Citizens’ Councils were a loose network of white supremacist, segregationist organizations in the South that organized to preserve segregation in defiance of the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine in public schools. Citizens Councils were part of the “massive resistance” movement, a term coined by Virginia Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. to describe the effort to prevent desegregation of public schools.

Resistance to Desegregation

The push for African American civil rights following the Brown decision prompted determined resistance from many white southerners. White Citizens’ Councils and other white supremacist groups organized throughout the South to defend segregation. The Councils fed on and exacerbated long-standing racial fears and frustrations. Councils’ organized resistance addressed the fears of many white southerners, who not only blamed the NAACP (and Communists) for democratic gains by Black people but also viewed a white-led movement to reestablish “southern” values as a solution to the race problem. Within a year of the Brown decision, most of the South actively resisted integration. Mississippi Circuit Judge Thomas P. Brady famously referred to the date of the Brown decision as “Black Monday” in an address to the Sons of the American Revolution in Greenwood, Mississippi. In much of the white South, the crusade for segregation and states’ rights became the focus, spearheaded in nearly every state by the Citizens’ Councils.

Grassroots Organizing

Citizens’ Councils tended to form in the old plantation areas of the Lower South, where Black populations were high, such as the Mississippi Delta. The first Citizens’ Council formed on July 11, 1954, in Indianola (population 4,369), in Mississippi’s rural Sunflower County, where Black people constituted nearly 75 percent of the population. From Indianola proponents of the council framework spread to neighboring counties.

The councils represented a genuine grassroots movement in small towns and rural communities. Early leadership came from plantation owner Robert B. Patterson and local politicians. Patterson and thirteen associates created the original Citizens’ Council and devised the model for future local groups. The council appealed to the middle class, and its recruiters sought invitations to speak to service clubs in small towns and county seats. Much of the membership of local chapters came from the ranks of the Lions and Kiwanis and Exchange and Rotary Clubs. While some planters regarded the councils as a more urban affair, farmers and plantation owners joined the movement in sizable numbers, and state Farm Bureau Federations were friendly toward the organized resistance. The movement gained influence in state legislatures. In October 1954, with Citizens’ Councils established in twenty counties, Mississippi Citizens’ Council leaders formed a state association to coordinate council activity and serve as an information hub. The association aimed to organize every town and county in Mississippi and then every state in the South. By 1955 Citizens’ Councils existed in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Beginnings in Louisiana

As in Mississippi, Louisiana segregationists quickly mobilized. In November 1954, six months after the Brown decision, Louisiana voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to employ state police power to preserve segregated public schools. Amendment 16, as it was known, received its greatest support in North Louisiana. In Claiborne Parish, for example, where Black people represented 52 percent of the population but less than 1 percent of registered voters, the amendment passed overwhelmingly on the strength of the white vote.

Louisiana’s Citizens’ Council movement was more hierarchical than Mississippi’s. It developed as a project of the state’s Joint Legislative Committee to Maintain Segregation. Committee Chairman and State Sen. William “Willie” Rainach, Committee Spokesman and State Rep. John Sidney Garrett, and General Counsel William M. Shaw all hailed from Claiborne Parish. They organized Louisiana’s first Citizens’ Council chapter in Homer (population 4,749), the Claiborne Parish seat, on April 19, 1955. They launched a statewide drive to foster more chapters later that year.

In September a second Citizens’ Council formed in New Orleans, prompted by a desegregation petition circulating there. The Association of Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana (ACCL) then formed in Baton Rouge in January 1956 “to support all phases of segregation in Louisiana.” Although the local councils organized and functioned independently, the association coordinated activities and provided information to member councils, who also maintained a degree of autonomy. When the ACCL organized, eight individual councils were operating in Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, and St. Bernard Parishes, and a central council, the Greater New Orleans Citizens’ Council, had formed. In early February 1956 Rainach reported in the Homer Guardian Journal that Citizens’ Councils operated in thirteen parishes with a total membership of eight thousand people in Claiborne, Union, Lincoln, Webster, Tensas, Concordia, and Madison Parishes in North Louisiana and Jefferson, Orleans, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, and Calcasieu Parishes in South Louisiana. The plan was to organize “tens of thousands of members” in all sixty-four parishes.

Individual councils varied widely. Some were powerful, others weak. Some participated in the agenda of the statewide organizations; some did not. Most council members were middle-class white people who supported segregation; however, ACCL’s directors included several influential business people and politicians from around Louisiana. Rainach and Shaw led the state organization. Other leaders included head of the American Association for the Preservation of State Government and Racial Integrity Harry P. Gamble Sr., Shreveport oilman and member of Louisiana State University’s Board of Supervisors J. Stewart Slack, Shreveport-based states’ rights advocate Robert G. Chandler, ex-president of the Louisiana Medical Association and president of the Greater New Orleans Citizens’ Council Dr. Emmett L. Irwin, and Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation President Malcolm Dougherty.

Spread in Louisiana

In April 1956 the Mississippi-based Citizens’ Councils of America formally organized with Willie Rainach as its first president. On April 9, 1956, the Greenwood Commonwealth announced on its front page that eleven states were meeting in New Orleans to form the Citizens’ Councils of America. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia were represented. The purpose, Rainach reported, was “to unite the efforts of all organizations dedicated to the preservation of the reserved natural rights of the people and of the states, including primarily the separation of the races in schools and all institutions involving personal and social relations, maintaining states’ rights, and regulating public health, morals, marriage, education, peace, and good order under the Constitution of the United States.”

When the Citizens’ Councils of America formed, there were councils in twenty-eight of Louisiana’s sixty-four parishes, and the ACCL claimed a combined membership between 75,000 and 100,000. In June 1956 the Southern School News estimated council strength at 100,000 to 125,000 in thirty parishes. Nearly all councils were in the so-called Anglo-Saxon Protestant portion of the state north of Alexandria. Along the Arkansas border and in the fertile lowlands of the Red River and upper Mississippi River deltas, the councils constituted a bloc of twenty-two parishes in a largely agricultural area where the Black population was most significant and resistance to social change was greatest. Leaders of the state-wide movement and Ned Touchstone, editor and publisher of The Councilor, the official publication of the Citizens’ Councils, all resided there.

Council activity in South Louisiana centered in metropolitan New Orleans. Unlike the rural agricultural parishes of North Louisiana, which bore more similarity to other states of the Deep South, the predominantly Catholic region of South Louisiana steered a moderate racial course. Nevertheless, New Orleans became the site of the second council organized in the state because an NAACP school desegregation suit had threatened it. Judge Leander Perez, political boss of neighboring St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, was the New Orleans area’s most influential spokesman. Perez was one of seventeen ACCL charter members and was considered by many to be a national Citizens’ Council leader. The only other councils in the state’s southern portion were in Calcasieu, East Baton Rouge, and Livingston Parishes.

Some historians have attributed South Louisiana’s more permissive attitude toward civil rights to the Catholic influence as opposed to the predominately Protestant influence in North Louisiana. Historian Neil R. McMillen noted, for example, that in 1956, more than half of all potential Black voters in French Catholic parishes were registered to vote versus only 20 percent in the rest of the state. McMillen also observed that a striking majority of desegregated colleges were in South Louisiana. Loyola University in New Orleans opened its doors to students of all races as early as 1950. Even among state-supported colleges, some compliance occurred before the Supreme Court’s May 1955 ruling that desegregation of public schools should proceed “with all deliberate speed.” The Southern School News reported in its 1964 “Ten Years in Review” that by October 1954, Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge admitted Black students to its graduate school, and as many as eighty Black students were admitted to Southwestern Institute (now University of Louisiana-Lafayette). The Councilor conceded that “the French Country of South Central Louisiana . . . that large area between Baton Rouge and Lake Charles” seemed unresponsive to the ACCL’s plea for a solid front against desegregation.

Rainach never realized his goal of a council in every parish. In early 1960, soon after he resigned from his council post to run for governor, The Councilor claimed organizations in only thirty-four of the state’s sixty-four parishes. Splinter groups from the Greater New Orleans Citizens’ Council in 1957 and 1958, such as the South Louisiana Citizens’ Council led by Jackson Ricau and Joseph E. Viguerie, exposed the increasing lack of coherence within the statewide association.

Citizens’ Council Activities

The ACCL engaged in several massive resistance schemes outside of its legislative efforts. Leaders considered themselves elite and dignified in contrast to the Ku Klux Klan. They put great emphasis on resistance by legal means. Thus, their activities strove for a veneer of respectability. Among their earliest efforts was promoting the organization in public high schools through an essay contest. Other schemes in the 1950s and 1960s targeted US President John F. Kennedy, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and later President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Probably the most widely known effort to target the Kennedys was the “Freedom Bus North Movement” of 1962 and 1963. George Singlemann of New Orleans was the spokesman for this scheme. Ned Touchstone was the project’s director in North Louisiana. Often referred to as “Reverse Freedom Rides,” the program parodied the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Nashville Student Movement in 1961. Black people who signed up were given free one-way bus tickets and promised high-paying jobs and free housing. The Citizens’ Council envisioned sending thousands of people north, but only a few hundred accepted tickets. The largest number were sent to the bus stop closest to the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis, Massachusetts.

Formation of Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana, Inc.: Decline and Legacy

Projects like the Reverse Freedom Rides signaled Louisiana’s movement away from the mainstream of the region’s council movement. After Rainach’s departure from leadership in 1960 and a legal defeat in a federal voter discrimination case (United States of America v. The Association of Citizens Councils of Louisiana, Inc., et al., commonly known as the Bienville Voter Case) in Bienville Parish in August 1961, the ACCL struggled to revitalize its operations. Historian Numan Bartley identified the basic problem of the Citizens’ Council movement as the inability to reconcile the deep economic and social divide between “county seat elite and the urban industrial laborer.” The councils fed on racial strife and threats of social change; when, at times, the resistance had nothing immediate and tangible to resist, interest lagged and, with it, finances and influence—particularly in areas outside the Black belt. Rainach’s successor, Rep. John S. Garrett, stepped down in November of 1960 to be succeeded by Shreveport attorney Charles L. Barnett, who shifted the headquarters from Baton Rouge to Shreveport. Following that move and the increasing influence of Touchstone, the whole Citizens’ Council enterprise in Louisiana shifted radically to the right. As McMillen notes, the council’s “Negrophobia” was excessive even by Deep South standards. The intensity of white supremacy, an obsession with the “Red menace,” and shameless anti-Semitism combined to mark it as an extremist organization that more moderate members shunned. In one issue alone The Councilor accused philanthropist and co-owner of Sears, Robuck, and Company Julius Rosenwald of promoting Communism, claimed the NAACP was co-launched by a “white Communist” and a “white Socialist,” mocked Louis Armstrong, and attacked the scholarship of historian Arthur Schlessinger Jr. and the northern press for pro-Black bias. The same issue scorned the murder of Illinois teenager Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta and claimed the Rothschilds—a prominent Ashkenazi Jewish banking family that had been the subject of many antisemitic conspiracy theories—controlled the Federal Reserve and were responsible for the Civil War.

Increasingly concerned with the direction the Citizens’ Council was taking, Charles L. Barnett sent a letter to Rainach in February 1962 suggesting a meeting at Alexandria since it appeared the ACCL was dying. Months later Rainach proposed reorganizing the state’s council movement modeled on labor unions. The result was a new statewide organization, Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana, Inc.

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Citizens’ Councils of Louisiana, Inc.’s influence on Louisiana politics waned. Councils in Shreveport and New Orleans continued to be active through the 1970s. The Councilor continued publication by Touchstone through 1981 but was no longer associated with the councils. Some segregationists sought alliances with white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which they previously shunned. They attempted to obscure their racism in “freedom of choice” and “law and order” rhetoric and were thereby successful in injecting white supremacy into mainstream discourse despite their decreasing membership and dwindling funds. They lost their fight against desegregation but continued to fight for white supremacy. They expanded their white supremacist activism not only in Louisiana but also on a national stage with support for George Wallace, a presidential candidate on the American Independent Party ticket in 1968, and campaigns for welfare cuts and freedom of choice for white Americans. As scholar Rebecca Brückmann observed, Louisiana’s segregationists “lost the battle for Jim Crow, but their strategy to cloak the defense of white privilege in colorblind rhetoric still reverberates today.”