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Published by The University of Alabama,
The University of Alabama at Birmingham,
and the Alabama Department of Archives and History

Fall 1961: Massive Resistance

10/25/2011

 
The Freedom Rides challenged the Kennedy administration to confront the continued existence of segregation in the Deep South. African American protests provoked southern whites to act violently towards activists; the resulting publicity kept the struggle for civil rights in a national spotlight. The reaction to the civil rights movement in the South, usually termed "Massive Resistance," encompassed a number of groups, each with different motivations and methods. As the federal government considered legislation to enforce equality, and as civil rights activists planned protests, southern resistance helped shape the civil rights movement.
Perhaps the most notorious group in Massive Resistance was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). In fact, the Mother's Day violence against the Freedom Riders was encouraged by members of the Klan seeking to disrupt the integration of public spaces. Two days after the attack on the Freedom Riders at the Birmingham bus terminal, police arrested a young Klansman who admitted that the KKK had called him days before the riot, instructing him to be at the station when the Riders arrived. Less organized than other anti–civil rights groups, the Klan nevertheless attracted members throughout the state and gained a reputation for vigilante violence. One of the more vocal Klansmen in Alabama was Asa Earl "Ace" Carter, who led a faction of the Klan called the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy and directed an assault on Nat "King" Cole while the singer visited Birmingham in 1956. KKK activity increased in the late 1950s and early 1960s as members targeted local and national civil rights leaders, bombing homes and attacking protesters in hopes that physical violence would frighten national leaders and prevent real change from occurring.

The KKK was undoubtedly the most visible representation of Massive Resistance, but another group proved more powerful in its ability to recruit and pressure local and state leaders. In July 1954 in Indianola, Mississippi, white leaders formed the first Citizens' Council, and in the wake of the Brown v. Board decision, similar groups spread throughout the South. In Alabama the first Citizens' Council appeared in Selma, where members began a campaign to use political and economic power in the city to limit jobs, revoke credit, and deny mortgages to black residents openly critical of segregation. By 1956 Alabama's Citizens' Councils boasted a membership of eighty thousand. The organizations rejected the bombings and beatings that were the province of more radical reactionaries, instead focusing on political and economic opposition that targeted those African Americans who challenged white supremacy. The Councils were helped by well-placed members. As Alabama historian Wayne Flynt has noted, the group's leaders were Black Belt politicians, businessmen, and professionals, most notably Montgomery's Judge Walter B. Jones, whose writings became "a forum for segregationist ideology."

With over sixty chapters in Alabama alone, the Citizens' Councils proved very effective at inspiring fear with their message. In a 1956 speech to the Central Park Citizens' Council in Birmingham, Bull Connor told attendees, "If you don't register and vote [the NAACP is] going to outvote you." A strong white majority at the polls would "beat the NAACP so fast it won't be funny." Dallas County State Senator Walter C. Givhan told a Council meeting that the NAACP hoped "to open the bedroom door of our white women to the Negro." But even as the Citizens' Councils adopted much of the rhetoric of white supremacy, the groups' leaders rejected outright terror and physical violence. The statewide Council renounced Asa "Ace" Carter and his followers as "demagogic rabble rousers" and "prisoners of hate." The Councils claimed to be the "responsible" alternative to the KKK and welcomed only "respectable" members.

The Councils and the Klan adopted different approaches to the civil rights movement, yet both played an important part in white reaction to integration. Massive Resistance placed real pressure on white moderates, forced to find a middle ground between African American activists demanding political, economic, and social equality, and the white opposition, rejecting any hint of desegregation. As state and national leaders searched for compromise, the movement continued to evolve, coming to rely on visible, sometimes violent, resistance to bring national and international attention to the plight of blacks in the segregated South.

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    Becoming Alabama:
    Civil Rights Movement

    Author

    Matthew L. Downs (PhD, Alabama) is an adjunct professor of history at Birmingham-Southern College. His dissertation focused on the federal government's role in the economic development of the Tennessee Valley.


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