Resisting the Civil-Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press Willard T

Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2014 Resisting the Civil-Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press Willard T. Edmonds Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES RESISTING THE CIVIL-RIGHTS MOVEMENT: RACE, COMMUNITY AND THE POWER OF THE SOUTHERN WHITE PRESS By WILLARD T. EDMONDS A Dissertation submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2014 Willard T. Edmonds defended this dissertation on August 21, 2014. The members of the supervisory committee were: Neil Jumonville Professor Directing Dissertation Jeffrey Ayala Milligan University Representative Maxine D. Jones Committee Member Jennifer L. Koslow Committee Member Andrew K. Frank Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ............................................................................................................................................................. iv 1. THE SOUTHERN STYLE ............................................................................................................................... 1 2. DRIVEN BY DOGMA ................................................................................................................................... 12 3. THE BLIND EYE ........................................................................................................................................... 52 4. POLICING THE PUBLIC SQUARE ........................................................................................................... 118 5. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................... 193 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................................. 204 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ............................................................................................................................ 227 iii ABSTRACT When conservative politicians captured Washington in the 1980s and 1990s, they brought with them a style of rhetoric rooted in the South of the 1950s and 1960s. The three core elements of this Southern style are clear: . Strong beliefs — firmly held, loudly proclaimed and adhered to at the risk of becoming dogmatic. Learning not to see — a practiced avoidance of complications or distracting issues, an ability to turn a blind eye, to deny the obvious. Policing of the public square — strict enforcement of the ruling beliefs, at times becoming a bullying of allies to keep them in line, paired with quick and sharp public attacks on dissenting opinions. The Southern style is now an ingrained element of the conservative movement, and it operates with, and relies upon, active cooperation of the conservative press. This, too, has roots in the South. During the decades of civil rights activism, Southern newspapers instilled Southern ideology and allegiance among white readers, turned a blind eye to injustice and other weaknesses of Jim Crow culture and cleared the public square of dissenting opinions and alternative points of view. This study examines how the Southern style operated in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the work of journalists in Richmond, Virginia, Tallahassee, Florida, and Jackson, Mississippi, and on their interactions with political leaders, activists and the public. iv CHAPTER ONE THE SOUTHERN STYLE When on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against racially segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education, those seeking social change in the South saw in the decision the beginning of the demise of the Jim Crow era. The Supreme Court, they argued, was the defining voice in the decades-long dispute over civil rights and would guide the nation, and especially the South, through a series of social changes. Those hopes, however, met with sour disappointment. Rather than begin to quiet the argument over the sins or virtues of a dual society, the Brown decision triggered a new and vociferous debate over race in the American South. What followed in Southern politics and in the press was an intense and public exchange of ideas and arguments over the role of the courts and the limits of federal power and, on rare occasions, the morality of segregation. The debate was shaped by a variety of players: activists for black freedom and equality, Southern governors and legislators, business leaders, preachers, school board members and others. Prominent among them were the South’s white newspaper editors. The editors, their arguments and their relationships with the South’s political leaders deserve scrutiny. This study looks at how Southern editors worked with the region’s system of one-party politics to restrict access to new ideas of social change, to encourage white citizens to ignore the realities of life under Jim Crow rules and to punish anyone who expressed criticism of the Southern status quo. This study considers five newspapers and their editors: James J. Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader, during the development of Virginia’s Massive Resistance to Brown in the fall of 1955; the Birmingham News, during the struggle of civil-rights activists challenging the Alabama city’s rigid rules of segregation and the reckless authority of Eugene “Bull” Connor in 1963; Malcolm Johnson of the Tallahassee Democrat, during the lunch counter sit-ins in the spring of 1960, when a once-segregationist governor voiced sympathy for African American protesters; and the editors and opinion writers of the Hederman family’s Clarion-Ledger and 1 the Jackson Daily News, during the integration of the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962. The editors and newspapers are chosen for their regional and ideological diversity. Kilpatrick was a conservative editor from Richmond, the capital of Virginia, where the culture and politics supported segregation but did not easily tolerate the extreme viewpoints heard in the Deep South. The Birmingham newspapers were part of a city power structure that was deeply conservative on race and tolerated violence on the part of the Ku Klux Klan and others to maintain the status quo in Alabama. Johnson worked in Tallahassee, capital of Florida, a state where some leaders in politics and business wanted the state to enjoy the benefits of the New South dream of business and industrial progress. His editorial arguments, though conservative in nature, were less obsessed with race than were those of many other Southern editors. The Hederman family and its newspapers in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, espoused the harshest Deep South attitudes and expressed maximum resistance to integration and social change. This selection of newspapers, editors and communities allows consideration of various white conservative viewpoints: one was Upper South, three were Deep South, and one hoped to be part of the New South; one editor tried to attack desegregation while avoiding overtly racists arguments, others employed racist commentary, and one glossed over racial unrest when he could. Together, these viewpoints expressed by individuals, politicians and newspapers, represented the predominant points of view among white Southerners and white Southern editors of the civil-rights era. This study examines the rhetoric used by these Southern white editors and by their allies in Southern politics, and it looks at how newspaper editors and elected leaders borrowed persuasive arguments from one another and shared in the tactics of managing public opinion. In this study, the rhetorical tools employed by these white leaders in opinion and politics are termed the Southern style. The three core elements of this Southern style are clear: 2 . Strong beliefs — firmly held, loudly proclaimed and adhered to at the risk of becoming dogmatic. Learning not to see — a practiced avoidance of complications or distracting issues, an ability to turn a blind eye, to deny the obvious. Policing of the public square — strict enforcement of the ruling beliefs, at times becoming a bullying of allies to keep them in line, paired with quick and sharp public attacks on dissenting opinions. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and extending through the 1960s, this style of politics and rhetoric was hitched to the Southern white press, which evangelized the ideology, declined to acknowledge injustices of segregation and swept away dissenting opinions from the public debate. With rare exceptions, editors at newspapers throughout the South routinely employed this Southern style of rhetoric on their pages, in both news articles and opinion. To great effect, this widespread adoption of the Southern style handicapped the South and limited its options, especially regarding race, and the politics-and-press partnership was often effective in beating back or weakening challenges to Jim Crow rules of racial discrimination and white superiority. At mid-century, when long efforts by civil-rights activists began to forge social change, this Southern style and its use in politics and the press kept whites looking to the past when they needed

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