http://eyeonhate.com.nyud.net:8090/Wicker3.jpgWicker has been in attendance at meetings of the West Tennessee and Marshall County Chapters of the CofCC.http://eyeonhate.com/dixie1a.htmlThe St. Louis-based Council of Conservative Citizens traces its roots directly to the racist, anti-integrationist White Citizens' Councils of the 1950s and 1960s.
Its current leader, attorney Gordon Lee Baum, was an organizer for the WCC and built the Council of Conservative Citizens in part from the old group's mailing lists. Like its predecessor, the CCC inflames fears and resentments, particularly among Southern whites, with regard to black-on-white crime, nonwhite immigration, attacks on the Confederate flag and other issues related to "traditional" Southern culture. Although the group claims not to be racist, its leaders traffic with other white supremacist groups and its publications, Web sites and meetings all promote the purportedly innate superiority of whites. Despite its record, the CCC has been successful in drawing southern politicians to its events: the 1998 revelation that then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had been a frequent speaker before the group drew substantial media attention. Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, Mississippi state senators and several state representatives have appeared in recent years.
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The roots of the CCC rest in white opposition to integration during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The group is a successor to the Citizens' Councils of America (originally configured as the White Citizens' Councils), an overtly racist organization formed in the 1950s in reaction to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation. Trumpeting the "Southern way of life," the CCA used a traditionalist rhetoric that appealed to better-mannered, more discreet racists; while the Klan burned crosses, the CCA relied on political and economic pressure.
The first Citizens Council was founded on July 11, 1954, in Indianola, Mississippi, by Robert B. Patterson (a current member of the CCC and former editor of its publication, The Citizens Informer). It formed committees that screened local political candidates to ensure they viewed "the negro vote" with appropriate disapproval, promoted "the advantages of segregation and the dangers of integration" and coordinated the application of economic pressure. The organization grew quickly, attracting members from across the South and beyond; by August 1955, Patterson's membership list exceeded 60,000 people and included 253 Councils. In August 1956, Citizens' Councils in 30 states came together to form the Citizens' Councils of America. Its goals were to preserve the "natural rights" of racial separation and "the maintenance of our States' Rights to regulate public health, morals, marriage, education, peace and good order in the States, under the Constitution of the United States."
The CCA tried to recruit public and civic leaders for membership. Organizers wanted to demonstrate that their views represented those of the modern and mainstream white South, not those of a rural, uneducated fringe. For the most part, its publicists avoided the coarser formulations of race-hatred associated with such groups as the Klan, but the white supremacy of the Council movement was nonetheless unmistakable and unapologetic. In the widely popular tract Black Monday, for instance, Mississippi State Supreme Court Justice Thomas P. Brady wrote, "Whenever and wherever the white man has drunk the cup of black hemlock, whenever and wherever his blood has been infused with the blood of the negro, the white man, his intellect and culture have died." Many of Brady's readers were state representatives, attorneys, local bank presidents and prominent farmers, leading historian Robert Hart to observe that "most membership lists read like a Chamber of Commerce."
While its membership reflected Main Street, the movement was not notably infused with civic spirit. It intimidated and harassed blacks involved in the civil rights movement and printed and distributed pamphlets containing inflammatory racist speeches by segregationists. A typical CCA pamphlet like "Segregation and the South" described African Americans as having "an inherent deficiency in mental ability" and "a natural indolence." Another pamphlet, "The Ugly Truth About the NAACP," spread the accusation, common at the time among opponents of integration, that this organization was controlled by Communists intent on destroying America.
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http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/CCCitizens.asp?xpicked=3&item=12
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