Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has a strategy for beating Sarah Palin to the teabaggers' support in the 2012 primaries. Digby calls it his "Southern Strategy," consisting of a the dogwhistle message that "racism in America was always overblown with the implication being that those who complain about it have always been whiners."
That includes telling The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson that the White Supremacist Citizens' Council was actually a force for good in the Civil Rights fight.
Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.
“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”
That would be news to the African American citizens of Yazoo City. Via Atrios, here's a 1956 article from David Halberstam.
"Look,” said Nick Roberts of the Yazoo City Citizens Council, explaining why 51 of 53 Negroes who had signed an integration petition withdrew their names, “if a man works for you, and you believe in something, and that man is working against it and undermining it, why you don’t want him working for you—of course you don’t.”
In Yazoo City, in August 1955, the Council members fired signers of the integration petition, or prevailed upon other white employers to get them fired. But the WCC continues to deny that it uses economic force: all the Council did in Yazoo City was to provide information (a full-page ad in the local weekly listing the “offenders”); spontaneous public feeling did the rest.
Intimidating blacks and their white employers and supporters seems to have been the real business of the Yazoo City Citizens' Council. Yglesias has more, from a history of the era.
Predictably, the boycott as an instrument of repression found most effective employment in a cotton center such as Yazoo City, Mississippi, the self-styled "Gateway to the Delta." The local Citizens' Council there was one of the state's oldest and largest, and as the Yazoo City Herald boasted, "from the very first this community's outstanding citizens have been members." In a town of only 11,000 people the organization had grown from only 16 to nearly 1,500 by September, 1955. With such numbers, it was well prepared to meet the challenge of fifty-three signatures on a desegregation petition. In a full-page advertisement in the Herald, the Council published "an authentic list of the purported signers" of an NAACP petition. This list was also printed on large cardboard placards which were displayed in many of the community's stores, the bank, and even in cotton fields surrounding the city. As had happened elsewhere, economic sanctions followed and within a matter of weeks the petitioners' ranks were reduced to half a dozen. Again local Council leaders attributed the rash of reprisals to the "spontaneous reaction of public opinion." Whatever the reason, a disapproving northern newspaper could observe with little exaggeration that, "with the awful spectre of Yazoo City before them, few Mississippi Negroes would sign a desegregation petition today."
The Southern Strategy lives.