extremism and massive resistance. However, this transition to the national stage did not occur under the best circumstances, and was in many cases necessitated by the economic challenges encountered in Mississippi. In the face of these challenges, the journalists often had to use their growing notoriety to stay afloat financially. Fortunately, civil rights advocates and journalists from across the country worked to provide the necessary support to keep these crusading papers in print. Contributions ranged from a single dollar to donations in the thousands, with wealthy East Coast philanthropists and struggling Mississippi African Americans uniting to protect these beacons of hope. Through their messages of justice and moderation, these papers had become invaluable symbols of the civil rights movement. As such, ensuring their survival became an integral front in the fight against segregation and injustice. The support system that emerged on behalf of Hazel Brannon Smith illustrates the importance of her papers to both the civil rights movement and the fight for the freedom of the press in the South. With her papers nearing financial ruin, hundreds of journalists from across the country took action to make certain that Smith’s voice was not silenced amid the segregationist pressure. At the forefront of this effort was Hodding Carter, whose diversified media operation left him more

179

Ibid., 182-183.



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immune to segregationist attacks and in a position to take on a support role for several journalists. He had stood by Smith personally and financially since her troubles began and continued to do so throughout her struggles. Carter worked to make sure that Smith’s situation was not overlooked, nominating her for awards and documenting her experiences in the speeches he made across the country. In 1957, Carter wrote of Smith’s economic troubles in a letter he entered into the Fund for the Republic’s American Traditions contest. The piece won third place and a prize of $500, which Carter requested be sent directly to Smith. The following year, he specifically mentioned Smith in his Joseph Pulitzer Memorial Lecture at Columbia University, in which he emphasized the ongoing threat to smaller newspapers fighting for civil rights and freedom of the press.180 By 1958, Smith’s financial situation had worsened, leaving her unable to make payments on her 100-acre farm and in danger of losing both the property and her cattle. This prompted Carter to take his support a step further and endorse a short-term note for Smith worth $5,000 from the First National Bank of Greenville. Smith had planned to pay off half of the loan within six months, but this estimate had been based on the assumption she would receive an inheritance from her recently deceased father. Unfortunately, she soon learned that her father had died owing money, leaving her unable to make the planned payments. By 1961, the note remained unpaid and with interest had grown to $7,000, further burying Smith in debt. Although Carter’s friendship with several members of the bank’s board provided Smith with some leniency, her financial situation was deteriorating quickly. In addition to this $7,000, she still owed nearly $17,000 on a note she had taken out with a bank in Jackson, and was still unable to pay several bills with local merchants. Exacerbated by the advertising boycott’s effect on her income, these unpaid debts had placed Smith’s papers in serious jeopardy.181 In response, Carter spearheaded an ambitious plan to raise funds for Smith in July 1961, organizing the Tri-Anniversary Committee,

180

Whalen, 104, 108.

181

Hodding Carter to Francis Harmon, Oct. 26, 1961, Carter Papers; Confidential Memorandum to Tri-Anniversary Committee, 26 Oct. 1961, Carter Papers.



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which was to simultaneously recognize Smith’s 25 years as an editor, the 100th anniversary of the Durant News and the 125th year of the Lexington Advertiser. Carter was joined in the campaign by former editor of the Hattiesburg American, Francis Harmon, who then lived in New York and would serve as secretary, along with Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal, J.N. Heiskell of Little Rock’s Arkansas Gazette, and Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution.182 Norman Isaacs, who was managing editor of the Louisville Times, also took a leading role in the fundraising, although he was not an official member of the committee. The group’s main focus was to solicit funding through advertising that would compensate for the income Smith was losing as a result of both the boycott and the Holmes County Herald. It was estimated that $16,400 was needed over the course of one year, which would be raised through the sale of individual advertising space in the Lexington Advertiser and Durant News for $164 per full page.183 Committee members first looked for supporters within their own profession. Armed with Tri-Anniversary Committee letterhead and a page of excerpts from Smith’s work, the men contacted media outlets across the country in search of donations. Efforts were also made to garner the support of the business community, which could potentially lead to future advertising for the papers. One such letter from Norman Isaacs to the vice president of American Motors in Detroit emphasized the importance of Smith’s fight beyond the civil rights struggle, reading:

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We’re doing it because we believe so firmly in the right of free speech, because we want to show our appreciation of Hazel Smith’s gallantry under economic fire and because we want to see her courageous papers survive. As I said, we consider it our own private little battle. But freedom is never an exclusive battle and any and all who want to join are warmly welcomed.184

182

Whalen, 125.

183

Tri-Anniversary Committee Confidential Memorandum, Oct. 26, 1961, Smith Papers. 184

Whalen, 127.



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Smith and the committee understood that a certain degree of stealth was necessary to prevent the impression that her papers were being supported by outsiders, who were still looked upon as agitators by many in the community. To prevent this, potential advertisers were given the option of purchasing space that would instead publicize charitable organizations such as the Red Cross, Cancer Society or National Safety Council.185 In addition, these advertisements were often underwritten by Smith’s papers or another resident within the local community. Smith addressed this issue in response to a letter from Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, who had expressed concern over a potential adverse reaction from locals. Smith writes, “You are right in thinking that local people will be quick to take offense at anything that smacks of an outsider presuming to interfere. ... Therefore, you may rest assured that we shall proceed slowly and cautiously and make certain that we do not over-step the bounds of what they will stand.”186 Regardless, the response to the Tri-Anniversary Committee was promising, with prominent journalists and civil rights advocates from across the country making contributions on Smith’s behalf. Although many could not afford to pay the full $164, several supporters divided the price for a single ad, contributing six separate donations of $27.34. Within two months, the committee had received more than $5,000 in contributions from 21 separate supporters, including a single donation of 65 shares of Gulf Oil stock worth $2,525. The generosity would continue over the next three months, with an additional $2,700 being contributed from 38 supporters. The list included several notable journalists and news organizations, including the president of CBS, Frank Stanton, William D. Maxwell of the Chicago Tribune and James G. Linen, publisher of Time, Inc.187

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185

Norman E. Isaacs to Lindsay Hoben, Sept. 18, 1961, Carter Papers.

186

Hazel Brannon Smith to Jonathan Daniels, July 27, 1961, Carter Papers.

187

Tri-Anniversary Committee – Progress Report as of 10/25/61, Oct. 25, 1961, Carter Papers; Progress Report No.1 –Tri-Anniversary Committee, Aug. 14 1961, Carter Papers; Tri-Anniversary Committee – Progress Report as of 10/25/61, Oct. 25, 1961, Carter Papers.



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After the first phase of the fundraising efforts ended in late October 1961, a total of $7,755.69 had been donated. The bulk of the contributions were used to pay off portions of Smith’s bank notes and overdue interest, but part was used to take care of local debts and demonstrate some signs of economic recovery to her opposition. Afterward, the committee continued to solicit contributions, expanding its reach to several other editors and publishers, while also focusing on acquiring local and national advertising.188 Although Smith’s economic woes continued, the committee was able to relieve some of her financial pressures. Carter emphasized the committee’s importance, as well as Smith’s ongoing struggle, in a letter to Harmon, writing, “The poor girl certainly was in way over her head and I do not know what would have happened to her—or rather I do know what would have happened to her—if one Francis Harmon had not appeared upon the scene. ... I want to thank you again for all you have done for a courageous person who is nearly wild with anxiety.”189 Despite the Tri-Anniversary Committee’s success, Smith’s decision to print the advertisements with caution eventually began to work against her. She had originally planned to run an advertisement announcing the committee’s formation on the 125th anniversary of the Lexington Advertiser. This was to be followed every week by two of the advertisements purchased through contributions. However, Smith decided to delay the announcement after a smear campaign emerged in August claiming that she had been involved in a pro-integration meeting. Finally, upon the urging of Harmon and Carter, the first advertisement appeared October 19, three months after the committee had been formed. This presented both a logistical and economic problem for the committee, as a significant backup of advertisements had developed. Also, during this time Smith spent a portion of the contributions equivalent to 20 advertisements, but she left herself with little money to eventually print the ads. Although Harmon was initially agitated by Smith’s apparent procrastination, he later acknowledged that she might have been “well advised to stall” as she had done.

188

Tri-Anniversary Committee – Progress Report as of 10/25/61, Oct. 25, 1961, Carter Papers; Confidential Memorandum to Tri-Anniversary Committee, Oct. 26, 1961, Smith Papers. 189

Letter to Francis Harmon from Hodding Carter, Oct.26, 1961, Smith Papers.



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Harmon writes, “I realize this gal is trying to do the work of three people. She has so many problems it is a wonder she is still able to stay in the ring and fight. Above all, she is making progress!”190 The committee’s contributions strengthened Smith’s economic position in her battle with the Holmes County Herald, but, as had been feared, the fundraising ultimately instigated opposition backlash. Despite Smith’s cautious approach to the advertisements, the Herald eventually learned of the fundraising campaign and attacked the committee in a November 9, 1961, front-page story. Headlined “Hodding Carter To Head Drive For Holmes County Publisher,” the scathing piece reads, “A group of out-of-state agitators, masquerading as do-gooders and moderates, have begun a fund-raising campaign to buy themselves a voice in Holmes County. ... It is now absolutely apparent that the integrationist and socialist elements who hate this country and state are determined to have an outlet for their views.” The article reported that news of the committee’s formation had come from an announcement in a national magazine, and it specifically attacked committee members Hodding Carter, Ralph McGill and J.N. Heiskell. It closed by calling the committee’s claimed protection of the freedom of the press into question, saying, “The cold fact remains ... that they are buying an outlet for idealistic babblings of their ilk. They will continue to pay only so long as their views are printed. The ‘free press’ they support is a press free only to print the ideas of how someone in New York, Chicago or Atlanta, thinks we should live.”191 In an attempt to combat the gains of the committee, as well as further smear Smith’s name, the Herald also held a public meeting at the Lexington City Hall on November 20 as part of a circulation drive of its own. Jack Shearer, who was the editor of the Herald, detailed the formation of the committee and classified the action as a community problem concerning every citizen in Holmes County.192 The paper continued its attacks on Smith and the committee throughout the fundraising efforts.

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190

Confidential Memorandum to the Tri-Anniversary Committee, Oct. 26, 1961, Smith Papers. 191

“Hodding Carter to Head Drive for Holmes Country Publisher,” Holmes County Herald (Lexington, MS), Nov. 9, 1961. 192

“Circulation Drive Begins at Herald,” Holmes County Herald (Lexington, MS), Nov. 23, 1961.



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Over the next several years, as Smith’s recognition spread, she was afforded additional ways to supplement her income. In May 1964, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, which led to a flood of supportive letters and a much-needed $1,000 winner’s check. She also covered the Freedom Democratic Party’s participation in the 1964 Democratic Convention for NBC and had been the focus of a number of features in national publications. This included a 1965 Look article for which she was paid $2,500. In addition, the national attention helped her maintain a steady circulation through subscriptions from Chicago and other northern cities. She also frequently spoke to groups such as college students and newspaper associations, for which she was paid between $300 and $1,000.193 Smith benefited from these speaking engagements both financially and psychologically. Biographer John A. Whalen writes, “The talks, largely centered on her own experiences, served as a balm to Hazel’s wounded psyche, given as they were mainly to kindred spirits, who reacted warmly to her message. The money, too, was a welcome supplement to her papers’ dwindling coffers.”194 By 1965, the Lexington Advertiser had been reduced to only four pages as a result of the lack of advertising. Although the Tri-Anniversary Committee had ceased its official efforts by 1965, journalists and civil rights advocates continued to offer Smith financial support. Mike Cowles of Cowles Communications, which owned Look magazine and other media outlets, issued a call for donations that would ultimately bring in a total of $2,500. That same year, Hodding Carter came to Smith’s aid again, teaming with Columbia University’s Edward W. Barrett to start the Hazel Brannon Smith Fund. Barrett, who was dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and editorial chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, put out a plea for support in the publication, including a letter from Carter. Carter wrote of Smith’s dire need for support, describing her battle for justice as “the fight of all of us.” Within a matter of months, $2,500 had been raised, with donations ranging from $1 to $200 from supporters across the country.195 During this same time, Smith also

193

Whalen,165, 179, 183, 199.

194

Ibid., 199.

195

Ibid., 199-201; Hazel Brannon Smith Fund – contributions as of 8/18, Aug. 18, 1961, Carter Papers.



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received support from the African-American community in Holmes County. On November 21, 1965, during an “editors appreciation day” at Lexington’s Saints Junior College, Smith was presented with a check for $2,852.20. The donation had been collected by black citizens who had gone door-to-door in the rural community soliciting support for Smith. The president of the college, Dr. Arenia C. Mallory, and lauded Smith for her sacrifices, saying, “This [civil rights] story reduced her from a woman of almost wealth to one who has had to struggle like the rest of us. ... Can you imagine this country without the Lexington Advertiser and Hazel Brannon Smith?”196 After the donation was presented, African-American leaders vowed to continue to counteract the advertising boycott against Smith’s papers. Mallory urged the audience to support Smith, saying, “Get a paper of your own, don’t read your neighbor’s ... and if you are in business and don’t make but $15 a week, use part of that money to advertise in her paper. ... Unless we stand tall, we’re not worthy of Hazel Brannon Smith.”197 Similar to Smith, P.D. East’s fight to keep the Petal Paper in print demonstrated both the generosity of his supporters as well as his own determination. After enduring two years of economic reprisals, the Petal Paper was losing an average of $400 per month by January 1957.198 The previous December, Will D. Campbell predicted that the paper would be out of business within a month if outside support was not found.199 Although the likelihood of finding such support locally was slim, East had gained national attention after his jackass ad, which had been reprinted across the country and even overseas. Yet East’s own reservations initially presented fundraising challenges. He was only willing to accept contributions in the form of subscriptions to his paper, or as payment for a booklet of editorials he had compiled the previous October and was selling for 50 cents apiece. Having already

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196

“Holmes County Negroes Chip in for Prizewinning Editor,” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Nov. 23,1965, 10-36-0-19-1-1-1, MSSC Records; “Negroes Raise $2,800 to Aid Hazel’s Paper,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), Nov. 22, 1965. 10-36-0-20-1-1-1, MSSC Records. 197

Whalen, 209.

198

Huey, 112.

199

Notes of Will D. Campbell, Dec. 3, 1956, Campbell Papers.



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placed an order for 5,000 of these booklets, East departed for New York City on January 30, 1957, in hopes of finding buyers in friendlier territory. Campbell, who served as an associate executive with the National Council of the Churches of Christ in Nashville, assisted him with this, placing East in contact with several organizations in New York that might be interested in the journalist’s work.200 The effort ultimately proved profitable. In route to New York, East stopped in Atlanta to meet with Harold Fleming of the Southern Regional Council, who agreed to purchase 2,000 of the booklets. East was able to sell another 1,500 after arriving in New York, leading him to order an additional 2,000 booklets, bringing the total to 7,000. More importantly in the long term, East’s trip prompted Edwin J. Lukas, chief counsel for the American Jewish Committee, to call a meeting of several groups that might be interested in providing support. With representatives from African-American, Jewish, Christian and political organizations, the meeting’s participants agreed to purchase and mail out 15,000 promotional copies of the Petal Paper in an effort to boost circulation. East returned to Mississippi already having sold half of the available booklets and would ultimately sell all 7,000 over a two-year period. During that time, not a single copy was sold in the town of Petal and only 30 were purchased in Hattiesburg. Fortunately for East, buyers from across the country purchased the remaining 6,970.201 During his trip to New York, East was given another opportunity for invaluable national exposure in the form of a profile piece in The Reporter magazine that was to be written by Albert Vorspan. The story, which appeared in the March 21, 1957, issue of the magazine, was entitled “The Iconoclast of Petal, Mississippi” and documented East’s struggles with the Citizens’ Council. Vorspan emphasized East’s courage in an atmosphere so unaccepting of dissent, writing, “In an age of conformity, and in a section of the country where not to conform is tantamount to putting your head to the muzzle of a loaded cannon, East is an iconoclast.”202 Combined with the promotional issues of the

200

Huey, 103, 112-113.

201

East, Magnolia Jungle, 212-213.

202

Vorspan, 34.



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paper, the article worked to boost circulation by 400. Over the following years, East continued to take advantage of opportunities to publicize his struggles nationally with radio and television appearances, which often led to increased interest in his paper.203 In 1959, he wrote a guest editorial for Harper’s Magazine and afterward received over 200 letters of support for the piece. Later that year, Paul Coates, a Los Angeles journalist and television personality, invited East to do an interview on his show and also wrote a column on the editor’s struggles for the Los Angeles Times, which was headlined “A Fellow to Whom We Should Subscribe.” Within two months of Coates’ call for support, East received 617 letters and $2,207 in subscriptions. Coates’ show was also rebroadcast in New York on June 3, 1959, leading to an additional $600 in support.204 East’s poor health and increasingly hectic schedule often prevented him from delivering to out-of-state subscribers on time, presenting a problem for subscription drives such as this. His tardiness worked to strain his relationships with both readers and those organizing the campaigns, which created a rift that he could little afford. In the case of Paul Coates’ Los Angeles subscription drive, angry letters complaining of unfulfilled subscriptions began to arrive as early as June, less than two months after the original story appeared. One woman’s letter was sent directly to Coates and assured him that she no longer would allow her “sympathies to be aroused by an appeal of this kind, no matter how well founded and sincere it may seem.” The woman also threatened to go public with the matter if she did not either get a refund or begin to receive the Petal Paper. Coates received letters such as this on a regular basis, even at home, leaving him frustrated with East. Upon hearing of the problem, East apologized and explained that he had simply been unprepared for such an overwhelming show of support.205 Despite his shy nature and shaky stage presence, East was able to gain further national exposure and supplement his income through speaking engagements. With his growing financial burden, in mid-1957 he had been convinced by fellow civil rights advocate Sarah Patton

203

East, Magnolia Jungle, 213.

204

Huey, 139, 142-143.

205

Ibid., 143.



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Boyle that accepting payment for speeches might be necessary to keep the Petal Paper in operation. He had previously opposed the idea on the principal that payment would constitute his profiting from the misery of others. Yet with the Petal Paper losing $4,000 a year, a decision to turn down any moneymaking opportunity would have been ill advised. As mentioned, at times these financial burdens actually led East to seriously consider closing the Petal Paper’s doors, but he was always convinced otherwise by friends who saw the greater importance of the publication in the context of the civil rights movement.206 This was the case after the financial losses of 1957, at which time Mississippi publisher Easton King provided East with this honest assessment of the paper:

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The Petal Paper is lousy, P.D., but it’s a beacon of hope in an otherwise dark area. If you can take the stand for the moderation you have and survive, others will take hope eventually and may speak out in behalf of our sanity. If you fail, if you are forced out of business, the bigots will take full credit for it and then other voices will not be heard for a long, long time. If for no other reason, The Petal Paper is important as a symbol.207 Many others shared this sentiment, leading them to offer the support that would prove so integral to the paper’s survival. Even with the extra income from speeches and circulation drives, East was soon forced to rely on more direct financial assistance from friends and supporters. In 1958, East reported that he had borrowed nearly $4,000 in private loans, with $1,550 alone coming from millionaire philanthropist and civil rights advocate Irving J. Fain.208 The following year, Maxwell Geismar and Alfred Hassler of the Fellowship for Reconciliation led a group to start an official organization geared toward supporting East financially. Appropriately named “The Friends of P.D. East,” the group featured several high-

206

Ibid., 116-117.

207

East, Magnolia Jungle, 240.

208

Money Borrowed in 1958, undated, East Collection – BU.



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profile members including Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., Harry Belafonte and Steve Allen. Within the first year, the effort solicited $5,000 for East and would find the same success in 1960. Yet with marital and health problems adding to his financial woes, this support served only as a temporary solution. Over the next three years, East received thousands of dollars of support through individual private loans. In addition, friends continued to mail out appeals for subscribers, with letters often numbering in the thousands.209 One such appeal from John Howard Griffin described East as living in “wall-to-wall poverty” and again emphasized the importance of the Petal Paper. Griffin writes that if East was silenced, “It might mean the difference between a victory for freedom of speech in this country or yet another defeat of this badly battered freedom.”210 Although the financial challenges faced by Ira Harkey were not as severe or prolonged as those of P.D. East and Hazel Brannon Smith, a similar outpouring of nationwide support took place. In the midst of his struggles after the Ole Miss crisis in late 1962, Harkey had become the focus of national media attention. Claude Sitton of The New York Times devoted an article to Harkey’s experiences, which was reprinted by several subscribers to the Times’ news service leading to letters of support from across the country. On January 23, 1963, after Sitton’s story was read on-air at New York radio station WNEW, listeners flooded the station with calls inquiring as to how they could help the editor. Ultimately, the Chronicle received over 500 new subscriptions from the publicity, amounting to over $2,500, which was nearly enough to replace the advertising the paper had lost over the previous three months.211 Harkey also received word that support was mounting closer to home in Pascagoula’s African-American community. Citizens were hoping to donate $1 each per week to support the Chronicle, and even sought a list of businesses that had withdrawn advertising from the paper in order to form a boycott against them. Though moved emotionally, Harkey declined the support, later explaining that “a dollar

209

Huey, 141, 168, 175, 185.

210

John Howard Griffin to Friends, undated, East Papers – USM.

211

Harkey, 163; Ira Harkey to WNEW, letter printed in the Wall Street Journal, Mar. 11, 1963.



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a week can mean the difference between eating and not for many a Southern negro.” He also sent word advising against the boycott, noting that he denounced any form of economic pressure, even against his opposition.212

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As the targets of scorn from neighbors, former friends and even family, the support systems that developed were imperative not only to the economic survival of these Mississippi pro-civil rights newspapers, but to their morale and resolve. In the atmosphere fostered by massive resistance, moderate southern writers and editors were viewed simply as traitors and threats to the southern way of life. As such, their messages were despised, their character attacked, and their will challenged in an attempt to discourage dissent and ensure conformity. Under such scrutiny, the practicality and worth of maintaining such a stand could easily be called into question. It was during challenging times such as this that the perspectives and encouragement of their supporters became so valuable, reminding the crusading journalists of the necessity and magnitude of their work.

212

Harkey, 150-163.



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CHAPTER 5

Beyond the Mississippi Mainstream

The pressures against Carter, Smith, East and Harkey were not unique to privately owned Mississippi newspapers, but appeared multiple times with student journalists on college campuses as well as other newspapers in the Deep South. As will be discussed, these pressures were not nearly as sustained as those faced by mainstream Mississippi papers, and in many cases emerged in response to growing extremism during specific civil rights movement events. However, the intent was the same: to punish the South’s voices of dissent and protect segregationist ideas and viewpoints from criticism.

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THE STUDENT PRESS IN MISSISSIPPI In an effort to combat integration, racists worked to quash any challenges to the status quo within the universities—including oncampus publications. The student newspaper of Ole Miss, The Mississippian, became a hotbed for “liberal” journalism in the early 1960s, and in turn, the focus of segregationist scrutiny. The backlash began in the summer of 1960 amid allegations that the managing editor of The Mississippian had demonstrated integrationist leanings and become friends with liberal journalists Ralph McGill and P.D. East. Billy C. Barton of Pontotoc, Mississippi, had allegedly become close with McGill while working at the Atlanta Journal that summer. As a result of his position with The Mississippian, and his plans to seek the position of editor in the upcoming school year, Barton’s activities were 135

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reported to the Citizens’ Council, which in turn notified the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.1 William J. Simmons of the Citizens’ Council had been warned of Barton by W.A. Lufburrow, executive secretary of the States’ Rights Council of Georgia. Simmons expressed his concern over Barton in an August 17, 1960, letter to Albert Jones of the Sovereignty Commission.2 The letter charged that McGill, who was incorrectly identified as the editor of the Journal, had taken Barton under his wing, even offering the student a job after graduation. Barton was described as “very dangerous” and in “advanced training” for leftist operations. According to Simmons, Barton had already been “actively involved in several lunch counter demonstrations in Atlanta.” The letter also claimed that Barton was a “close friend” of P.D. East and actually planned on visiting the Petal Paper editor before returning to school. Simmons went on to explain the information had been acquired through a student at Tulane University, who had secretly been planted on the Journal staff by the States’ Rights Council of Georgia in order to observe Barton. Simmons wrote that an officer from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who had worked with the organization on past investigations, validated the student’s reports. Simmons concluded that the overall situation indicated “the painstaking efforts of the prointegration people to plant sympathizers in key positions on our college campuses, where they can exert a maximum influence on student opinion.”3 In addition to circulating the accusations against Barton, Simmons would go on to reportedly even offer to fund the campaign of another student in order to prevent Barton from being elected editor in the upcoming spring election.4 Despite being warned of the Citizens’ Council’s surveillance, Barton continued to write for The Mississippian, refusing to allow the segregationist pressure to silence him. That fall, he used the paper to

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1

W.J. Simmons to Albert Jones, Aug. 17, 1960, 7-0-2-86-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

2

Ibid.

3

Ibid.

4

Charles Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 182.



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oppose segregationist legislation to limit voting rights to citizens of “good moral character,” a thinly veiled attempt at further restricting African-Americans’ access to the polls.5 Word of the allegations against Barton continued to spread throughout the Ole Miss campus and the state, and in December 1960, Malcolm Dale, the current editor of The Mississippian, contacted Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett concerning the suspicions.6 By this point, the rumors surrounding Barton tied him directly to the NAACP. In a letter to Barnett, Dale wrote, “Reports have reached me that the managing editor of The Mississippian is a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. My sources have indicated that their information came from your office.” Dale went on to say that although he understood the concern, especially considering that Barton could potentially become the paper’s editor, he could not take any action without evidence, which he then requested.7 Following his inquiry with Barnett, Dale received the Commission’s file on Barton, accompanied by a letter from Albert Jones stating that the inquiry into Barton’s membership in the NAACP was beyond his reach. Dale responded to Jones’s letter soon after, expressing his doubt in the accusations.8 Barton soon learned of Dale’s correspondence with Barnett and Jones and decided to contact the governor directly regarding the charges. Barton denied the accusations against him and requested the governor’s assistance in correcting the false reports. Although Barnett responded that he hoped the charges against Barton were false, he denied any responsibility.9 On March 10, 1961, Barton went public with his case, claiming that the Sovereignty Commission had released the report in hopes of sabotaging his campaign for the editorship of The

5

Ibid., 182.

6

Ibid., 182.

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7

“Letter from Malcolm Dale to Ross Barnett,” Dec. 6, 1960, 7-0-2-22-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

8

“Letter from Albert Jones to Malcolm Dale,” Dec. 9, 1960, reprinted in Bob Pitman, “Barnett Explains Barton Incident,” Jackson Daily News (Jackson, MS), Mar. 16, 1961, 7-0-3-137-1-1-1, MSSC Records; “Letter from Malcolm Dale to Albert Jones,” Dec. 10, 1960, 7-0-2-20-2-1-1, MSSC Records.

9

Eagles, 183.



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Mississippian, actions he described as “Gestapo tactics.” He also denied all of the charges against him, insisting that he had met neither P.D. East nor Ralph McGill and had attended only one sit-in, and that was as a reporter. He also denied that he had ever been offered a job with the Journal and said that the claim he was a member of the NAACP was “preposterous and an utter lie.” The situation, Barton continued, showed “the extent to which some unscrupulous people will go to destroy even a Mississippi born college student in order to serve their own vicious instincts.”10 To try and clear his name in the days following his announcement, Barton volunteered for a lie detector test, agreeing beforehand that the results could be used for or against him. He passed without question, further substantiating his claims of innocence.11 In response to Barton’s public statement, Barnett, Jones and Simmons all attempted to avoid any responsibility for the attacks, and initially responded that they did not know anything about the report. When the correspondence between Barnett, Jones and Dale was presented, the men explained that the file on Barton had only been sent to Dale upon his request and was meant to be kept confidential. Barnett stood by his argument that he had no knowledge of the letter from Dale or Barton’s file before the public controversy erupted in March.12 He continued to try and distance himself from any wrongdoing, stating that he presumed Barton to be “innocent and honest” and hoped that he would get a “square deal.” Barnett and Jones also emphasized that the Commission had “no desire to meddle into student affairs by taking

10

Larry Speakers, “Segregationists Smearing Him, Student Charges,” Memphis Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), March 11, 1961, 7-0-3-126-1-1-1, MSSC Records. Copyright © 2013. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

11

Oliver Emmerich, “The Concept of Freedom is Now Tested in Mississippi,” Jackson State Times (Jackson, MS), March 16, 1961, 7-0-3-134-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

12

Larry Speakers, “Segregationists Smearing Him, Student Charges,” Memphis Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), March 11, 1961, 7-0-3-126-1-1-1, MSSC Records; “Barnett Assures Barton Chance to Defend Self,” Jackson Daily News (Jackson, MS), March 14, 1961, 7-0-3-128-1-1-1, MSSC Records.



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part either for or against, directly or indirectly, any candidate.”13 Yet in the days that followed Barton’s public accusations, Mississippi Representative Phillip Bryant revealed that the governor had told him of Barton’s alleged membership in the NAACP at least four months earlier, predating Dale’s December letter. Bryant quoted Barnett as saying he “definitely did not” want a member of the NAACP as editor of the campus newspaper.14 The controversy surrounding Barton captured the attention of the state and elicited the condemnation of many liberal journalists. Tylertown Times Editor Paul Pittman wrote that the fruits of democracy were under attack in Mississippi and that it was “common knowledge that the State Sovereignty Commission ... paid informers and spies at work, collecting information for files on Mississippi moderates and other deviates from the administration line.”15 Oliver Emmerich compared the actions against Barton to those taken in Hitler’s Germany or in Russia, writing that the situation indicated “that it is not the candidate for the editorship that is dangerous but rather the tactics used against him by the State Sovereignty Commission.”16 Yet, even amid such a damaging and embarrassing story, some ardent segregationists continued to minimize and even defend the tactics of the Sovereignty Commission and Citizens’ Council.17 Despite the support Barton received from some more moderate Mississippians, one week before the election he decided to withdraw from active campaigning for the editorship as a result of the segregationist attacks.18 Barton lost the election for editor by a sizable

13

Bob Pitman, “Barnett Explains Barton Incident,” Jackson Daily News (Jackson, MS), March 16, 1961, 7-0-3-137-1-1-1, MSSC Records. 14

“Ross Told of Barton, Bryant Says,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), Mar. 12, 1961, 7-0-3-128-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

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15

“Insidious Fifth Column Said Threat to State,” Jackson State Times (Jackson, MS), March 16, 1961, 7-0-3-133-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

16

Oliver Emmerich, “The Concept of Freedom is Now Tested in Mississippi,” Jackson State Times (Jackson, MS), 16 March 16, 1961, 7-0-3-134-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

17

Eagles, 185-186.

18

Ibid., 186.



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margin, falling to Jimmie Robertson by a vote of 986 to 307.19 In 1962, in his continuing effort to clear his name, Barton sued Barnett for defamation, seeking $200,000 in damages from the governor. The case was dismissed in July 1962 by Judge M.M. McGowan, a member of the Citizens’ Council. Although Barton filed suit in federal court against Barnett and the other prominent players in the smear campaign, that case would also eventually fail in 1964.20 Had segregationist forces not smeared Barton, he would have likely been judged as the more conservative journalist in the election for editor. Prior to defeating Barton, Robertson had worked for The Mississippian as a sportswriter and openly criticized the university’s policy prohibiting participation in any integrated athletic events, even those taking place in different states. His opinions led to grumblings from many Mississippi politicians, whose reactions were shared with Robertson by an Ole Miss public relations representative, George Street.21 However, despite Robertson’s opinions on integrated athletics, the most serious, and public, condemnations did not come until after his ascent to the editorship. On January 10, 1962, an editorial appeared in The Mississippian that had been signed only as “Robertson.” The piece chastised the Sovereignty Commission for its recent effort to smear Hazel Brannon Smith concerning her relationship with the Mississippi Free Press. Entitled “Sovereignty Commission Violates Bill of Rights,” the second-page editorial criticized the Commission and others for violating the rights of those that held opinions different from their own. It reads, “Not only is the incident itself contrary to the Bill of Rights, but it was committed by high ranking state officials who spend the major portion of each day screaming at the top of their lungs against the Federal Government’s destruction of the rights of the individual.” It urged citizens to stand up against such injustice and

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19

Johnny Gregory, “Robertson Elected ‘U’ Student Editor,” Jackson Daily News (Jackson, MS), April 19, 1961, 3-9-1-65-1-1-1, MSSC Records; Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 254.

20

Eagles, 187-188.

21

Ibid., 113-114.



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asserted that it was the responsibility of Barnett to protect the rights of every individual, regardless of their beliefs and views.22 It took nearly two weeks for the article to gain public attention, but it did so after statements from Representative Bedford S. Waddell on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives. On January 23, Waddell blasted the editorial and condemned the university for allowing such material to be produced, saying that “if that kind of stuff keeps coming out of the university, well, we ought to take steps to stop it. ... I’m tired of this atheistic, communistic brand of tomfoolery.”23 Robertson did find some degree of support in the House of Representatives, with Representative Thompson McClellan stating that although he did not agree with the editorial, he supported Robertson’s right to print his opinions. Representative Phillip Bryant pointed out the irony in the situation, commenting that he “thought Governor Barnett had sent his ‘friends’ to the campus last year to help Robertson get elected. He—Governor Barnett—supported a Republican and didn’t know it.” Aside from saying Waddell’s statements did not warrant any comment, Robertson did not personally respond. Instead, an editorial written by others on the paper’s staff addressed the issue, calling Robertson’s opinions “distinctly American” and declaring the paper’s intention to “continue to serve the students—not the will of partisan groups.” 24 The response to the editorial, and the subsequent controversy surrounding it, was mixed on the Ole Miss campus. During the early morning hours of January 24, a hanging red and white dummy was burned in front of the student union with the word “Waddell” attached

22

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Jimmie Robertson, “Sovereignty Commission Violates Bill of Rights,” The Mississippian (Oxford, MS), Jan. 10, 1962, 7-0-5-14-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

23

“UM Editor Under Fire,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), Jan. 24, 1962, 7-0-3-133-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

24

“Legislator Hits Ole Miss Paper,” Memphis Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Jan. 24, 1962, 7-0-5-18-1-1-1, MSSC Records; “Ole Miss Editor Mum on Attacks,” Memphis Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), Jan. 25, 1962. 7-0-518-1-1-1, MSSC Records.



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to it.25 On the other hand, during the night of February 11, a mimeographed newsletter entitled the Rebel Underground was anonymously placed under the doors of all of the men’s dorm rooms on campus. The newsletter, which claimed to be funded by Ole Miss students and unaffiliated with any specific organization, charged that Robertson had failed in his duties as editor. It said that it “was time for cooperative action to put a cease to this news without fact and power without representation” and called for students “to unite and fight for our race and the south to the last bitter ditch.” A second issue of the Underground appeared later that week, calling Robertson’s work “yellow journalism” and urging the editor to get off his “integration kick and scandal sheet and write about the real problems facing this campus.”26 It was later revealed that the Underground had been typed on the same machine used by Citizens’ Council Executive Secretary Robert Patterson to produce his own newsletters and was most likely the product of the organization.27 The final and most official blow to Robertson came from the student senate in the form of a resolution to reprimand his editorial policies. Ed McCaskel, the resolution’s author, said that the reprimand did not stem from Robertson’s views, but rather his timing in printing his opinions. McCaskel felt that Robertson’s decision to criticize the Sovereignty Commission was imprudent considering the university’s appropriation requests were currently before the Mississippi Legislature. The resolution was referred to the University of Mississippi Student Activities Committee for consideration by Dirk Wilson, president of the student senate, who also happened to be Robertson’s roommate and fraternity brother.28 Although the resolution

25

“Copiah Legislator is Hanged in Effigy,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), Jan. 25, 1962, 7-0-5-16-1-1-1, MSSC Records.

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26

“Unsigned Newsletter Hits Paper,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), Feb. 13, 1962, 3-9-1-75-1-1-1, MSSC Records; “Robertson, Barton Hit By ‘Underground,’ Jackson Daily News (Jackson, MS), Feb. 17, 1962, 3-9-1-75-11-1, MSSC Records.

27

McMillen, 248.

28

“Reprimand Considered for Ole Miss Editor,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), Feb. 16, 1962, 3-9-1-76-1-1-1, MSSC Records.



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would never officially pass, as a compromise, the student senate publicly stated its disagreement with Robertson’s opinions but also its belief the editor should be able to utilize the editorial page as he saw fit.29 Robertson’s clash with racists and the Rebel Underground continued during the following months, as the editor was again attacked for his sympathetic treatment of James Meredith.30 The controversy surrounding the editorship of The Mississippian persisted the next year as Ole Miss erupted into violence over Meredith’s actual enrollment. On the night of the rioting, Sidna Brower, Robertson’s successor as editor, penned an editorial urging that students abstain from violence. She wrote that the rioting was “bringing dishonor and shame to the University and the state of Mississippi” and begged students to return to their homes. Brower continued, “No matter what your convictions, you should follow the advice of Governor Ross Barnett by not taking any action for violence. Blood has already been shed and will continue to flow unless people realize the seriousness of the situation.”31 The editorial appeared in the October 1, 1962, issue of The Mississippian and was followed by a second piece four weeks later chiding the Ole Miss administration for failing to maintain order during the riots. As a result, Brower became the target of ridicule for her views. Letters from across the South criticized her support for nonviolence and accused her of being brainwashed by federal officials. Many misconstrued her comments completely. One letter from Montgomery, Alabama, read, “It amazes me that a Southern girl ... could in any way condone the unconstitutional use of brute Federal force in Mississippi.”32 Brower’s parents, who lived in Memphis, Tennessee, regularly received hate calls in response to their daughter’s opinions, and her uncle, who lived in Mississippi, publicly denounced

29

Eagles, 177.

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30

Russell H. Barrett, Integration at Ole Miss (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 74.

31

Sidna Brower, “Violence Will Not Help,” The Mississippian (Oxford, MS), Oct. 1, 1962.

32

Wil Haygood, “A Mississippi Odyssey, The Washington Post (Washington, DC)¸ Sept. 29, 2002.



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Brower. On campus, the chapter of the Kappa Alpha fraternity circulated a petition to impeach her, and she was even spat at by one of her own sorority sisters.33 Like Robertson, more official condemnation was to follow. On December 4, 1962, over two months after the editorial’s publication, Brower was reprimanded by the student senate for failing “in a time of grave crisis to represent and uphold the rights of her fellow students.”34 George Monroe, a member of the student senate who supported the action against Brower, claimed the editor had fallen short of her responsibilities by failing to address the civil rights violations of other students by federal marshals. Monroe believed that as an editor elected by students and supported by Mississippi taxpayers, Brower should have been “loyal to their feelings.”35 Although the Ole Miss faculty came to Brower’s defense, she later received a subpoena from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in the middle of a history exam. Brower recalled the ordeal in a 2002 interview, saying, “A state trooper—or maybe it was a sheriff—came in and got me. I was taken to the alumni house and these old men were sitting around and basically asking me why I didn’t uphold the principles of the South.”36 After returning to class, the professor, who had made it clear he did not agree with Brower’s views, refused to let her complete the exam.37 Brower graduated from Ole Miss in 1963 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her writing during the race crisis. She went on to work as a journalist in New York City, and later ran a string of weekly newspapers in New Jersey.38 In September 2002, as part of the 40-year

33

Nadine Cohodas, The Band Played Dixie: Race and the Liberal Conscience at Ole Miss (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 96; Sidna Brower Mitchell, Author Interview, November 16, 2010. 34

“Ole Miss Repeals 1962 Censure Of Editor,” Editor & Publisher, Sept. 26, 2002. Copyright © 2013. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

35

Cohodas, 97.

36

Wil Haygood, “A Mississippi Odyssey, The Washington Post (Washington, DC)¸ Sept. 29, 2002. 37

Sidna Brower Mitchell, Author Interview, November 16, 2010.

38

Emery Carrington, “Tumult of Integration Has Lasting Effects on Participants,” The Daily Mississippian (Oxford, MS), Oct. 1, 2002; Ashley E.



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anniversary of Meredith’s admittance, the current Ole Miss student senate unanimously repealed the 1962 resolution, replacing it with one commending her “for the outstanding journalistic courage she displayed throughout her tenure as editor of The Daily Mississippian.”39 The pressures against dissent within the student media in Mississippi were not limited to Ole Miss. Two years before the controversy surrounding Billy Barton, L.E. Miller, the editor of the Mississippi State College (now Mississippi State University) Reflector, came under fire after an editorial condemning the suppression of free speech at Jackson’s Millsaps College. The editorial, titled “Millsaps ‘censored’ in effort to give students full picture,” was written in response to Citizens’ Council pressure against the college for organizing a discussion of the role of the Christian in the state’s ongoing race problems. The topic of Christianity and race was to be one of several issues broached during a multi-week discussion of the place of the Christian in modern-day society. After a speech on “The Negro Response to White Contentions” by Dr. Ernst Borinsky, a white sociology professor from all-black Tougaloo College, Millsaps experienced “a barrage of criticism from the Citizens’ Council,” leading to the cancelation of a follow-up speaker.40 In addition to scathing editorials from journalists such as Hodding Carter, who criticized the “Nazi-like conformity of thought which bigots demand,” Miller voiced his concern over the Citizens’ Council’s backlash and the impact on the freedom of speech. Miller clearly stated that The Reflector was not “by any means advocating integration,” and reiterated that the issue instead was the “ignorance in not hearing opponents’ points of view,” calling the situation “pathetic.” In closing, Miller addressed the Citizens’ Council directly, asking, “Just because a person or a college listens to a man speak, does that mean that the

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Russell, “Campus Editor Stood Ground During Riots,” The Daily Mississippian (Oxford, MS), Oct. 1, 1997. 39

“Censure Repealed After 4 Decades,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), Sept. 26, 2002.

40

L.E. Miller, “Millsaps ‘Censored’ in Effort to Give Students Full Picture,” The Reflector (Starkville, MS), March 11, 1958.



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person or college endorses what the speaker says? Do you have the right to be a censoring agency for Mississippi and the great college of Mississippi? Do you have the right to tell Millsaps that they shouldn’t listen to whatever they please?”41 Over the next several weeks, Miller and The Reflector would receive and run numerous letters supporting and condemning the editor’s statements. Although many Mississippians were upset by Miller’s support of the Millsaps speakers, it would be the content of the follow-up letters to the editor that spurred the most extreme response. Some of the letters supporting Miller’s editorial stance went into great detail about the repressive conditions in Mississippi, condemning the thought control that some believed was a driving factor behind the Citizens’ Council’s actions. As a result, the president and vice president of the Mississippi State College Student Association informed Miller that it would not be wise to continue printing letters about the topic. However, according to Miller, he was never explicitly instructed to stop printing the letters and he continued to do so. Soon after, on March 25, Miller ran a letter that held little back in its criticism of Mississippi. The letter began with a description of repression within Nazi Germany and continued:

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Here in the state of Mississippi, a similar condition exists because a “white Anglo-Saxon people” are trampling and holding down a race that merely wishes to shed the bonds of ignorance and economic slavery. Yet in the presumably free state, the aggressor is praised as just, right, and good; as a preserver of the “Southern way of life;” and as one who upholds the will of God. The letter went on to describe the Citizens’ Council as “fanatical, ignorant and weak” and questioned how Mississippi could even consider itself as part of the United States under the pressures of the Council and State Sovereignty Commission. Just as had been specified in many other such letters, the author requested that his name be withheld.42

41

Ibid.

42

“Letters to the Editor,” The Reflector (Starkville, MS), March 25. 1958.



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Less than a week after the letter was run, Miller learned that the Executive Council of the Student Association was moving to have him recalled, which he believed was the doing of only a handful of student leaders. “I believe two or three influential SA officers really believed that what I had done could in some way disturb ‘their way of life,’” Miller said. “Some people could not think clearly about integration.” He was informed of the action just 45 minutes before the recall vote was to be taken and had no opportunity to present a defense. To make matters worse, the campus was in the process of closing for spring break and many members of the Student Association had already left school. “The recall vote, itself, was contrived,” Miller stated. “The leaders delayed the meeting until they could go look for students, any they could find that would agree to come to the meeting. They found several, and voted to authorize them to vote proxy for the missing SA members.”43 The recall passed by a margin of 29-2, with one dissenting voter voicing concern over rumors that the Citizens’ Council was behind the effort. However, despite the blow against Miller, the recall measure required a two-thirds vote by the student body to officially remove the editor from his position. In an address to students in the April 15, 1958, edition of The Reflector, just two days before the student body would decide Miller’s fate, Student Association President Ted Kendall presented the Executive Council’s case. According to Kendall, Miller failed in his responsibility “to present a true picture of our student body and to promote the best interest of our school.” Kendall specifically mentioned the letter of March 25, noting that such material “presented a very distorted picture of the convictions of the student body as a whole.” In his defense, Miller denied any affiliation with integrationist groups or even support of integration. For him, it was a matter of the freedom of speech. He summed up his stance by saying, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”44 Although 55 percent of the student body

43

L.E. Miller, Author Interview, October 29, 2010.

44

“Miller, Council Present Issue,” The Reflector (Starkville, MS), April 15, 1958.



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voted to remove Miller from his position, the vote was short of the twothirds needed, allowing Miller to finish his term as editor.45 The experiences of Miller, Barton, Robertson and Brower illustrate the breadth of segregationists’ attempts to control the free-flow of ideas in Mississippi. Robertson recalled, “I still use my memories of life in Mississippi in the year leading up to September 30, 1962, to understand what it must have been like in Nuremburg in 1938.”46 These editors threatened the segregationist cause both as members of the media, but also as youthful challengers to the longstanding southern traditions. For many, challenges to segregationist arguments about integration and civil rights had no place in public discussion, especially within academia. One such letter to L.E. Miller, which was also printed in the Jackson Daily News, exemplifies this mindset, asking why American freedoms such as free speech should be defended “to the extent that they hurt us.” The letter closes with a commendation of the “Jackson Daily News and the Citizens’ Council members for not preventing, but limiting our Freedoms to their rightful extent.”47 Therefore, the limiting of debate in Mississippi was not seen as an abridgement to greater American freedoms, but as a means to protect them, and in turn, protect segregation. BEYOND MISSISSIPPI

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Although Mississippi demonstrated the most extreme and sustained efforts against integration, the state’s journalists were not alone in their persecution. The most widely publicized case of segregationist backlash against mainstream southern journalists outside of Mississippi occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, with Harry Ashmore’s Arkansas Gazette. Like the Mississippi journalists, Ashmore had spoken out against the growing extremism in Arkansas, directing significant criticism at both state politicians as well as the Citizens’ Council. He had been a vocal opponent of attempts to create an Arkansas State Sovereignty Commission, which he charged would “abrogate as it saw

45

“Reflector Head is Reinstated,” The Reflector (Starkville, MS), April 22, 1958.

46

Jimmie Robertson, Author Interview, March 8, 2011.

47

“Readers Viewpoint,” Jackson Daily News (Jackson, MS), March 17, 1958.



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fit the rights of free speech, free assembly, free press, due process of law, and the right of petition.” Ashmore went on to warn that the Sovereignty Commission “would make it possible to employ the police power of the state to intimidate any person who supported the action of the United States Supreme Court.”48 The Arkansas State Sovereignty Commission would eventually be established, but would never wield the same power as its sister organization in Mississippi. Despite such public stands against the tide of extremism, the most significant backlash against the Gazette occurred as a result of Ashmore’s opinions in the midst of the growing crisis surrounding the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. Ashmore wrote that while the Gazette supported every legal method of maintaining segregation, the decision of the Supreme Court must be followed until overturned. As segregationists and the Citizens’ Council urged Governor Orval Faubus to defy the Supreme Court, on August 30 Ashmore warned that if Faubus resisted, he “would simply keep the controversy alive and worsen the racial situation in the state—and make the final settlement that much more difficult” when it inevitably came.49 Ashmore’s warnings would go unheeded, and on September 2, 1957, Faubus made the now-notorious decision to utilize the Arkansas National Guard to temporarily prevent the high school’s integration. In response, Ashmore continued to urge calm and promote law and order, writing, “Somehow, some time, every Arkansan is going to have to be counted. We are going to have to decide what kind of people we are— whether we obey the law only when we approve it or whether we obey it no matter how distasteful we may find it.”50 Although his words of reason would earn him the Pulitzer Prize, his dissent would also lead to coordinated segregationist backlash. In addition to threatening letters and phone calls, including warnings that a sniper was following Ashmore, an organized effort to

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48

“Do We Believe in the Bill of Rights?,” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), February 13, 1957.

49

“The Surrender of Governor Faubus,” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), August 30, 1957. 50

“Reflections in a Hurricane’s Eye,” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), September 9, 1957.



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implement boycotts on both circulation and advertising emerged in response to his opinions.51 In December 1957, 1,500 of the paper’s advertisers received anonymous letters announcing a “massive crusade” against stores advertising in the Gazette, charging that the paper had “played a leading role in breaking down segregation laws, destroying time honored traditions that have made up our southern way of life, and at last bringing upon the people of Little Rock the most insufferable outrage ever visited upon an American city.” Advertisers were warned that each ad placed in the Gazette would be considered “positive notification to every outraged white person that your store ignores their feelings and does not care for their business.” The letter concluded by warning that in the “rising tide of race feeling” in the South and Little Rock, advertisers had a choice between “one side or the other.”52 Although the letter was simply signed “an Indignant Group,” it was suspected that the Capital Citizens’ Council was responsible. The Council denied culpability, but Ashmore contended the organization was “obviously” behind the pressure.53 The Gazette responded by running the letter in full, followed by a condemnation of both the “vicious and deliberate distortion” of the paper’s position as well as the “small group of extremists” who sought “to rule ... by terror, coercion and boycott.” The Gazette reiterated that it had never supported integration and spoke out only in favor of law and order.54 Despite the clarification, the paper’s business would suffer. Although Hugh B. Patterson Jr., the Gazette’s publisher, said that there had been no drop in advertising, a significant amount of circulation was lost. In mid-December, the Gazette reported a loss of 15,000 subscribers, roughly 15 percent of its total circulation. During this same

51

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), 174. Copyright © 2013. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

52

“Is Revolution the Answer,” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), Dec. 13, 1957. 53

Peter Braestrup, “Little Rock Extremists Fight Paper, Gazette Faces Boycott Drive,” New York Herald-Tribune (New York, New York), Dec. 18, 1957. 54

“Is Revolution the Answer,” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), Dec. 13, 1957.



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time, the evening Arkansas Democrat, the Gazette’s competitor, saw a 6,000-reader increase. Ashmore referred to the Democrat as “a virtual house organ for the Governor and the white Citizens’ Council,” noting that it received all of the Council’s advertising.55 Within five months of the original boycott, the Gazette’s circulation had returned to a daily volume of 88,000, yet still lacked 11,000 customers from its peak.56 Boycotts and intimidation were also used to silence the voice of Daisy Bates, the editor of Little Rock’s African-American newspaper, The State Press. As editor and head of the Arkansas NAACP, Bates had long been a proponent of integration. However, the pressures against her became increasingly extreme in the midst of her involvement with the integration of Central High School. In 1956 and 1957 alone, three crosses were burned in her yard as well as the effigy of an African American with a rope around its neck. Bates’ home was also reportedly targeted seven times by arsonists and a rock was thrown through the window with the warning, “Stone this time. Dynamite next.”57 With the help of friends, Bates and her husband, L.C., began standing guard at their home nightly and even occasionally hired an off-duty police officer.58 Despite the pressure, she continued to write in favor of integration and played an integral role in the Arkansas civil rights movement. However, while able to overcome the constant threat of violence, the economic attacks against her paper proved harder to endure. From 1954 to 1957, The State Press lost 39 advertisers, many of which were major companies in the area. Although this may have been a natural reaction to her involvement in the civil rights movement by some southerners, anonymous phone calls were made to advertisers warning against supporting The State Press. One such call was made to a local grocer who was told to stop advertising or risk having her store

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55

Harry Ashmore Speech, undated, Turner Catledge Papers, Mississippi State University. 56

Peter Kihss, “Gazette Finds Readers Return After Segregationist Boycott,” New York Times (New York, New York), May 6, 1958. 57

Grif Stockley, Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 103, 157, 189.

58

Ibid., 90.



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bombed. The pressure was successful as the grocer ceased advertising soon after. Of the pressure, Bates wrote, “They’ve cut the circulation of our paper to its lowest point; they’ve frightened most of our advertisers away from us. They’ve intimidated our dealers; they’ve done everything they can to put us out of business. ... They feel without us and our newspaper that the whole thing will be dropped.”59 By 1958, The State Press had become largely reliant on advertising from the NAACP. The organization realized the detrimental effect the closing of the paper would have on the movement and other AfricanAmerican newspapers’ willingness to speak out in favor of civil rights. As a result, the NAACP committed $3,000 in advertising to The State Press to be spent over the course of 1958. However, NAACP President Roy Wilkins estimated that $15,000 would be needed to keep the paper afloat. Despite the NAACP’s commitment, Bates biographer Grif Stockley writes the paper was becoming “a bottomless financial pit that almost no amount of subsidy could rescue.” 60 By June 1959, The State Press was down $6,000 in circulation revenue and the staff had been cut to only four employees. Bates addressed the mounting pressures in a letter to the NAACP, writing: There comes a time in everyone’s life when one must realize there are forces too powerful to withstand. For more than a year, L.C. and I have watched our white friends and supporters being picked off one by one for daring to stand up for what’s right. ... Our friends, teachers, and principals from whom we get most of our state support, reported in September that they could not support the paper any longer because of local pressures.61

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The State Press produced its last edition on October 30, 1959. A third high-profile instance of segregationist pressure outside of Mississippi occurred the previous year in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with

59

Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (New York: David McKay Company, 1962), 176; Stockley, 181. 60

Stockley, 186, 190, 194.

61

Ibid., 204-205.



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Buford Boone’s Tuscaloosa News. Like so many of the journalists discussed here, Boone was not a supporter of integration and initially sought to avoid conflict on the issue. However, as the civil rights struggle, as well as its opposition, became centered on the enrollment of African-American Autherine Lucy at the University of Alabama in 1956, Boone found it difficult to hold back criticism of the segregationist response.62 Prior to the development of near-mob rule on campus following Lucy’s attempt to enroll, Boone had only made one comment editorially about the situation, urging Lucy to withdraw her request for a dorm room. Although he wrote that she had every right to a room, he cautioned her to simply be satisfied with gaining admission and warned of the potential danger she might face living on campus. The segregationist interpretation of his editorial demonstrated the level of extremism that had developed in the state and the disappearance of any middle ground. Roberts and Klibanoff write, “In the segregationist mind, he did not seem to be scolding Lucy as much as coaching her, as if they were on the same team. And when he referred to southern Negroes as ‘our friends and fellow citizens’ who ‘deserve fair treatment, equal opportunities,’ he made himself a lightning rod.”63 On February 7, 1956, in the midst of the growing unrest in Tuscaloosa, Boone penned an editorial that would win him the Pulitzer Prize, but also unleash segregationist backlash against him and his paper. The editorial, titled “What a Price for Peace,” addressed the mob of roughly 1,000 people that had gathered on campus as well as the university administration’s response. The university and the people of Tuscaloosa, Boone wrote, “should be deeply ashamed—and more than a little afraid. ... No intelligent expression ever has come from a crazed mob, and it never will.” Boone went on to describe the atmosphere on campus and the very real possibility that Autherine Lucy might be killed. In response to this, Boone bluntly captured the absurdity of the situation and addressed Lucy’s “crimes” in the eyes of segregationists, writing, “She was born black, and she was moving against Southern custom and tradition.” Boone closed with a condemnation of the university’s knuckling “under to the pressures and desires of the mob,” and put such actions into a broader context, writing, “What has

62

Roberts and Klibanoff, 134.

63

Ibid.,134-135.



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happened here is far more important than whether a Negro girl is admitted to the university. We have a breakdown of law and order, an abject surrender to what is expedient rather than a courageous stand for what is right. Yes, there’s peace on the university campus this morning. But what price has been paid for it?”64 Despite Boone’s words of reason, Lucy would be permanently expelled the following month and the University of Alabama would be segregated until 1963. He remained a critic of the segregationist response throughout Lucy’s struggles. In response to the editorials, local segregationists unleashed their backlash against Boone, organizing a boycott against the paper.65 His family also began receiving harassing phone calls every 20 minutes at night, preventing them from going to sleep. The harassment reached the point that he had to put in a second unlisted phone line and leave the phone to the public number off the hook over night. In addition, windows were broken in his home and his wife received anonymous phone calls when Boone traveled warning her that he was in danger. Rumors about Boone’s background also began to swirl, including accusations that the Tuscaloosa News “was secretly owned by a group of New York Negroes and that Boone was their pawn.” In reality, Boone owned 80 percent of the paper while another white Tuscaloosa resident owned the remaining 20 percent. He made this clear in his newspaper, going so far as to list “all his southern credentials, including his family’s ties to the Confederacy.”66 The pressures against Boone would eventually subside. As in Mississippi, the pressures against dissenting journalists were not reserved to the mainstream press in Alabama. Controversy also erupted regarding James Meredith at the University of Alabama as Melvin Meyer, editor of The Crimson-White, the campus paper, underwent scrutiny for an editorial on the situation. On September 27,

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64

Buford Boone, “What a Price for Peace,” Tuscaloosa News (Tuscaloosa, AL), February 7, 1956.

65

Maurine Hoffman Beasley and Richard R. Harlow, Voices of Change: Southern Pulitzer Winners (Washington: University Press of America, 1979), 54. 66

Roberts and Klibanoff, 137.



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after Meredith had initially been blocked from the university, Meyer wrote that there was no moral or legal reason for his being kept out. He also expressed his concern that the events in Oxford would set a precedent for other universities, and wrote that the democratic system is “a mockery if the laws are only to extend to a portion of the citizenry.”67 As a result, Meyer became the target of much criticism. A cross was burned in the yard of his fraternity house and he was advised that he had 24 hours to leave town by a caller claiming to represent the Ku Klux Klan.68 Although the university did provide two policemen to protect Meyer, there was also pressure from the administration to conform. Similar to the case of Jimmie Robertson, it was feared that such an editorial stance could impact the university’s funding, as well as create unrest when the time came for Alabama to integrate. In addition, during the week after the initial editorial, The CrimsonWhite’s copy was censored by the university. Meyer discussed these restraints and the overall reaction in an issue of the Journal of the Student Press, writing, “We had claimed before that we were completely free. Now we learned that, in reality, we were free only so long as we remained in our very limited space in the state’s power structure. The minute after we decided to step out of this place, this ‘freedom’ was attacked on all sides.”69 Pressure against the student media in Alabama had also occurred at nearby Auburn University, dating back to 1961. After Jim Bullington, the editor of The Plainsman, published an anti-segregation editorial on the front-page of the May 24, 1961, edition, the university’s appropriation was threatened. Bullington was reportedly warned that if something was not done about “that nigger lover,” the Alabama Legislature would cut Auburn’s funding. In response, the Board of Student Publications reprimanded Bullington for his writing and the

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67

Melvin Meyer, “A Bell Rang,” Crimson-White (Tuscaloosa, AL), Sept. 27, 1962. Henry Meyer Papers, Mississippi State University. Collection cited hereafter as Meyer Papers. 68

Jack Hopper, “Crimson-White editor gets threats after UM editorial,” Oct. 14, 1962, Meyer Papers. 69

Mel Meyer, “Alabama Crisis,” Journal of the Student Press¸ Spring 1963, p. 15. Meyer Papers.



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Board of Trustees instructed Bullington to consult with the dean of student affairs before printing any other controversial editorials. Despite the threats, Bullington replied to the pressure editorially, writing that he would not consult with the dean, at which point the issue was taken no further.70 However, animosity continued between The Plainsman and Board of Trustees throughout the early 1960s, with the Board attempting to claim greater control over the paper on several occasions.71

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Although the level of repression in states such as Arkansas and Alabama did not match that found in Mississippi, the vilification of moderation existed nonetheless. As individual southern states were forced to come face to face with the impending reality of integration, a peak in extremism often emerged and segregationists closed their ranks in preparation for a final defense of “the southern way of life.” The freedom of expression was often a casualty of this defense.

70

Melvin Mencher, “The Campus Newspaper: Public Relations Arm or Laboratory of Life?,” in Freedom and Censorship and the College Press, eds. Herman A. Erstin and Arthur M. Sanderson (Dubuque, IA: W.C. Brown Company, 1966), 27. 71

Jim Sims and Don Phillips, Author Interviews, March 18, 2011.



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CHAPTER 6

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Those South-Hating Propagandists

Just as the myths of the solid South and white supremacy were meant to galvanize support for massive resistance among southerners, segregationists sought to perpetuate similar ideals to the rest of the nation. In a context in which the majority of the southern media failed to present an accurate picture of conditions in the South, thus protecting massive resistance myths, the importance of the outside press became increasingly paramount for both segregationists as well as civil rights activists. While civil rights leaders sought to shed light on the cruelties and inequalities of segregation, leaders of massive resistance worked to protect the flawed arguments on which the racially separated southern way of life was based. According to segregationists, African Americans were satisfied with the status quo, and the South exemplified a true harmony between the races within its “separate but equal” society. Segregationists argued any unrest that did occur was largely driven by external influences and paled in comparison to the race problems found in integrated areas outside of the South. Through these arguments, it was hoped that southerners and non-southerners alike would either be convinced of the merits of segregation, or they would at the very least be mollified into ambivalence and inaction. However, just as southern dissenters challenged many of the myths of massive resistance, this objective was repeatedly threatened by national media coverage both of the actions and strategies of the civil rights movement as well as segregationists’ often violent and inhumane responses. The national press provided the nation and the world a glimpse not only at the oppressive conditions in which African Americans lived, but also the extremist means by which segregationists sought to maintain the racial status quo. Aimee Edmondson writes, 157

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“Without the world looking at the South through the lens of the national press, southern officials and other segregationists would have been free to continue to squelch activism in their own way.”1 For civil rights leaders and segregationists, the value of the national media was fully realized. Despite segregationists’ efforts to portray a romanticized image of the South, the strategies and actions of civil rights leaders juxtaposed the movement against the very worst of southern society. As segregationists argued for white supremacy and African-American complacency, news stories and images presented a very different picture. Michael Klarman writes, “The few blacks who had been handpicked as desegregation pioneers were almost always middle class, bright, well dressed, well mannered, and nonviolent. The mobs that sought to exclude them ... tended to be lower class, vicious, obscene, unruly and violent.”2 Combined with civil rights leaders’ strategic use of passive resistance and non-violent coercion, the movement, and southern African Americans in general, were successfully portrayed in the media as the innocent victims of the injustice and inhumanity of segregation. Therefore, events such as the white mobs at Little Rock’s Central High School, the segregationist riots and unrest in New Orleans and Oxford, the attacks on protesters in Birmingham and Selma, as well as the acts of violence against African Americans throughout the movement, effectively challenged many of the myths of massive resistance. These events demonstrated not only that southern African Americans were unhappy with segregation, but they also challenged the foundational myths of separate but equal and white supremacy. For example, of the 1963 protests in Birmingham, Roberts and Klibanoff write:

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These marchers were not the Sambos many white southerners had thought they were. These were not the lazy, unkempt,

1

Aimee Edmondson, “In Sullivan’s Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel Law During the Civil Rights Movement” (doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri, 2008), 2.

2

Michael J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 198.



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compliant, or complacent people they’d always read and heard about. Nor were they untamed, violent savages. And they were not outsiders, hotheads, pulling into the streets a rump group against the will of the more solid Negro citizens. What Americans saw [were] ... proud, smiling, fearless faces even as arrests mounted, reaching a thousand on a single day.3 The national media conveyed to the nation these images and stories of steadfast protesters enduring segregationist violence and pressure across the Deep South, further igniting an interest and concern with southern race relations that leaders of massive resistance had hoped to avoid after the Brown ruling. Through this media coverage, and the doubt it cast on the assumptions and myths on which the southern social system was based, the firm grip segregationists had held in the region since the end of reconstruction was challenged. However, just as segregationists sought to silence dissent from within the South, similar efforts were made to prevent these challenges from outside the region. When it became clear that traditional public relations strategies aimed at non-southern media and citizens were failing, and that the brutal realities of the segregated South were reaching and impacting the nation, segregationists again turned to media suppression. Through various means, both legal and otherwise, segregationists sought to not only challenge the credibility of the northern media, but to inhibit and prevent them from covering the movement.

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CARPETBAGGERS AND PAPER CURTAINS Much like segregationists’ vilification of southern moderates, including members of the media, outside influences in the South were common targets as well. Throughout segregationist propaganda and journalism, warnings and condemnations of “outside agitators” not only deflected blame for the racial unrest away from the South, but also further placed southerners on the defensive. It was in such an environment that attacks on the credibility, affiliations, and motives of the non-southern press

3

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), 321.



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took place. For many southerners, these journalists, and the shocking stories of racism and backlash against the movement they would convey to the nation, represented a direct challenge to the segregationist conceptions and portrayals of reality.4 Encouraged by segregationist leaders and propaganda, a deep hatred and suspicion of the northern press emerged throughout the South. From its establishment in late 1955, the Citizens’ Council newspaper made frequent references to the bias within the non-southern press, and specifically media from the North. In the October 1955 inaugural issue of The Citizens’ Council, the organization warned of “the tremendous propaganda assault being waged against the minds of our young people and our citizens,” calling southerners to form “District Information and Education Committees” to nullify such attacks.5 In August 1958, readers were told of attempts at “brainwashing” and were cautioned against the “liberal bait” and “medicine of the communications-media witch doctors.”6 Over the next several years, articles regularly appeared in The Citizen’s Council specifically criticizing the northern media, with charges ranging from bias and ignorance to outright support and involvement with the civil rights movement, the NAACP and even the communist party. The northern media were frequently condemned for ignoring race problems in integrated cities such as Detroit, Chicago and New York. A June 1960 “open letter to the northern press” asked non-southern journalists, “Can any of you honestly lay claim to acting in the public interest when you allow your own parochial views to discolor and distort happenings many miles distant from your homes?”7 The efforts to discredit and vilify the non-southern press were not exclusive to adults, however, but appeared even in the Council’s “Manual for Southerners,” a booklet

4

Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 140.

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5

“Mississippi Councils Complete Organization by Congressional Districts,” The Citizen’s Council (Jackson, MS), October 1955. 6

“Brainwashed Southerners Fall for ‘Liberal’ Bait, Then Claim ‘Persecution,’” The Citizens’ Council (Jackson, MS), August 1958.

7

“An Open Letter to the Northern Press,” The Citizens’ Council (Jackson, MS), June 1960.



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aimed at fifth and sixth grade students. The manual warned children against believing stories of successful school integration, reminding them “that the Race Mixers own most of the newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations. And they do not tell you the truth about Race-Mixing. They only want to fool you and cause trouble.”8 It was exactly this type of biased propaganda and reporting, the Citizens’ Council claimed, that necessitated support for media outlets such as The Citizens’ Council and Citizens’ Council “Forum.”9 The Citizen Council was not alone in its public condemnation of the non-southern media. Prominent segregationist newspapers such as the Jackson Daily News, Charleston News and Courier, Montgomery Advertiser, and Richmond News Leader devoted considerable editorial space to challenging the claims of outside journalists. Like the Citizens’ Council, these newspapers commonly criticized the northern press for ignoring race problems outside of the South and preventing the nation from getting a true understanding of segregation and race relations below the Mason-Dixon line. According to journalists like the News and Courier’s Tom Waring, a “paper curtain” existed between the South and the rest of the nation. “Neither metropolitan newspapers nor nationally circulated magazines,” Waring wrote in a 1955 editorial, would “deal honestly and truthfully with” the subject of race and civil rights. Instead, Waring continued, “They publish many distorted articles, and almost anything against the Southern viewpoint. But they refuse to print the other side.”10 Segregationists would evoke the concept of the paper curtain throughout the period of massive resistance. However, the charges against the non-southern press were more severe than just claims of one-sided coverage. In many cases, the alleged failure to promote the southern perspective was the result of malicious vendettas against segregation and the South. For example, a

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8

“A Manual for Southerners,” The Citizens’ Council (Jackson, MS), August 1957. 9

“First Southwide Programs Feature Top Lawmakers,” The Citizens’ Council (Jackson, MS), June 1958.

10

Tom Waring, “Paper Curtain Over the South,” News and Courier (Charleston, SC), October 10, 1955.



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March 31, 1956, Jackson Daily News editorial referred to Look magazine as the “official organ of the National Association for the Protection of Colored People, the Communist party, and other riff raffs now engaged in a determined effort to destroy the Southern way of life.” The same editorial also directly implicated journalist Carl Rowan, describing him as a “south-hating Negrophile reporter.”11 An April 5, 1961, Daily News editorial echoed this sentiment, referring to the press as “South-hating propagandists,” “left-wingers,” and a “crack-pot gang.”12 Similarly, on August 27, 1957, the Charleston News and Courier accused The New York Times of “pamphleteering for its cause – the intermingling of the races,” warning that thousands of readers dependent on the Times for information had been “brainwashed.”13 Although the non-southern press was often lumped together in these segregationist newspapers’ condemnations, particular attention was paid to the New York media, with multiple specific references to the poor coverage and bias of the New York Herald-Tribune, The New York Times, and Look, Life, and Time magazines. Alternatively, U.S. News and World Report, which Roberts and Klibanoff describe as sounding ideologically “as if it had come rolling off the Citizens’ Council’s own press,” was often specifically singled out for praise, recognition that would be reflected in the southern public’s response to the magazine’s reporters’ presence in the South.14 In addition to simply criticizing the non-southern press, the segregationist media took steps to provide evidence for its arguments. It was not uncommon for critiques to be followed by specific reports of race problems outside of the South, serving either to exemplify the inattention to such issues by the non-southern press or to simply illustrate that desegregation was not the panacea for race relations. Although these reports were found throughout the segregationist media, the most widely known examples appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser. In 1956, Editor Grover C. Hall, who had become “fixated

11

“Take a Look at Look,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), March 23, 1956.

12

“How Washington Uses Dogs,” Daily News (Jackson, MS), April 5, 1961.

13

“Biased Reports of Racial Campaign Promote Disorder North and South,” News and Courier (Charleston, SC), Aug. 27, 1957. 14

Roberts and Klibanoff, 54.



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and obsessed with what he considered the hypocrisy of the North sending reporters down and ignoring the problem in their own backyards,” ran a series of editorials exposing race problems outside of the South.15 The series was titled “Tell It Not in Gath, Publish It Not in the Streets of Askelon,” a biblical reference to David’s order to hide the death of King Saul from the Philistines, and ran from March 10, 1956, to February of the following year.16 Over the course of 33 editorials, the Advertiser provided both commentary as well as investigative reporting of race problems in ostensibly desegregated areas such as New York, Chicago, Michigan and Ohio, emphasizing the existence of racial unrest as well as voluntary segregation. In addition, the series made frequent references to the failures of the northern press. A June 3, 1956, editorial reads: Now once again The Advertiser illuminates a scandal in American journalism. It is a scandal of abortion on the news. As you read, remember that the front pages of Northern newspapers have made the picture of Miss Autherine Lucy more familiar than that of Eleanor Roosevelt, and rendered the saga of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. only a little less renowned than that of Davey Crockett and accorded his encyclicals a deference surpassing those of Norman Vincent Peale. But how do Northern newspapers play race strife when it happens not under the picturesque Dixie magnolia, but under the Northern beaches? As The Advertiser has previously and repetitiously documented, Northern race disharmony is subordinated, masked and even doctored.17 The editorial goes on to provide commentary of how a recent race riot in Buffalo, New York, was under-covered in the nation’s media.

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15

Doug Cumming, “Building Resentment: How the Alabama Press Prepared the Ground for New York Times v. Sullivan,” American Journalism 22, no. 3 (2005): 15. 16

Ibid.

17

“Publish It Not in the Streets of Askelon,” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 3, 1956.



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Overall, through editorials such as this, the “Askelon” series was successful, leading multiple publications around the country to address racial unrest in areas outside of the South.18 However, it also further vilified the northern press within the eyes of southerners. The bias of the northern media was also publicly addressed on multiple occasions by leading segregationist politicians. In his speeches to the Citizens’ Councils throughout the South, Senator James Eastland warned of the indoctrination and brainwashing of southerners, listing the “left-wing liberal press” among the “powerful alignment of enemies facing the South.”19 He was more specific in an October 29, 1955, press release promoting the regional commission to combat propaganda against the South, warning southerners that “many segments of the American press have been infiltrated by agents of the anti-South and these media, including certain radio and television outlets, newspapers, and especially some slick magazines, have been a willing tool of the propagandists.”20 Similar warnings and condemnations were made in the press releases and newsletters of U.S. Representative Tom Abernethy of Mississippi. Abernethy’s disdain for the northern press was also apparent in his personal letters to constituents. In a May 1959 letter to James Naftel of Alabama, Abernethy went so far as to agree with Naftel’s suggestion that the freedoms of the press be curbed, writing, “I am just as disappointed as you are with the American press. ... You expressed the feeling that Congress should do something about the abuse of the privileges of a free press. I often have that feeling myself. On the other hand, it is something that is very difficult to do.”21

18

Roberts and Klibanoff, 213.

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19

James Eastland, untitled speech given to the Mississippi Association of Citizens’ Councils, Dec. 1, 1955, University of Mississippi Libraries Archives and Special Collections. Collection cited hereafter as Eastland Collection; James Eastland, untitled speech given to the Mississippi Association of Citizens’ Councils, August 16, 1955, Eastland Collection.

20

James Eastland, untitled press release, October 29, 1955, Eastland Collection. 21

Tom G. Abernethy to James A. Naftel, June 4, 1959, Thomas G. Abernethy Collection, University of Mississippi Libraries Archives and Special Collections.



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Although the circulation of publications such as The New York Times was relatively low in the South, segregationist organizations, media and politicians left little question in the minds of southerners as to the quality and intent of the non-southern press.22 Such criticism worked to cultivate a hostile environment in which reporters were targeted not only as potential documenters of segregationist brutality and violence, but as biased and conspiring outside agitators invading the South alongside the civil rights activists. As such, members of the media often became targets of violence and backlash themselves. THE BACKLASH The opinions of segregationist leaders and journalists were reflected in the response the outside media received from white southerners. Many high-profile magazines and newspapers, along with the journalists they employed, were despised in the South.23 However, segregationist ire was not reserved for the print media. Each of the broadcast stations was given nicknames that indicated their apparent bias. NBC, for example, was known as the “Nigger Broadcasting Company,” CBS the “Colored Broadcasting Company,” and ABC the “Afro Broadcasting Company.”24 Although the ill-will and backlash toward the media at times also extended to outlets from within the South, there was a distinct difference between how the northern and southern press were viewed and treated by segregationists. Thomas Leonard writes, “On several occasions there was a method in the madness of press haters. White reporters with a southern accent often had a shield; if that failed,

22

Roberts and Klibanoff, 235.

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23

Roberts and Klibanoff, 54; Fred Prowledge, Free at Last?: The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (Boston: Little Brown, 1991), 516. 24

Rodger Streitmatter, Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008), 176; Raymond L. Scherer and Robert J. Donovan, Unsilent Revolution: Television News and American Public Life, 1948-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9.



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they were more likely than others to win an apology from the southerners who had beaten them.”25 However, even the non-southern media were not treated equally. Certain outside publications, such as the Time-Life magazines and The New York Times, were particularly despised and targeted during protests and violence. Alternatively, more conservative publications such as U.S. News and World Report were often spared the backlash of segregationists and were “conspicuous by their absence in casualty reports.”26 Southerners’ preference for U.S. News and World Report was widely known in media and federal law enforcement circles, with Justice Department officials disguising themselves as U.S. News and World Report reporters to gain the favor of angry segregationist crowds.27 Yet for most outside journalists, the reception in the South was far less cordial. Popkin writes, “At virtually every step in the civil rights struggle, angry white southerners looked into the faces of journalists. ... Each of the reporters who covered the civil rights movement has a crowd story: they were engulfed and insulted, and the unlucky ones were physically assaulted.”28 Civil rights histories abound with stories of violence against the press, with the most tragic being the death of reporter Paul Guihard of Agence France Presse during the riots at Ole Miss. As the campus erupted in violence, Guihard was taken behind a tree and executed at close range.29 Although the only reported media fatality during the riots, Guihard was not the sole victim in Oxford. A cameraman from a Dallas television station was also attacked, having been singled out as a member of the media, with one of his attackers yelling, “That guy’s a goddamn reporter. Let’s kill him,” as a mob of protesters moved in.30

25

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William Scarborough, Author Interview, November 30, 2010; Thomas Leonard, “Anti-Slavery, Civil Rights, and Incendiary Material” in Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (Lexington, KY: Universty of Kentucky Press, 1995), 123-124. 26

Leonard, 124.

27

Powledge 516; Leonard, 124.

28

Leaonard, 122.

29

Roberts and Klibanoff, 294.

30

Ibid., 294.



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Dan Rather recalls being shot at and pelted with bricks every time his CBS television crew turned on its light to film, forcing them to only shoot for 15 seconds at a time.31 However, the violence against the media at Ole Miss is only a single indicator of the conditions in which the press operated in the South. Leonard writes, “Frequently the assaults [on the press] took on a life of their own, independent of the crowd’s hunt for blacks who dared to integrate. ‘We ought to wipe the street with Yankee reporters,’ citizens yelled repeatedly at Central High in Little Rock. ‘Let’s kill every reporter we can find,’ was the call at Ole Miss.”32 During the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and 1956, reporters and cameramen were attacked while police looked the other way.33 In Little Rock, while covering the integration of Central High School, several members of the staff of Life magazine were beaten by segregationists.34 NBC reporter Richard Valeriani was clubbed with an ax handle during his coverage of the march in Selma while other newsmen were less seriously injured and had their equipment destroyed.35 Furthermore, multiple journalists were assaulted in Birmingham during the attacks on the Freedom Rides in 1961. Over the course of the civil rights movement, more than 50 reported attacks on the media took place.36 Yet even those reporters who were spared physical assaults were forced to operate in an environment of intimidation and fear. The press, and especially those targeted as “outside agitators,” worked under a constant threat of violence as segregationists made it widely known that the media were unwelcome. In Birmingham, Dan Rather was threatened at gunpoint and saved only by the intervention of his armed cameraman. Peter Jennings of ABC was chased out of Natchez, Mississippi, by the Ku Klux Klan, prompting the network to contact the state’s governor and demand protection. While covering the

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31

Donovan and Scherer, 11.

32

Leonard, 123.

33

David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 80.

34

Ibid., 114.

35

Bodroghkozy, 124.

36

Donovan and Scherer, 122.



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disappearance of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, Claude Sitton of The New York Times and Karl Fleming of Newsweek were warned to leave town or be killed.37 In addition to capturing the dangerous conditions in which reporters worked, Sitton and Fleming’s experience in Philadelphia exemplified the lens through which many southerners viewed the outside press. Fleming recalls, “When we emerged into the courthouse rotunda we were set upon by [southerners] who proceeded to tell us in no uncertain terms that if we didn’t get the hell out of town, they were going to kill us. Their Negroes were really happy ... and everything was fine until we damn Yankee newspapermen came around to stir up trouble.”38 Fleming and Sitton initially ignored the warning but reconsidered after the locals showed up at their motel with a half-gallon jar of corn whisky brandishing two 10-gauge shotguns. The journalists quickly left town. Reporter Robert Plante and cameraman Bernie Nudelman of CBS encountered a similar reaction in Selma when segregationists sprayed their camera lens with paint, harassed them with clubs and blamed the press for the demonstration.39 Under such conditions, members of the outside press often made efforts to conceal their affiliation with the media. For example, Sitton began cutting down his reporter’s notebook to a size that would more easily fit into his pocket and better conceal it from view. The strategy proved successful and several reporters covering the movement would eventually adopt the practice. Sitton also specifically requested white Pontiacs while working in Mississippi to match those driven by local law enforcement and often wore a London Fog raincoat to give the impression that he was a federal agent. While reporting in McComb, Mississippi, Sitton went a step further, dirtying up his shirt and shoes, messing up his hair, and casually chewing on a blade of grass to appear more like the southerners he covered.40 However, despite these efforts, local segregationists often kept close tabs on the press through wiretaps

37

Leonard, 12-14.

38

Jack Lyle, ed., The Black American and the Press (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1968), 30. 39

Bodroghkozy, 125.

40

Donovan and Scherer, 12.



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and surveillance. Fleming recalls, “They had a network of informers which consisted of Citizens’ Council people riding around in these pick-up trucks with the whiplash antennas and the rifles plainly showing in the windows. They, together with the Klan people and the police chiefs, kept the white rednecks, so-called, informed at all times where we were.”41 With this in mind, Fleming made it a practice to avoid hotels that would be difficult to escape, and Sitton refused to sit with his back to the door while covering the movement.42 To these outside journalists, the threats and dangers were very real. The Weapon of Libel

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Although vilified, targeted and victimized by segregationists, the national media pushed forward and exposed the evils and inequality of massive resistance and the South to the nation. However, while the attacks on the outside press by segregationist organizations, journalists and politicians certainly cultivated a dangerous environment for the media, it also set the stage for the use of legal pressure and libel law to silence voices of dissent. Prior to any legal action, southerners were taught to distrust the national media and to view their coverage of the movement as biased lies and propaganda. This, combined with the existing prejudice within the southern legal system, opened the doors to a greatly effective means of assault on press coverage deemed threatening to the southern way of life. Throughout the civil rights movement, the legal system was used as a method of social control, working to punish those who threatened the racial status quo in the South, as well as discourage others from stepping out of line.43 Not only did many southerners who opposed the Brown decision truly believe that law was on their side in the matter of integration, they also fully understood how the legal system could be manipulated to suppress African-American unrest. Upon its formation in 1954, the Citizens’ Council devoted its Legal Advisory Committee, one of its four standing committees, to deal with such matters. An early

41

Ibid., 12.

42

Donovan and Scherer, 12; Roberts and Klibanoff, 259.

43

Steven E. Barkan, “Legal Control of the Southern Civil Rights Movement,” American Sociological Review, 49.4 (Aug. 1984), 554.



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Citizens’ Council circular stated that the Legal Advisory Committee served to anticipate “moves by agitators and devise legal means for handling any problems that may arise.”44 As the movement progressed and gained national media attention, these legal tactics were also often used to retaliate against unfavorable press coverage. This was especially prevalent in cases involving the northern media, most notably the landmark libel suit of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.45 Unlike smaller local papers, national publications were largely immune to economic pressure and smear campaigns, but were prime targets for litigation. Segregationists exploited the widespread impression that the northern media were “outside agitators” and relied on this bias to bring retribution against the press in the courtroom. Rodney A. Smolla writes, “No strategy for squelching the media’s portrayal of conditions in the South ... carried more potential for success than the creative use of the law of libel.”46 Frequently, litigation was in response to accurate, truthful reporting, which was exactly what segregationists hoped to withhold from the public.47 In 1961, CBS was sued for $1.5 million by members of the Montgomery County Board of Registrars for broadcasting a program documenting the challenges African Americans faced when registering to vote. In 1962, retired General Edwin A. Walker sued several media outlets, including Hodding Carter’s Delta DemocratTimes, for a total of $20 million in response to reports that he had instigated violence during the Ole Miss riots.48 By 1964, 17 libel suits involving public officials and the press were pending in state and

44

Hodding Carter, III, The South Strikes Back (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1959), 33.

45

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)

46

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Rodney A. Smolla, Suing the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 43. 47

Ibid., 43.

48

Walker’s suit would eventually be heard by the Supreme Court in Associated Press v. Walker, 389 U.S. 28 (1967). Along with the ruling in Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, 388 U.S. 130 (1967), the Supreme Court decided against Walker by broadening Times v. Sullivan’s “actual malice” standard to include public figures as well as public officials; See also, Smolla, 54.



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federal courts. The cases targeted several facets of the media and sought a combined award of $288 million.49 As mentioned, the most prominent and important legal action of the period involved The New York Times. In 1960, the Times was sued for libel on two separate occasions for its civil rights content. The first, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, stemmed from the publication of a pro-civil rights advertisement that allegedly libeled public officials in Montgomery, Alabama, The second resulted from journalist Harrison Salisbury’s report on the “fear and hatred” that gripped a racially torn Birmingham. Together, the suits sought awards of over $6 million. The Times fought the charges over the next six years, with the Sullivan case reaching the Supreme Court and establishing legal precedent that would change the face of libel law. An examination of the prolonged battle surrounding the Times cases demonstrates both segregationist motivations as well as the legal challenges facing the northern media during the civil rights movement. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan New York Times Co. v. Sullivan was originally filed on April 19, 1960, after the Times printed a full-page advertisement on March 29 purchased by “The Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South.” The ad, which appeared on page 25 of the paper, was entitled “Heed Their Rising Voices” and documented the efforts being made by pro-civil rights students across the country, as well as the response from southern officials. Among the incidents mentioned was a claim that African-American student leaders had been expelled from Alabama State College after leading a group to sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” on the state capitol steps in Montgomery. This was reportedly followed by the arrival of “truckloads of police armed with shotguns and tear-gas” to the school’s campus. In protest, students refused to register for classes, at which point their dining hall was allegedly “padlocked in an attempt to starve them into submission.” In addition to this action against the students, the ad also noted attacks on Martin Luther King, declaring that the “southern violators” who were responsible ultimately wanted “to

49

Newsletter, Southern Publishers Association, Apr. 11, 1964, Hodding Carter and Betty Werlein Carter Papers, Mississippi State University.



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remove him physically as the leader to whom the students and millions of others ... look for guidance and support, and thereby to intimidate all leaders who may rise in the South.” The ad concluded by urging readers “to join hands with our fellow Americans in the South by supporting, with your dollars, this combined appeal for all three needs—the defense of Martin Luther King—the support of the embattled students—and the struggle for the right-to-vote.” A list of supporters including the names of 80 prominent Americans followed the claims.50 For segregationists, the advertisement represented another unwarranted attack by northern agitators aiming to further disgrace the South. Soon after the ad appeared, Alabama Secretary of State Bettye Frink proposed that legal action be taken against the Times for “falsifying the State of Alabama with lies.”51 A handful of Alabama and Montgomery politicians would take the advertisement’s claims more personally. Although the advertisement did not mention any “southern violators” by name, the group of public officials, including Commissioner of Public Affairs L.B. Sullivan, believed they had been directly implicated and thus libeled by the “false” allegations. At the urging of local attorney Merton Nachman, who believed victory would be almost certain, Sullivan filed a $500,000 libel suit against both the Times and four Alabama ministers whose signatures had appeared in the advertisement.52 Alabama Governor John Patterson followed with a suit asking for $1 million, while Montgomery Mayor Earl James and former City Commissioner Frank Parks also joined in the litigation, suing for $500,000 each.53 The Times questioned how Sullivan determined that the ad’s content implicated him specifically. Sullivan responded that as the

50

“Heed Their Rising Voices,” New York Times (New York, New York), March 29, 1960; Smolla, 29. Copyright © 2013. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

51

Harrison Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times. (New York: Times Books, 1960), 380. 52

Kermit Hall and Melvin Urofsky, New York Times v. Sullivan: Civil Rights, Libel Law, and the Free Press (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 27. 53

Smolla, 30.



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commissioner supervising the police department, he would be held accountable for any alleged police activity. Rodney Smolla describes the convoluted strategy of Sullivan’s attorneys, writing:

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Through a series of “house that Jack built” steps they were able to turn an ad that did not mention Sullivan and largely had nothing to do with him, into an ad “imputing” the bad conduct to Sullivan. They then turned around and used the same fact that many of the events had nothing to do with Sullivan to prove that the statements “imputing” improper conduct to him were false!54 Aside from the implications of wrongdoing, the plaintiffs also noted that several inaccuracies existed in the advertisement. Among them included the fact that only students who did not have a meal ticket as a result of their failing to register were barred from the dining hall. It was also eventually confirmed that the hall had never been padlocked. In addition, while the ad stated that Martin Luther King had been arrested seven times, in reality it had only been four. Along these same lines, it was claimed that the charge King had been assaulted by an officer was still in dispute. Sullivan also pointed out that although the fire bombings of King’s house had taken place, they occurred before he was in office, a fact that was not stated in the newspaper.55 These inaccuracies were crucial in proving that the advertisement constituted libel according to Alabama law. Once the Times admitted to the statement’s inaccuracies, which it did, damage was automatically presumed, leaving the prosecution only with the burden of demonstrating that the ad implicated Sullivan. Over the three-day trial, six witnesses testified that this was the case, and it took little time for the jury to agree. On November 3, 1960, after less than three hours of deliberation, the jury ruled for Sullivan, awarding him $500,000. Despite the accommodating nature of the Alabama libel law, the impact of southern bias for the northern media must be factored into this decision as well. Smolla writes, “A large part of the verdict was the product of the jury’s prejudice against what was perceived as a liberal

54

Ibid., 32.

55

Ibid., 31.



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New York newspaper’s officious meddling in the traditional regime of white supremacy in Alabama.”56 This prejudice was apparent on several different fronts during the trial, including from Judge Walter B. Jones, who made no secret of his support for states’ rights. He had previously published a document entitled “The Confederate Creed,” which stated his duties as a southern judge as he understood them. The document reads, “I believe, as a Confederate ... it is my duty to respect the laws and ancient ways of my people, and to stand up for the right of my state to determine what is good for its people in all local affairs.” In both Jones’s courtroom and the city of Montgomery, racial inequality was accepted and passionately defended. This fact was made evident throughout the trial, with Jones’s strictly enforcing segregated seating and even allowing a prosecuting attorney to repeatedly pronounce “negro” as “nigger,” despite the objections of the defense.57 Regardless of the facts, as a “northern agitator,” the Times faced an impossible uphill battle in Jones’s courtroom and with the local public. This atmosphere was captured throughout the trial by the Montgomery press. Upon hearing of the ad’s original publication, Montgomery Advertiser Editor Grover C. Hall Jr. “came roaring out into the newsroom and demanded to see the scandalous advertisement,” recalled Ray Jenkins, who was the city editor of the Alabama Journal at the time. As discussed, Hall had long held the belief that the national press ignored racial tensions in the North while amplifying those in the South, and the appearance of the advertisement added fuel to that fire.58 The following day, April 7, he responded to the ad with an editorial headlined “Will They Purge Themselves?” Hall stated that there were “voluntary liars” and “involuntary liars,” and that both had played a part in the advertisement’s publication. He wrote that it was The New York Times’s responsibility to purge itself of its “false witness,” and forcefully condemned the content of the ad. He also specifically referenced the misinformation concerning the students’ expulsion and the padlocking of the dining hall, describing the statements as “lies, lies, lies—and possibly willful ones on the part of the fund-raising

56

Ibid., 34.

57

Ibid., 33.

58

Ibid., 11.



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novelist who wrote those lines to prey on the credulity, selfrighteousness and misinformation of northern citizens.”59 This hostility in the local press continued after the announcement of Sullivan’s $500,000 award. On November 4, 1960, the day after the ruling, an Alabama Journal editorial reveled in the Times’s punishment. The piece read: The half million dollar judgment imposed on the New York Times et al by a Montgomery jury could have the effect of causing reckless publishers of the North … to make a resurvey of their habit of permitting anything detrimental to the South and its people to appear in their columns. That the South and the people of the South individually and collectively, are being libeled every day by Northern newspapers, magazines and their special correspondents is known by all men. ... Half a million dollars is a mere fraction of what is required to repair the damage of the South, Alabama and their people inflicted by the New York Times and other newspapers.60 According to the editorial, the ruling dispelled the northern media’s impression that they were “safe from prosecution for their offenses because they were far off” and “could be sued for their derelictions only in the courts of their home cities.”61 The threat of such legal repercussions was precisely what Sullivan and segregationists hoped to use to silence the press. “Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham” On April 12, 1960, an article unrelated to the Montgomery controversy appeared in The New York Times and led to the second libel suit

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59

Grover C. Hall Jr., “Will They Purge Themselves?”, Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), April 7, 1960, Turner Catledge Papers, Mississippi State University. Collection cited hereafter as Catledge Papers. 60

“Must Stick to the Truth,” Alabama Journal (Montgomery, AL), Nov. 4, 1960. 61

Ibid.



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directed toward the paper. Written by Harrison Salisbury, the piece was headlined “Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham” and detailed the racial unrest and injustice that existed in the Alabama city. Salisbury wrote that residents, both black and white, shared a community of fear, with some referring to Birmingham as the Johannesburg of America. There was no middle ground in Birmingham, he wrote. Every inch had “been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state’s apparatus.”62 Unlike “Heed Their Rising Voices,” Salisbury specifically mentioned the names of several city officials, such as Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, who he said had been elected on a platform of “race hate.” Salisbury noted that a favorite tactic of harassment for Connor was to arrest citizens on simple charges of vagrancy but hold them without bail for days, at times even without a phone call. He went on to describe numerous instances of racial injustice and inequality, emphasizing the lack of action taken by law enforcement to prevent such occurrences.63 The local media and public reaction to Salisbury’s articles proved to be even fiercer than that following “Heed Their Rising Voices.” Although some of the condemnation stemming from the ad had been absorbed by its sponsors, the repercussions following Salisbury’s work fell directly onto the paper and its journalist. In addition, the work was widely perceived as an intentional attack on the South, inspired by true malice rather than caused by misunderstanding. On April 15, the Birmingham News ran an editorial headlined “A Grave Disservice,” which declared that The New York Times had set “a new standard for anti-South propaganda” with the articles.64 In the Birmingham PostHerald, columnist John Temple Graves’s criticism was aimed at Salisbury, suggesting that his ill-will toward the South could have been a result of his growing up in Minnesota, the “most South-hating of the

62

Harrison Salisbury, “Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham,” New York Times (New York, New York), April 12, 1960, Catledge Papers. 63

Ibid.

64

“A Grave Disservice,” Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), April 15, 1960, Catledge Papers.



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states.”65 The derision for Salisbury spread beyond the city of Birmingham, with the Gadsden Times chiding, “The Times writer took to task one of the nation’s finest peoples, and when he had finished left their names dirtied and smudged by one of the most biased jobs of reporting it has been our misfortune to witness.”66 In Charleston, South Carolina’s News and Courier, the implications of Salisbury’s work went beyond sullying Birmingham’s reputation. An April 16 editorial read: Granting his skill in the use of words, we find Mr. Salisbury’s approach to race relations in the South more like a propagandist’s than the objective reporter’s. If The Times is intent on stirring revolution in the South, as it did with its promotional articles on Fidel Castro in Cuba, it is going about its business with determination and skill. Such distorted pictures of the South do the American Republic no good in the eyes of the world. They may bring suffering to peaceful citizens of both races in the South.67 Although the sentiment of these journalists was often echoed by the white southern public, many African Americans expressed their unconditional support for Salisbury’s assessment of Birmingham, often through letters to Times Editor Turner Catledge. On April 27, 1960, Birmingham resident George Hall shared, “Congratulations on the excellent articles by Harrison Salisbury. As a Negro who has lived in Birmingham all my life I can attest to every fact that he so brilliantly wrote.” Elton Nessler of Talladega, Alabama, agreed, describing Birmingham as a hell hole for African Americans and referring to

65

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John Temple Graves, “Almost Total Lie From the Times,” Birmingham PostHerald, (Birmingham, AL), April 16, 1960, Catledge Papers. 66

Gadsden Times editorial, reprinted in “Times’ Attack on Alabama Stirs Statewide Indignation,” Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), Apr. 25, 1960, Catledge Papers.

67

“N.Y. Times Libels Birmingham, Ala., In Picturing City of Race Terror,” Charleston News and Courier (Charleston, SC), Apr. 16, 1960, Catledge Papers.



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Salisbury’s article as “THE GOSPEL TRUTH.” He went on to urge that Catledge not give in to the Birmingham officials’ demand for a retraction, writing, “You would do a great injustice to Negroes (Colored people) all over the world if you retract his article.”68 An African-American minister responded directly to the criticism of Salisbury coming from the southern press in a letter to the Birmingham News. The letter, which was printed in the paper’s “Voice of the People” section, referred to Salisbury’s work as the “naked truth about racial relations in Birmingham,” remarking that the News had been “sparing no pains in trying to either infuriate the public, or cover up the nasty things written in the articles.” The minister continued, “Evidently Mr. Salisbury became sick of the soul as he saw a great city and state being strangled and cut in its jugular vein by men in public office who are so obsessed with the failure of 1865 that their words and acts serve as a deterrent to racial progress so badly needed in 1960.”69 Many of those who wrote letters further demonstrated the repressive atmosphere of the city in their requests that, in the event that the correspondence be published, their names be withheld for fear of retribution. In response to the Salisbury article’s allegations, Eugene Connor sought legal counsel at the Birmingham law firm of Lange, Simpson, Robinson and Somerville. The attorneys advised Connor that while the city itself did not have cause for legal action, Birmingham’s three city commissioners did.70 Upon this advice, Connor, along with the city’s two other commissioners, Mayor James W. Morgan and J.T. Waggoner, filed suit for libel against the Times on May 6, 1960, each asking for $500,000. On May 31, the three city commissioners from neighboring Bessemer, which was also mentioned in the article, filed identical suits. Three weeks later, a Birmingham police detective took legal action, asking for $150,000. Combined with the pending cases in

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68

George Hall to Turner Catledge, April 27, 1960, Catledge Papers; Elton Nessler to Turner Catledge, April 27, 1960, Catledge Papers.

69

“Negro Minister On Salisbury,” Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), April 26, 1960, Catledge Papers. 70

“Letter from James A. Simpson to J.W. Morgan, J.T. Waggoner, and Eugene Connor,” Apr. 14, 1960, J.W. Morgan Papers, Birmingham Public Library Archives. Collection cited hereafter as Morgan Papers.



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Montgomery, the New York Times Co. was being sued for $6,150,000 in Alabama. Concerning the legal action, Times attorney Louis Loeb remarked, “In all the years I have practiced law nothing had arisen that was more worrisome. Nothing scared me more than this litigation.”71 As the case developed, Loeb came to better understand the dynamics of the South and the challenges facing the paper. When legal issues arose in the past, the Times generally collaborated with a law firm based in the area in which the case originated. Yet when Loeb sought local counsel in Alabama, the legal community demonstrated a response similar to that of the press. He found little cooperation, as it seemed any affiliation with the Times was anathema. Anthony Lewis explained this reaction, writing, “State and local politicians had whipped up outrage against the New York Times ... denouncing the paper as an interfering Northern agitator. ... Fear of association with the Times marked even lawyers, who by tradition and ethic are supposed to feel free to represent unpopular clients.” After failing to find an attorney in Montgomery, the Times partnered instead with the Birmingham office of Beddow, Embry and Beddow, a firm known for defending a large number of African Americans.72 However, the ill-will toward the Times and its attorney’s continued as the case developed, with the newspaper’s lawyers having to even use false names at Alabama hotels as a safety precaution.73 The reputation of the Times and other northern media outlets in the South was an important factor in the development of both libel suits. Considering the ill will toward the Times, defense attorneys worked to prove that the paper had not done enough business in Alabama for the trials to be held in the state’s courts. On the other hand, the plaintiffs strongly preferred that the suits be tried in Alabama, or at least some place in the South. This was apparent in the prosecution’s legal maneuverings in both cases. In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the location of the trial was the primary reason that the four Alabama ministers were named as defendants. Lewis writes, “The four ministers

71

Salisbury, 381-382.

72

Anthony Lewis, Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (New York: Random House, 1991), 24. 73

Hall and Urofsky, 46.



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were named as defendants along with the Times ... for a shrewd legal reason. The plaintiffs’ lawyers calculated that having the ministers in there would prevent the Times from removing the cases from the state court to a federal court.”74 According to the U.S. Constitution, in a civil suit involving plaintiffs and defendants from different states, it was possible to have the case tried in a neutral federal court in order to avoid any local biases. This was an option unless co-defendants were named who resided in the same state as the plaintiff, which was the case with the four ministers, who were residents of Alabama. As a result of the ministers being named as co-defendants, the case was not eligible to be removed to a federal court and thus had to be tried in an Alabama state court.75 Although it was officially ruled that the Sullivan suits would be held in Alabama in July 1960, the cases against Harrison Salisbury were not as easily decided. The Times had appealed a district court ruling allowing the Salisbury cases to be tried in Alabama, leading plaintiff attorneys to develop contingency plans in the event that the original decision was reversed. During this process, the importance of keeping the cases in the South, and exploiting the prejudice against the paper, was apparent. On March 8, attorney James Simpson wrote Commissioners Connor, Morgan and Waggoner to discuss the situation. Simpson stated, “If the Court invalidates our service [in Alabama], we can secure service in Georgia, where The Times maintains an office and an agent, we think, subject to service.” The plan was to file additional suits in Georgia while the originals were waiting for a final jurisdiction decision in Alabama. Simpson writes, “If we lose here, we can then go to Georgia and try those cases. If we win here, we can dismiss the Georgia suits and pay the court costs over there and litigate our controversy here.” The attorneys eventually decided against this action, leading to a three-year legal battle over jurisdiction.76 Regardless, in both the Sullivan and Salisbury suits, the value of a southern jury to the plaintiffs’ cases was clear, demonstrating

74

Lewis, 11.

75

Ibid., 14.

76

James A. Simpson to Plaintiffs, 8 Mar. 1961, Morgan Papers; James A. Simpson to Plaintiffs, 10 Apr. 1961, Morgan Papers.



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the prosecution’s anticipated dependence on bias rather than neutral legal precedent.

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The Chilling Effect The dangers posed by The New York Times law suits extended beyond financial damage and included legitimate threats to the freedom of the press. As discussed, one motive of the legal action was to intimidate the media into silence and conformity. This strategy was only strengthened with the initial ruling against the Times in the Sullivan case. Kermit Hall and Melvin Urofsky write, “While violence raged in the streets of Birmingham and elsewhere, authorities used the decision in Sullivan v. New York Times to harass the press, hoping to force northern media to stop, or at least cut back on, their coverage of events in the South.”77 Although the Times was not scared off of the civil rights story altogether, the legal pressure did have an effect. In December 1960, Turner Catledge wrote that he was “frightened as hell at this new weapon of intimidation which seems to be in the making.”78 As a result of the lawsuits, the Times experienced severe limitations on its ability to report freely and without prior restraint. Amid the ongoing litigation surrounding jurisdiction in the Salisbury cases, the Times withdrew all of its reporters from Alabama. This was done to sever “any meaningful connection of business or property or person” with the state and prevent legal process from being served on one of its reporters.79 Had Times writers remained, the prosecution’s argument that the case should be heard in Alabama would have been significantly strengthened. Without reporters of its own in the state, the Times was forced to rely primarily on the wire services, which restricted its access to coverage of the movement. In January 1962, Catledge described the Times’s position in Alabama as “severely handicapped,” yet he could not overlook the potential risks to the paper’s reporters and The New York Times itself. 80 An April 1962 memorandum to Catledge detailing

77

Hall and Urofsky, 83.

78

Turner Catledge to Lee Hill, 30 Dec. 1960, Catledge Papers.

79

Lewis, 24.

80

Harrison Salisbury to Claude Sitton, May 31, 1962, Catledge Papers; Turner Catledge to James Simpson, Jan. 31, 1962, Catledge Papers.



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the latest legal advice illustrated the paper’s concern, reading, “The position is that the litigants, having failed to obtain the service against The New York Times by other means, might very well try to serve a summons on any representative of The New York Times who was sent to Alabama.” Times counsel Tom Daly warned that the paper would be running “a grave risk” by sending any reporters into the state. He advised it wait until the litigation had run its course and even until after a new governor was sworn into office. It was believed that the present governor, John Patterson, was actually funding the litigation against the Times. The paper eventually did send a reporter into the state that September, before the election, but only after the Alabama Supreme Court had upheld Sullivan’s libel judgment in August. In the words of Catledge, “Nothing worse could happen to us from now.”81 During this same period, the Times also demonstrated how the suits could affect decisions surrounding which stories were to be run. The potential for instigating an additional lawsuit, or simply exacerbating those already pending, was a prevalent concern. Certain articles that dealt with sensitive civil rights subjects were evaluated by the Times’s legal team before appearing in print. For example, in March 1961, Catledge consulted his attorneys concerning a piece Claude Sitton had written about the situation in Mississippi. Although Loeb gave the story the go-ahead, it was not without warning. In a memorandum to Catledge, Loeb writes, “It is our opinion that the Times should go ahead and publish it. You understand, of course, that we cannot guarantee that someone won’t sue after it is published based upon the example of what is going on in Alabama.”82 At times, though, it was decided that stories should be killed rather than risk further legal action. In November 1962, after Times’s reporters had reentered Alabama, Catledge made the decision to hold Sitton’s story on a political development in Birmingham concerning Bull Connor. Residents had recently voted to replace the commission system with a mayoral and nine-member city council system,

81

Lewis, 102; Memorandum from Clifton Daniel to Turner Catledge, April 17, 1962, Catledge Papers; Turner Catledge to Arthur Sulzberger, Oct. 1, 1962, Catledge Papers. 82

Memorandum from L.M. Loeb to Turner Catledge, March 29, 1961, Catledge Papers.



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eliminating Connor’s position as commissioner of public safety. In the report, Sitton discussed Connor’s history as a segregationist, writing that during his time in office, “Negroes have complained frequently that the rights accorded them have fallen far short of those guaranteed by the Constitution.” He also addressed Birmingham citizens’ feelings about the possibility for racial progress with Connor in office, writing, “A number of prominent residents contended that there would be little hope for resolving the city’s racial difficulties under the present Commissioners.”83 Yet after a November 25 memorandum from News Editor Bob Phelps advised against running the story, Catledge ordered it killed. The memorandum reads, “On the advice of our lawyers, we are holding this Claude Sitton story out of the paper. Tom Daly says that it might indicate malice in the pending case.”84 While much of the southern media at the time seemed to overlook the threat to the press unfolding before them, industry and northern publications expressed serious concern. This stemmed not only from the potential that papers would regulate content to avoid suits, but that they might also withdraw reporters from areas with service of process statutes similar to those in Alabama. As had been seen in The New York Times cases, sending reporters to the South could become a legal liability. Hall and Urofsky write, “The rules of libel as Judge Jones had interpreted them made it practically impossible to write about the realities of life in the Deep South in the early 1960s. …”85 Washington Post Executive Editor J.R. Wiggins addressed these concerns in the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Wiggins warned that laws such as those in Alabama:

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Enormously increase the liability of the press for its own defense against such suits in communities where jurors may be hostile to them. Where the press is liable to ruinous reprisal for publication, its investigation into and reporting on affairs will be timid and excessively cautious. The theoretical

83

Unprinted story by Claude Sitton, Nov. 20, 1962, Catledge Papers.

84

Memorandum from Bob Phelps to Turner Catledge, Nov. 25, 1962, Catledge Papers. 85

Hall and Urofsky, 86.



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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression freedom to get information, and to print without prior restraint, will be practically diminished in value if the costs of defending against bare allegations of error threaten the survival of the newspaper.86

He went on to write that this kind of prior restraint may “inhibit the kind of reporting that has served in the past to expose local tyranny and oppression.”87 A similar warning was presented in a letter distributed by the Lawyer’s Committee on the Alabama Libel Suits in late 1962. The committee, made up of 23 lawyers from Washington, D.C., and New York City, sent the letter to the deans of every law school in the nation, as well as to all bar associations. Citing the pending suits against the Times, the lawyers emphasized the “indiscriminate use of the libel laws of the State of Alabama as a device to stifle truthful reporting and open discussion of conditions arising in the South.” They warned of the potential punishment and intimidation that could result for those who voiced unpopular opinions about race relations in the South, writing, “No person will remain immune from legal and economic attack if he utters beliefs contrary to those held by his fellow citizens. … No newspaper will be free to print the truth, where the facts about social injustice would inflame, without risk of bankruptcy.”88 This potential for financial ruin held true even for The New York Times, which in the early 1960s was barely making a profit and likely would not have been able to survive a $6 million judgment against it.89 In addition to the concern surrounding the impact that these lawsuits were having on the freedom of the press was the potential impediment to the civil rights movement itself. The petition of certiorari filed by the four ministers implicated in the Sullivan suit addressed this potential, classifying the legal action as another attempt

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86

J.R. Wiggins, “The Alabama Actions Against the Times: Liabilities of the Press May Be Enormously Expanded.” Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 438 (Jan. 1961), p. 9, Catledge Papers.

87

Ibid., 9.

88

“Lawyer’s Committee on the Alabama Libel Suits,” undated, Catledge Papers. 89

Lewis, 107.



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by the state of Alabama to “prevent its Negro citizens from achieving full civil rights.” The petition reads: [The state] now strikes at the rights of free speech and press— roots of our democracy. To silence people from criticizing and speaking out against its wrongful segregation activities, Alabama officials now utilize civil libel. ... If this case stands unreviewed and unreversed, not only will the struggles of Southern Negroes towards civil rights be impeded, but Alabama will forever have given permission to place a curtain of silence over its wrongful activities.90

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Harrison Salisbury later reiterated the importance of the Sullivan case to the movement, writing, “Had the Supreme Court’s verdict gone the other direction the burden of censorship and official intimidation might well have enabled the Southern judicial strategy to prolong lawlessness as a final barrier against the revolution in Civil Rights.”91 As discussed, for the movement, uninhibited press coverage of this lawlessness was imperative to bringing the reality of southern injustice to the rest of the nation. The concerns of both the press and civil rights leaders seemed to fall on deaf ears until January 1964, when Times v. Sullivan reached the United States Supreme Court. After fighting an uphill battle in the courts of the South, the paper would finally find vindication. Although the Court recognized that the Times had been negligent in some aspects of the ad’s publication, it ruled 9-0 that the paper’s actions did not constitute the newly defined condition of “actual malice.” On March 9, 1964, Justice William Brennan’s majority opinion stated: The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with “actual malice”—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not. ... We think the evidence

90

Ibid., 110.

91

Salisbury, 389.



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Massive Resistance and Media Suppression against the Times supports, at most, a finding of negligence in failing to discover the misstatements, and is constitutionally insufficient to show the recklessness that is required for a finding of actual malice.92

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The Court also considered the potential impact that upholding the previous rulings could have on the press and prior restraint. Justice Brennan writes, “A rule compelling the critic of official conduct to guarantee the truth of all his factual assertions—and to do so on pain of libel judgments virtually unlimited in amount—leads to a comparable ‘self-censorship.’”93 Justice Hugo Black echoed this in his concurrence, writing, “The half-million-dollar verdict does give dramatic proof ... that state libel laws threaten the very existence of an American press virile enough to publish unpopular views on public affairs and bold enough to criticize the conduct of public officials.” He goes on to specifically discuss the civil rights movement and the hostility that was directed toward The New York Times as an “outside agitator.”94 As integral as the decision was to the civil rights movement, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan also stands as the landmark case in modernday libel law involving public officials. The ruling established the actual malice standard, requiring that public officials must prove that a defendant printed information “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”95 This standard effectively placed the burden of proof with the public official, leaving the prosecution to show evidence of “clear and convincing clarity” that a defendant had in fact known the information to be false or shown reckless disregard for the information’s validity. Under the existing Alabama libel law, the prosecution only needed to prove the falsity of a statement. Furthermore, the ruling established the actual malice standard as a national definition of libel against public officials, protecting defendants from prosecution under individual state libel laws like that in Alabama. Smolla writes, “Times v. Sullivan revolutionized

92

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 280, 288 (1964)

93

Ibid., 279.

94

Ibid., 254, 294.

95

Ibid., 254, 280.



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the American law of libel because in one sudden burst of federal judicial power, state libel laws were made subject to the structures of the First Amendment, and, with that ruling, hundreds of years of evolving state libel laws were ruled obsolete.”96 The Sullivan ruling had immediate implications for many of the other civil rights libel cases still pending, including that against Harrison Salisbury. As a result of the “actual malice” ruling, all of the libel suits against Salisbury were thrown out except for that of Bull Connor. Connor was initially awarded $40,000 by a jury in U.S. District Court, but the award was overturned in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit based on the plaintiff’s inability to prove the actual malice condition of a “reckless disregard for the truth.” The Court concluded that Salisbury had shown “a high standard of reporting practices” and that there was no evidence “he misquoted his sources or gave the information acquired from them a different slant than intended as is so often done.”97 The years of segregationist attacks and pressures against the outside media illustrate the importance of the national press in the overall mission of both the civil rights movement and massive resistance. The legal standard established by the Times v. Sullivan ruling protected journalists against the segregationist use of libel to silence the press, allowing a true picture of the South to be shown to Americans across the country without fear of falling victim to baseless legal retribution. It was precisely this picture that segregationists sought to hide from the nation through their public condemnations, violent assaults and legal attacks against the press. However, just as segregationist pressures failed to silence dissent from within the South, national media worked to discredit the myths of massive resistance before the eyes of the nation throughout the movement.

96

Smolla, 50.

97

New York Times Co. v. Connor, 365 F.2d 567 (5th Cir. 1966)



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CHAPTER 7

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The Decline of Massive Resistance

Prior to the 1954 Brown ruling and the civil rights movement, whites and blacks in the South lived in an environment largely insulated from the rest of the nation on matters of racial progress and equality. Despite the Civil War and reconstruction, segregation and white supremacy continued to reign supreme and were both reflected as well as perpetuated in the southern power structure and culture. The separation of the races was viewed as common sense and natural for many, and the ideology and myths behind southern whites’ control had for decades gone largely unchallenged, establishing the consensus that supported the hegemonic power of segregationists and white supremacists. However, the Brown ruling marked the beginning not only of an assault on segregation, but also on the ideology and myths that sustained it. The movement that followed repeatedly challenged the beliefs and arguments that had necessitated segregated facilities and defended African-American subjugation. African Americans in the South no longer accepted their role as second-class citizens and, once exposed to the brutalities of segregation, national public opinion also turned against the “southern way of life.” However, in response to these challenges, the transition from consensus to coercion emerged as the South descended into a decade of massive resistance. The “iron times” of which Stuart Hall wrote became a reality for the South. As the coordinated defense of segregation developed, extremism pushed moderation to the fringes and segregationist leaders sought to prevent integration at all costs. As many southerners tried to protect the ideologies and myths behind segregation, dissent on the issue of civil rights and massive resistance became anathema in many parts of the South. In attempts to silence 189

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dissent, segregationists applied pressure to anyone, regardless of race, deemed a threat to the status quo. This study demonstrated the prevalence of such pressures on the media. As leaders of massive resistance and civil rights activists struggled to define their respective causes, and ultimately the South and segregation, the media became a central battleground. The southern white hegemonic control was largely dependent on maintaining the “preferred meanings” of the South and segregation both in the minds of southerners as well as the nation. Although much of the southern media upheld the myths of massive resistance, these ideas, as well as the more direct methods of segregationist resistance, were often challenged by the outside press and a handful of southern journalists. In response, segregationists worked to discredit and suppress this media coverage along with the claims and efforts of the federal government and civil rights leaders. Through organizations such as the Citizens’ Council and Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, as well as with the cooperation of much of the southern press, segregationists not only perpetuated the myths of massive resistance, but also attacked, chastised, and in some cases successfully silenced voices of dissent within the press. The experiences of moderate southern journalists in Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas exemplify the breadth of segregationist backlash against the media. Although many of these journalists maintained their commitment to segregation throughout the civil rights movement, by simply urging law and order and questioning the extremist methods of massive resistance, they posed serious public threats to the myths behind many southerners’ die-hard defense of the southern way of life. Through their writing, they illustrated the absurdity of many massive resistance tactics and arguments, as well as demonstrated that the South was by no means voluntarily solid, but was rather coerced and pressured into the appearance of a united front. Furthermore, amidst segregationist condemnations of an overbearing and tyrannical federal government, these journalists’ accurate portrayals of the Citizens’ Councils and Sovereignty Commissions, as well as the corruption within southern state governments and legal systems, demonstrated where the true tyranny lay. In the midst of a public relations battle both inside the South and out, this was exactly what segregationists hoped to avoid. Hodding Carter III recalled,



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“What [segregationists] really did not want was the informed insider talking to the world about what was wrong with the place. They figured they could pretty much control things as long as it was kept inside the family.”1 For journalists such as P.D. East and Ira Harkey, the segregationist pressure ultimately proved too much to endure. After guiding the Pascagoula Chronicle through the economic turmoil that developed after the integration of Ole Miss, Harkey sold the paper to Ralph Nicholson of Tallahassee, Florida, for over $1 million. Fourteen years earlier, Harkey had purchased the paper for only $106,000. Before the sale, Nicholson had promised Harkey he would maintain the paper’s stance on integration. Unfortunately, the promise was broken as Nicholson began to side with segregationists soon after he took over. Harkey left the South in July 1963, moving to Reno, Nevada, and eventually would go on to join the faculty of The Ohio State University in 1965.2 Fearing for his life, P.D. East left Mississippi for Alabama in December 1963. However, with the help of others and a regular reliance on reprints, the Petal Paper continued to be produced until East’s death of liver failure in 1971.3 For Hazel Brannon Smith, the economic and legal backlash she experienced plunged her into massive debt, and her newspapers remained open only through outside support. The one-time socialite and world traveler was never able to overcome the financial obstacles that emerged during her battle with segregationists. Amazingly, the Advertiser remained in operation until a foreclosure on all of her properties in 1985, when it was estimated she owed creditors $250,000, including a $34,000 printing bill.4 Although Hodding Carter III

1

Hodding Carter, Author Interview, November 18, 2010.

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2

David L. Bennett, “Ira Harkey Jr., and the Pascagoula Chronicle,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 203.

3

Gary Huey, Rebel With a Cause: P.D. East, Southern Liberalism, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1953-1971 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1985), 201.

4

Mark Newman, “Hazel Brannon Smith and Holmes County, Mississippi, 1936-1964: The Making of a Pulitzer Prize Winner,” Journal of Mississippi



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successfully continued the fight against extremism after his father turned over control of the Delta Democrat-Times in the early 1960s, the paper remained under boycott in some areas of Mississippi until 1969, noticeably impacting its bottom line. It was not until this boycott was lifted and segregationist pressure subsided within the state, Carter later recalled, that the paper began to turn a healthy profit.5 In Little Rock, Harry Ashmore saw the integration of Central High School through, but left his post at the Gazette for a position with the Fund for the Republic in 1959. In addition to the appeal of the opportunity itself, Ashmore’s decision was in part due to a belief the Gazette would recover more quickly from the segregationist backlash if he left the paper.6 Unfortunately, Ashmore’s fellow Little Rock editor, Daisy Bates, was unable to ride out the segregationist pressure against the State Press. However, she continued her leadership role within the Arkansas civil rights movement and would be an active member of the national NAACP throughout the 1960s.7 In Alabama, Buford Boone remained a voice of reason at the Tuscaloosa News as integration slowly progressed in the state, culminating with the dramatic desegregation of the University of Alabama in 1963. Although he did not experience the longstanding pressures waged against the Mississippi journalists, he remained a target of segregationists and specifically Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Robert Shelton. In addition to repeatedly attacking Boone through letters to the editor and speeches to the Klan, Shelton sued Boone for libel in both 1964 and 1965 for comments critical of the KKK, seeking $500,000 in damages in each case. Shelton would technically win the first of the suits, but was

History 54 (February 1992): 72, 87; Arthur J. Kaul, “Hazel Brannon Smith,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 260. Copyright © 2013. LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

5

Hodding Carter III, Keynote address given at the Civil Rights and the Press Symposium, Syracuse University, April 25, 2004.

6

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), 211. 7

Grif Stockley, Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 259.



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awarded only $500. The second of the suits was eventually dropped.8 These journalists operated in an environment in which conformity largely ruled the day. They served not only as direct threats to the myths of massive resistance, but also as much-needed moderate voices against the extremism that had developed in the South. These journalists, Roberts and Klibanoff write:

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Stepped into a vacuum created by southern politicians who did not want to be associated with racial integration. … The national racial trauma might have been even more agonizing if the liberal and moderate editors had not assumed leadership and reached out to the rest of the nation. ... If not for these editors, the gulf between the South and the rest of the nation might have grown wider and harder to bridge.9 As the voices of reason in what amounted to be a silenced South under the pressure and extremism of massive resistance, these journalists made the conscious decisions to forgo profit and social standing within their communities, in many cases putting their safety at risk, in order to speak out for what they believed was right. The pressures against them not only challenged their own livelihoods but also the freedom of the press and their role as the Fourth Estate. Similar to the concern segregationists had with the dissenting southern press, the national media further challenged the attempts of massive resistance leaders to win the support of Americans outside of the South. Through stories, images and film of the civil rights struggle, the national press opened the eyes of many Americans, including politicians, to the brutality and oppression in which many African Americans lived. In doing so, massive resistance arguments defending segregation on grounds of separate but equal and African-American complacency crumbled under the pressure of the national media’s attention. In response, segregationists utilized propaganda and supportive southern media organizations to not only attempt to discredit

8

Aimee Edmondson, “In Sullivan’s Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel Law During the Civil Rights Movement” (doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri, 2008), 120, 126-127.

9

Roberts and Klibanoff, 405.



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the northern press, but to present it as a collection of “South-hating” propagandists actively attempting to destroy the southern way of life. In addition to cultivating an often-dangerous environment in which many outside reporters were assaulted and attacked, this vilification left little hope for the national media when facing all-white southern juries during the multiple libel suits that would emerge in the 1960s. Combined, the pressures against the northern and southern media demonstrate the pervasiveness and power of the racist orthodoxy and the dangerous implications of such widespread social control. Although racism may have always been at the core, the level of conformity required by the southern establishment ultimately prevented the freedom of expression and public debate for all citizens. Journalists were unable to even objectively report news of the civil rights movement without fear of segregationist backlash. Press freedom applied only within the parameters of the southern way of life and any deviation from what appeared to be outright support of segregation and social inequality was met with fierce resistance. From rural Mississippi weeklies to The New York Times, no voice of dissent was safe.

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MASSIVE RESISTANCE SUBSIDES Despite the fervor with which leaders of massive resistance vowed to never accept integration, reality slowly crept in as the federal government enacted undeniable changes in the South. As public schools and facilities began to desegregate during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the cause of massive resistance became increasingly futile. For many segregationists, any question as to the federal government’s commitment to desegregation and equal rights was answered as the massive resistance strongholds of Alabama and Mississippi were forced into compliance at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama in 1962 and 1963, respectively. By 1964, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act the following year, the myths of massive resistance and the ideology of white supremacy came into direct conflict with the broad new federal statutes. Wilhoit writes, “In their hearts, the majority of Massive Resisters doubtless continued to believe the myths of their movement, but after 1964 they were rebels without



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legal or moral cause, ideological pariahs in search of a viable creed. Their drums, if not silent, were muted.”10 In such an environment, the organizations that had been at the forefront of massive resistance withered, and many southern politicians backed down from their segregation-at-all-costs stands. With the exit of Ross Barnett and the inauguration of Governor Paul Johnson in Mississippi, even the most extreme of the southern states began to follow a more moderate path toward compliance with federal civil rights legislation. The once-feared Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission reflected the change, transitioning from the “eyes and ears” of the resistance movement to a promoter of “moderation and positive acceptance of change among the state’s officials as well as its white citizenry.”11 However, despite this change, the organization’s mission of improving the image of the state of Mississippi remained. In 1966, a bill was introduced to the Mississippi Legislature to officially change the Commission’s name to the Mississippi Information Agency, reflecting its focus on refuting the “distortions or falsehoods written or told” about the state. Yet amidst opposition from remaining bitter-end segregationist leaders who believed the organization’s focus should remain on states’ rights, the bill was defeated. Although the Commission continued to operate under its original title for seven more years, it was far from the powerful segregationist organ it had once been. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission closed permanently on June 30, 1973. Like the Sovereignty Commission, the Citizens’ Council’s size and influence waned as integration spread throughout the South. Whites who had been swept up by the tide of massive resistance in the 1950s began to grow disenchanted with the Citizens’ Council and other bitterend segregationists as their extremist tactics failed to produce lasting results. McMillen writes, “Once it had become apparent that some degree of desegregation was unavoidable, that the nation’s muchvaunted commitment to racial justice could not again be deferred

10

Francis Wilhoit, The Politics of Massive Resistance (New York: G. Braziller, 1973), 214.

11

Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 175.



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indefinitely, widespread public ardor for organized defiance cooled.”12 Although this did not necessarily indicate a change in many southerners’ perspectives on racial equality, by the mid-1960s, the actions of the federal government demonstrated that “last-ditch defiance was utterly futile.”13 By 1965, even Citizens’ Council stalwart Judge Tom P. Brady conceded to the authority of the Supreme Court. However, the Citizens’ Council remained in operation until 1989, yet it never regained the standing and influence it had held within the South in the 1950s and 1960s. The decline of these organizations, and segregationist extremism in general, indicated more than simply leaders’ realization that resistance was futile. As it became clear to the South as a whole that even the most extreme tactics to prevent integration would fail when faced with federal intervention, tolerance for that extremism waned considerably. In the years following the Brown ruling, segregationists operated with an “ends justify the means” mentality. However, when those ends became unattainable, justification became increasingly difficult. Wilhoit writes, “The growing disenchantment of southern moderates after 1960 with the counterrevolution’s extremist leadership gradually produced more open dissent in the South, which helped directly to soften the intransigence of die-hard legislators, governors and bureaucrats.”14 Furthermore, as Americans outside of the South were exposed to the brutalities waged against civil rights protesters, they, too, demanded change. George Lewis writes, “By 1965 and the denouement of the Selma conflagrations, it was clear that what little national tolerance there had been for figures in the mold of Bull Connor and Sheriff Jim Clark had effectively dissipated.”15 The result was the return of moderation in the South.

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12

Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 362.

13

Ibid., 266.

14

Wilhoit, 216.

15

George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (London: Hoddler Arnold, 2006), 187.



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Overall, the experiences of the dissenting press within massive resistance not only illustrate the level of suppression that occurred in many areas of the South during the civil rights movement, but also the importance of ideas, myths and ideology in maintaining social control and hegemony. Be it through the use of propaganda and the segregationist media, or the attempts to silence challenges to the status quo, the press and other means of mass communication were central to the efforts to maintain the myths and ideology of massive resistance. The survival of these ideas within the South and the nation would have allowed the hegemonic control of the white South to continue unabated. However, through media coverage of the sacrifices made by civil rights advocates, as well as of the atrocities wrought by segregationist racism and extremism, this control was effectively challenged. Although the success of the civil rights movement ultimately lies with the activists, the media played an integral role in placing the struggle, and the segregationist backlash, on a stage for the nation and the world to see.



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References

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Archives Abernethy (Thomas) Collection, J.D. Williams Library Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Miss. Campbell (Will D.) Papers, McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Miss. Carter (Hodding and Betty Werlein) Papers. Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Starkville, Miss. Catledge (Turner) Papers, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Starkville, Miss. Citizens’ Council Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Miss. Citizens’ Council Collection, J.D. Williams Library Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Miss. East (P.D.) Collection. McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Miss. East (P.D.) Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass. Eastland (James) Collection, J.D. Williams Library Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Miss. Johnson Family (Paul B.) Papers, McCain Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Starkville, Miss. Meyer (Henry) Papers, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Starkville, Miss. Morgan (J.W.) Papers, Birmingham Public Library Archives, Birmingham, Ala. Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Miss. 199

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Index

16th Street Baptist Church, 8, 22 A Message from Mississippi, 55 A.P. v. Walker, 10, 170 ABC, 165, 167 Abernethy, Tom, 164 African-American complacency, 6, 54, 57-59, 158-159, 193 Alabama Journal, 175 Alabama State Legislature, 155 Allen, Steve, 88, 134 Arkansas Democrat, 151 Arkansas Gazette, 125, 148-149, 150, 192 Arkansas State Sovereignty Commission, 148, 190 Ashmore, Harry, 3, 5, 21, 123, 148-149, 151, 192 Associated Press, 47, 75, 77 Atlanta Constitution, 125 Atlanta Journal, 135, 138 Atlanta Nine, 47 Auburn University, 3, 11, 155 Barnett, Ross, 16, 42, 45, 69, 103, 108, 120, 137-138, 140141, 143, 195 Barrett, Edward, 129

Barton, Billy, 135-136, 138, 140, 145, 148 Bates, Daisy, 3, 151-152, 192 Beddow, Embry and Beddow law firm, 179 Belafonte, Harry, 134 Bessemer, Ala., 178 Birmingham News, 176 Birmingham Post-Herald, 176 Birmingham, Ala., 3, 8, 22, 158, 167, 171, 176-179, 182 Black, Hugo, 186 Blass, Joe, 75 Boone, Buford, 3, 153-154, 192 Borinsky, Ernst, 145 Boyle, Sarah Patton, 133 Braden, Carl, 86 Brady, Tom P., 35-36, 39, 49, 58, 63, 196 Brennan, William, 185 Broadus, Don, 100-101 Brower, Sidna, 143-144, 148 Brown II, 14, 104 Brown University, 75, 111 Brown v. Board of Education, 1-2, 6, 13-22, 26, 30-31, 3536, 39, 41, 45-46, 53, 58, 60-62, 64, 66, 68,

209

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210 70, 72, 82, 90, 99, 104, 118, 123, 159, 169, 189, 196 Brown, Alfred, 93 Brown, Sevellon, 77 Bryant, Phillip, 139, 141 Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 183 Bullington, Jim, 155 Byrd, Harry, 16, 50 Byrd, Richard, 68, 91-92, 94, 99 Campbell, Will D., 107, 130 Carter, Hodding, III, 58, 63, 66, 84, 110-112, 116, 120, 190, 191 Carter, Hodding, Jr., 3-5, 21, 6668, 74-77, 82-85, 90, 95, 99, 110-112, 115, 119, 123-124, 127-129, 135, 145, 170 Catledge, Turner, 177-178, 181183 CBS, 126, 165, 167-168, 170 Central High School, 58, 167, 192 Charleston News and Courier, 38, 161-162, 177 Chicago Daily Defender, 43 Chicago Tribune, 126 Citizens’ Council Forum, 41-43, 52, 161 Citizens’ Council, The, 41-42, 54, 160 Citizens’ Councils, 2, 11, 14-17, 21, 23-24, 35-36, 39-46, 49-50, 55-56, 58-59, 6364, 67-69, 71, 74-75, 7879, 81, 84, 89, 95-96,

Index 98, 105-106, 108, 112113, 115-116, 118, 131, 136, 140, 142, 145-146, 148, 150-151, 160-162, 164, 169, 190, 195 Clark, Arthur, 89 Coates, Paul, 132 Columbia Journalism Review, 4344, 129 Communism accusations of, 35, 37, 57-60, 73, 81-89, 120, 122, 141, 160, 162 Congress of Racial Equality, 50 Connor, Eugene "Bull", 176, 178, 180, 182-183, 187, 196 Cowles, Mike, 129 Cox, Eugene, 92 Crimson-White, The, 154-155 Cubley, Harold, 109, 122 Dale, Malcolm, 137-139 Daly, Tom, 182-183 Daniels, Jonathan, 126 De La Beckwith, Byron, 119 DeCell, Hal, 41, 55 Decline of moderation, 62-64 Deer Creek Pilot, 41 Delta Democrat-Times, 66, 76-77, 111, 170, 192 Dunn, Vardamann, 92 Durant News, 86, 96, 99, 125 East, P.D., 3-6, 66, 70-71, 87, 90, 104-109, 111, 114, 122, 130-136, 138, 191 Eastland, James, 16, 36-40, 43, 63, 82, 108, 164 Ebony, 78 Emmerich, Oliver, 5, 75, 83, 93, 139



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Index Ethridge, Mark, 125 Ethridge, Tom, 42, 74, 88 Evers, Medgar, 22, 79, 81, 119, 121 Faubus, Orval, 16, 149 FBI, 119 Fleming, Karl, 168-169 Four-County News, 96 Freedom Rides, 167 French, John, 84 Friends of P.D. East, 110, 133 Frink, Bettye, 172 Gadsden Times, 177 Geismar, Maxwell, 122, 133 Graves, John Temple, 46, 50, 176 Griffin, John Howard, 121, 134 Grimsley, James, 100-102 Guihard, Paul, 166 Gulledge, Dave, 94 Hall, Grover C., 162, 174 Harelson, William, 109 Harkey, Ira, 3-6, 46, 66, 72, 87-88, 90, 99-104, 111, 114, 118-119, 123, 134-135, 191 Harmon, Andrews, 45 Harmon, Francis, 125, 127 Harper’s Magazine, 114, 132 Hassler, Alfred, 133 Hattiesburg American, 45, 125 Hederman family newspapers, 4445 Hederman, Tom, 110 Hegemony, 11, 24, 26-27, 32-33, 61, 73, 190, 197 Heiskell, J.N., 125, 128 Hilburn, Ben, 97

211 Holmes County Herald, 81, 86, 96-97, 125, 128 Ideology, 7, 10-11, 17-18, 25-27, 29-33, 39, 49, 51, 54, 65, 73, 83, 88, 162, 189, 194-195, 197 Interposition, 19, 52-53 Isaacs, Norman, 125 Jackson Clarion-Ledger, 44-45, 74 Jackson County Citizens Emergency Unit, 100102 Jackson Daily News, 39, 44-45, 48, 50, 63, 75, 77, 88, 148, 161-162 Jackson State Times, 93 Jackson, Miss., 14, 17, 42, 44, 76, 79-80, 83, 99, 101, 118, 124, 145 James, Earl, 172 Jenkins, Ray, 174 Jennings, Peter, 167 Johnston, Earle, 48, 55 Jones, Albert, 79, 136-138 Jones, Walter, 174 Kendall, Ted, 147 Kennard, Clyde, 121-122 Kennedy, John F., 8, 46, 119, 122 Kershaw, Alvin, 23 Kilpatrick, James J., 17, 39, 46, 52-53 King, Easton, 133 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1, 7, 134, 163, 171-173 Ku Klux Klan, 16, 21-22, 75, 117, 155, 167, 169, 192 Ladner, Heber, 76, 79



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212 Lange, Simpson, Robinson and Lange, Simpson, Robinson and Somerville law firm, 178 Lexington Advertiser, 68, 79, 81, 86, 91, 93, 95-99, 118, 125, 127, 129-130 Life magazine, 162, 166-167 Linen, James G., 126 Little Rock, Ark., 3, 5, 58, 148, 150-51, 158, 167, 192 Loeb, Louis, 179, 182 Look magazine, 67, 74, 112, 129, 162 Los Angeles Times, 132 Louisville Courier-Journal, 125 Louisville Times, 125 Lowman, Myers, 85, 86 Lucy, Autherine, 153-154, 163 Lufburrow, W.A., 136 Lukas, Edwin, 131 Lynd, Theron, 87, 109, 120 Mallory, Arenia, 130 Marshall, Chester, 96 Matthews, J.B., 82, 84 Maxwell, William D., 126 McCaskel, Ed, 142 McClellan, Thompson, 141 McComb, Miss., 75, 168 McGill, Ralph, 5, 17, 21, 123, 125, 128, 135, 138 McGowan, M.M., 140 McLaurin, John, 97 McMullen, W.G., 98 Meredith, James, 23, 45-46, 52, 72-73, 88, 100, 114, 118, 143, 145, 154-155

Index Meridian Star, 80-81 Meyer, Melvin, 154-155 Miller, L.E., 145, 147 Miller, Roger, 87 Millsaps College, 145-146 Minor, Bill, 118 Minter, David, 92 Mississippi Free Press, 78-79, 140 Mississippi Pilot, 111 Mississippi State Legislature, 71, 74, 84, 98, 195 Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, 5-6, 11, 23, 39-43, 47-48, 54-55, 64, 69, 79, 84-85, 137140, 142, 144, 146, 190, 195 Mississippi State University, 3, 11, 144, 146 Mississippian, The, 135-136, 138, 140, 143, 145 Monroe World, 88 Monroe, George, 144 Montgomery Advertiser, 161-163, 174 Montgomery bus boycott, 2, 167 Morgan, James, 178, 180 NAACP, 20, 23, 36, 40, 50, 54, 58, 79, 81, 89, 109, 137139, 192 Nachman, Merton, 172 Natchez, Miss., 167 NBC, 129, 165, 167 New England Press Association tour, 55 New Orleans, La., 158 New York Herald-Tribune, 162



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Index New York Times, 7, 9, 134, 162, 165-166, 168, 171, 173176, 179, 181-184, 186, 194 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 9-10, 170-171, 179, 185187 New York Times Magazine, 84 Newsweek, 8, 168 Nicholson, Ralph, 191 North Mississippi Herald, 88 Northside Reporter, 118 Nudelman, Bernie, 168 Ole Miss, 3, 11, 22-23, 52, 72, 88, 100, 111, 114, 118, 120, 134-135, 141-144, 166167, 170, 194 Oxford, Miss., 3, 119, 155, 158, 166 Paper curtain, 38, 161 Parks, Frank, 172 Pascagoula Chronicle, 72, 99, 100-103, 118-119, 134 Patterson, Hugh, 150 Patterson, John, 172, 182 Patterson, Robert, 16, 46-47, 142 Petal Paper, 71, 104-108, 110, 121-122, 130-134, 136 Petal-Harvey Dispatch, 87 Peters, William, 59, 60, 112 Philadelphia, Miss., 168 Pittman, Paul, 139 Plainsman, The, 155-156 Plante, Robert, 168 Plessy. See separate but equal Poynter, Nelson, 86 Providence Evening Bulletin, 77 Providence Journal, 77

213 Pulitzer Prize, 66, 73, 88, 90, 123124, 129, 144, 149, 153 Putnam, Carleton, 49 Race and Reason, 49-50 Raleigh News and Observer, 126 Rather, Dan, 167 Rebel Underground, 142-143 Reflector, The, 145, 147 Reporter, The, 70, 131 Richmond News Leader, 39, 52, 161 Robertshaw, Jimmy, 74 Robertson, Jimmie, 140-142, 144, 148, 155 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 134, 163 Rowan, Carl, 162 Saints Junior College, 130 Salisbury, Harrison, 171, 176, 177-178, 180-181, 185, 187 Segregationist myth, 6-7, 10-11, 13, 25-32, 39, 48, 53-54, 57-58, 64-66, 73, 76, 89, 157-159, 187, 189-190, 193-194 Selma, Ala., 3, 8, 89, 158, 167168, 196 Separate but equal, 6, 18, 26, 3031, 53, 57, 67, 157-158, 193 Shannon, George, 47 Shelton, Robert, 192 Silver, James, 22, 23, 44, 65 Simmons, William, 42, 136-138 Simpson, James, 180 Sitton, Claude, 134, 168-169, 182183 Slavery, 27-29, 31, 54



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214 Smith, Hazel Brannon, 3-5, 66, 68, 78- 81, 86, 90-93, 95-96, 98-99, 102, 109-111, 115-116, 118, 123-124, 126-127, 129-130, 134135, 140, 191 Smith, Walter, 94-95 Southern heterogeneity, 60-61 Southern Manifesto, 18-19 Southern press asset to segregationists, 44 treatment of African Americans, 43 Southern Regional Council, 20, 82, 131 St. Petersburg Times, 86 Stanton, Frank, 126 Starkville News, 88 State Press, The, 151-152, 192 States’ rights, 1, 30, 40, 51-53, 57, 174, 195 States’ Rights Council of Georgia, 136 Street, George, 140 Sullens, Frederick, 44-45 Sullivan, L.B., 9-10, 170-172, 175, 179-180, 182, 184187 Supreme Court, U.S., 14, 18-19, 30-31, 36, 39, 41, 49, 50-51, 59, 70-72, 81, 104, 115, 149, 171, 185, 196 Tardy, Paul, 81

Index Thurmond, Strom, 16, 50 Till, Emmett, 2, 7 Time magazine, 8, 43, 78, 126, 162, 166 Tougaloo College, 145 Tri-Anniversary Committee, 99, 124-127, 129 Tuscaloosa News, 135, 153-154, 192 Tylertown Times, 139 U.S. News and World Report, 8, 162, 166 U.S. Press Association, 47 University of Alabama, 3, 11, 153154, 192, 194 Valeriani, Richard, 167 Vicksburg Evening Post, 88 Vorspan, Albert, 131 Waddell, Bedford, 97, 141 Waggoner, J.T., 178, 180 Walker, Edwin. See A.P. v. Walker Ward, James, 17, 39, 44, 50-51 Waring, Tom, 17, 38-39, 42, 4647, 50, 161 Washington Post, 183 Wiesenburg, Karl, 98 Wiggins, J.R., 183 Williams, T.M., 79 Wilson, Dirk, 142 Wingo, Earle, 105 Wright, Fielding, 104 Wroten, Joe, 74, 84



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