Trying to reconcile the mythmaking memorials and the actual record this week, I was struck by the echoes of this story in the manuscript I'm now completing on the Civil Rights Division in the 1960s. In particular, I'm reminded of the reaction that centrist media and government officials had to the creation of the White Citizens' Councils, which likewise hid ugly actions behind a mask of civility.
The White Citizens' Councils, a private organization led by prominent whites, provided the main form of "massive resistance" to court-ordered desegregation and the larger civil rights struggle in the South. The first Citizens' Council formed in Indianola, Mississippi, in July 1954, after the initial Brown decision; many more formed in 1955, after Brown II. By 1957, the White Citizens' Councils had a membership of between a quarter million and a half million Southern whites.
The Citizens' Councils recruited its membership mainly from the middle classes, the people who considered the Ku Klux Klan too lowbrow. As J. Edgar Hoover put it: "The membership of these organizations reflects bankers, lawyers, doctors, state legislators and industrialists. In short," he said, "their membership includes some of the leading [white] citizens of the South."
You can read more of his assessment here:
From the Eisenhower Library: https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/research/online-documents/civil-rights-eisenhower-administration/1956-03-01-hoover-statement.pdf
The Councils contrasted themselves with the crude racism and violence of the Klan, insisting that they could defend white supremacy through nonviolent means.
A Council leader from Alabama put it bluntly. "We intend to make it difficult, if not impossible" he told reporters, "for a Negro who advocates desegregation to find a job, get credit or renew a mortgage." When black parents petitioned for desegregated schools during the summer of 1955, for instance, his council published the names and publicly called for the petitioners to be placed on an employers' blacklist.
Officially, then, they rejected violence and resisted civil rights change through "peaceful" means. Unofficially, though, the Citizens' Councils lent respectability to the grass-roots resistance to school desegregation. They gave community approval to the actions of the mobs of white parents, the gangs of white teens, and at some distance, the violence of terrorist groups like the Klan.
The Councils presented themselves as serious and sober-minded citizens who just happened to be white supremacists. While some correctly called them out as just the "white collar Klan," many media outlets decided to treat them as something decidedly different, platforming their complaints as legitimate in ways they never would have with the Klan.