Cornish: So you actually did some reporting on citizens councils back in the '60s. Tell us, how did they come about and why?
Carter: They were formed in the Delta, which is where our paper was. They were formed for one reason only: to oppose any form of integration. They were formed immediately after the desegregation decision of 1954. And let me just read one little phrase from their organizing pamphlet. "The citizens council is the South's answer to the mongrelizers. We will not be integrated. We are proud of our white blood and our white heritage of 60 centuries." That was the point. And at every point they had a chance, they used pressure of every sort except overt violence to put down any dissent from total white supremacy. …
Cornish: So what kind of methods did they use?
Carter: Well, Yazoo City is a good example of what they used. A group of some 50 or so black citizens in Yazoo City signed a petition asking for the desegregation of the schools really early. The citizens council published, not only in the newspaper, but on placards around town, the names of all of those who had signed that petition, suggested people look at those names carefully. Within two weeks all but something like 12 of those 50-something names had been stricken. Some of the people had left town, some of the businesses that they had had been closed. Immediate, fast, uh, a very quick lesson in what non-violence meant to the citizens council.
Cornish: I do want to say civil rights leader Medgar Evers was killed in 1963 by a member of a citizens council in Jackson, Mississippi, and there is other evidence of use of violence by members of councils. Was the Yazoo City council different?
Carter: The citizens council was always extremely careful to use rhetoric which said we will not … we do not condone … we will prevent the destruction of our way of life by other means. But you should not be surprised, they would say, if the effort to stop it peacefully fails, if violence breaks out. That was as coded an invitation as you would want to those who would take up violence that, if things got to it, nobody was ever going to turn against them. And, indeed, nobody in the citizens council in Mississippi at any time, and I was there throughout the entire period, got up and led the charge to bring the killers to justice, to expose them. The killers in Mississippi swam in a sea of citizens council control and therefore protection for what they did. Never, ever were those people brought to justice by white leadership.
Cornish: And how are we to interpret Gov. Barbour's memories of Yazoo City and his statement about these councils? I mean, what does it say about him and maybe his political prospects?
Carter: Well, Haley is a younger man than I am, and he could be forgiven for a slight lapse of memory since he was not in the middle of the business at the time that it was really hot. On the other hand, he was from a family of leadership in Yazoo City and he knows perfectly well what kind of force was used - economic and other forms in Yazoo City to "hold things down," as they used to like to say. Why was he saying that? I think he was talking to a sympathetic interviewer and he lost his mind. |