Citizens' Councils

The White Citizens' Council was an American group of people who believed that white people were better than black people (white supremacy). It began on July 11, 1954.  After 1956, it was called the Citizens' Councils of America.  With about 60,000 members, mostly in the South, many people knew the group because it opposed racial integration during the 1950s and 1960s. It responded to integration efforts with economic boycotts and other intimidation against black activists, including depriving them of jobs.  The WCC was a part of the "massive resistance" in the South against court decisions that required racial integration.

Federal civil rights legislation passed in the mid-1960s over the opposition of the WCC. By the 1970s, the federal government was working hard to enforce those laws. So, the influence of the WCC dropped very much. People in the WCC went on to found the Council of Conservative Citizens in the 1985.
References

Further reading

Geary, Daniel and Sutton, Jennifer. "Resisting the Wind of Change: The Citizens' Councils and European Decolonization," in Cornelius A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg, eds., The U.S. South and Europe, University of Kentucky Press, 2013.


 Other websites 
The Citizens' Council  - Historical resource website by Edward Sebesta, with digitized copies of the full run of The Citizens Council newspaper, 1955–1961. Originally a publication of the Mississippi Citizens' Council, the monthly publication became the official paper of the Citizens' Councils of America in October 1956.
Available in PDF from Internet Archive.
"Civil Rights Documentation Project" , University of Southern Mississippi
Dr. John Dittmer, "'Barbour is an Unreconstructed Southerner': Prof. John Dittmer on Mississippi Governor’s Praise of White Citizens’ Councils", 22 December 2010 video report by Democracy Now! 
 "Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman: The Struggle for Justice" , American Bar Association

Category:American civil rights
Category:White supremacists
Category:1954 establishments in the United States