Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954-1989

ISBN-13: 9780807169155 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 256 str.

Stephanie R. Rolph

Opis

Stephanie Rolph's study examines the history of the Citizens' Council, an organization committed to coordinating opposition to desegregation and black voting rights. Founded in 1954, two months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that declared "separate but equal" educational facilities unconstitutional, the Council spread rapidly in its home state of Mississippi throughout 1954 and 1955. Initially, the organization relied on local chapters to monitor signs of black activism and take action to suppress that activism through economic and sometimes violent means. However, as Rolph reveals, over the course of the next thirty-five years, the Council went through various stages of growth and contraction, leading its administrators and supporters deeper into mainstream threads of American politics. At the same time, she suggests, the organization networked and cooperated with groups from the radical right and cultivated a message of white supremacy that eventually converged with conservatism. It did so by consistently promoting the necessity of white unity.