The segregationist war against racial equality, like the contemporary war on woke, was not limited to actions by government officials. Organizations like the White Citizens’ Councils played a significant role. The first branch of the Citizens’ Council formed two months after the Brown decision in Indianola, Mississippi, and the group quickly spread through the state and the rest of the South. This group saw itself as the vanguard of the backlash against the movement toward Black equality; they fought to “preserve white supremacy via economic pressure” and other modes of political action, pledging “eternal resistance to racial integration.”
Among their most common targets were television shows that had interracial casts. “Let’s start a drive throughout the South to have ten million sets follow my example and bar the negro from our homes by way of television,” wrote the author of a letter to the editor of the Citizens’ Council publication in 1956. He urged fellow segregationists to ensure that the show’s sponsors are “notified of our actions.” The following year, E.W. Hooker, who had been the chair of the States’ Rights Democratic Party (aka the “Dixiecrats”) in 1948, published an open letter to the Johnson Wax company. That company was a sponsor of Robert Montgomery Presents, which had aired a show in February featuring an interracial cast. Segregationists launched a similar boycott of the Philco Corporation for its sponsorship of a Television Playhouse episode that they mistakenly thought included an interracial couple. (It turned out that Hilda Simms, who was paired with Sidney Poitier in that show, was actually also Black.) The Ed Sullivan Show was another popular target.
Segregationist boycotters also took on popular companies like the Ford Motor Company and Philip Morris that they claimed supported civil rights. (Ford Motor Company supported the Ford Foundation, and Philip Morris supported the Urban League, both organizations that promoted racial equality—or what the Citizens’ Council called “race mixing” in denouncing the Ford Foundation in December 1956.) As a segregationist leader from Louisiana told reporters Carl T. Rowan and Richard P. Kleeman in 1956, “We expect the dealers to stop Ford’s contributions to the fight for civil rights or there isn’t going to be a damn Ford sold in the South.”
Even as segregationists employed boycotts as an extension of their politics, they cried foul when economic pressure was employed against them. In 1957, columnist Ray Tucker described Washington, D.C., as being “under NAACP siege” since its two professional sports teams, the Senators and the Redskins, were “picketed regularly because neither organization has a colored player on its roster.” Tucker called this a “cultural offensive” that he connected with that organization’s insistence that “Stephen Foster’s ballads be censored.”