While the GOP wiped their hands of the Birchers, the leadership of the society looked south.
It was the middle of the 1960s and the good white citizens of the former Confederacy were growing terrified of their “coloreds” and the growing civil rights movement.
The Birchers labeled Dr. Martin Luther King as a Communist. Court-ordered integration of the schools would lead to a permanent police state, they said.
African- Americans were attacked as agitators, revolutionaries and thugs.
The Birchers scared a whole lot of citizens with the revelation that the Communists had formulated a plan to form a Negro Soviet Republic right in the heart of the South.
My parents believed that the goal of the Civil Rights Movement was to start another civil war. I heard warnings about armed gangs of Blacks who would be roaming the South killing white men and raping the women.
The message I heard was repeated all across Dixie.
These messages took root and the Birch society flourished.
By 1965, 100 John Birch Society chapters were operating in Birmingham, Alabama.
Let me repeat that: 100 Birch chapters in Birmingham.
For comparison, Chicago was four times bigger and had around 25 chapters.
The Birch society grew and grew and grew.
In Texas, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia and the Carolinas, Birchers grabbed city council seats and school board posts and county board positions.
They were a force. And in many of those places, they still are.
The anti-civil rights message, a touchstone for the Birchers for years, caused my first separation from my parents and their Birch ideology.
I believed that African Americans should have the same rights I did. It was that simple for me.
My parents were furious when they realized that I was opposed them on this issue.
Facing down their disapproval and their threats scared me. But, in that process I learned something big: I had my own ideas and my own voice. It was tiny and squeaky, but it worked.
“You better be careful,” my mother told me. “You’re turning into a bleeding heart liberal.”
That was the first time I carried that insult as a badge of courage.
For years, I struggled to break away from the fanaticism of my parents. I vacillated from “going along to get along” to trying to persuade them to consider other viewpoints.
Finally, in 1972, when I was 27 years old, I said a definite, absolute, loud NO.
Mother and Dad could not accept that their oldest daughter had forsaken their ideas.
“You’re a traitor to your parents and to your country,” my mother told me.
“You are a disgrace,” my father said. “I can’t stand to look at you.”
The scars from our break-up never healed.
Many years later, after my father was gone, I talked to my mother about her beliefs. “What happens to the poor, the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled if the Birch society achieves success?”
“It doesn’t matter, not at all,” she told me. “It’s all about the Constitution.”
“The Constitution doesn’t feed a hungry child or help an unemployed man,” I argued.
“That’s not my concern,” she said.
She wagged her finger at me that day. “Our day will come,” she said. “All you socialist-liberals will fail and we’ll be ready.”