Like many of you, I was instantly shocked when I saw the picture on the front page of Sonia Sotomayor in academic robes with a Klan hood photoshopped atop her head.
That shock quickly turned to rage when I learned the source of this "political humor": the Council of Conservative Citizens. In a couple of comments, I tried to outline just what the CCC and the Citizens' Councils (aka White Citizens' Council) were.
I thought a little more background might be helpful.
In May of 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, southern whites saw red. The "interventionist" federal government had, with the stroke of a pen, nullified their sovereign right to deny people of color equal education opportunities. Who knew where it would lead? Could even the sacred principle of separate but equal, sanctified by the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, be next?
Southern states quickly mobilized to meet the threat of buttinsky federal judges. In Mississippi and Louisiana, "upstanding citizens" began organizing chapters of the White Citizens' Council.
In Louisiana, the first chapter was headed by a state senator (later a congressman), Joe Waggoner. Throughout the South, the Councils were headed and manned by similarly august persons--bankers, lawyers, judges, sheriffs. The clean, respectable pillars of the community, not the hard sort who would drive out at night to burn crosses and shoot into cabins, but good, honest men, who met in the light of day to draw and enforce property covenants, refuse business licenses and "keep the peace."
Rightly dubbed by Hodding Carter "the Uptown Klan," Citizens' Councils never engaged in violence themselves, merely used the power of their positions to keep the "right people" up and the "undesirables" down. In towns and cities throughout the South (and elsewhere), they were aware of the Klan actions, often before they occurred, but kept what distance was needed to maintain "respectability."
But the Councilmen's power lay not just in their economic and social positions. The Councils encouraged, managed and maintained a vast network of voluntary surveillance over the communities in which they operated. Think of the Bush/Ashcroft TIPS program, but not limited to your mailman or meter reader. Everyone and anyone could be an informant to the Councils.
Were you too friendly and polite to a black person? Did you invite someone of color, not an employee into your home? Were you ever overheard saying something supportive of equal rights? The Councils, and the state-funded Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, were likely to know of it, and you could expect a discreet word from one of your community leaders.
By the 1970s and 80s, the Council(s) was seen as so blatantly racist and anachronistic that it couldn't survive in its original form. What more American solution than a change of brand?
Today, the Council of Conservative Citizens is headed by largely the same Board of Directors, with the same goals as the White Citizens' Council of yore.
These people, in essence the respectable "front office" for the Ku Klux Klan, are the ones who published that photoshopped picture of Judge Sotomayor in a Klan hood today.
I can only assume that getting one to photo wasn't much of a stretch for them.
Note: This diary originally had a different title and much different content. It has been re-written to conform with site guidelines. The original follows. Feel free to skip over.
FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING CRACKER-ASS FUCKS!
How dare you? HOW FUCKING DARE YOU? How dare you dress this actual intellectual, this tested jurist in the Halloween costume even you are ashamed to own after all these years? Where'd you get the hood, anyway? Pull it off the top shelf at the back of your fucking closet and dust it off, thinking about the good old days?
I know who the fuck you are. You're the fucks who blacklisted my friend H's real estate business because she dared let blacks out of your red-line, pine woods, back-of-the-tracks ghettoes. You're the bastards who sent your sons to beat my friend R and his brothers near to death, because her mother had the audacity to teach black children to read. But what the fuck. They were just fucking n-----lovers. Hell, they're barely a step up from n-----s themselves, right?
Don't you DARE show your faces again. Don't you EVER DARE mention my president or his appointees again, you hear me? I KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU'VE DONE.
Your kind had a chance to fade into obscurity years ago. If you didn't have the grace to take that way-too-generous opportunity, then fuck politeness now. Like the guy you reluctantly supported last November said, I'll make you fucking famous.
Heritage, my ass. You are disciples of devilry. Go back under your rocks.
You can understand why I decided to edit.