“SEGREGATION FOREVER”: LEADERS OF WHITE SUPREMACY

Widely regarded as one of the most virulent opponents of civil rights in the Louisiana State Legislature, William “Willie” Rainach, whose tenure lasted from 1940 to 1960, stridently opposed Brown and fought to delay its implementation. While Rainach was chair of the Joint Legislative Committee to Maintain Segregation, the legislature directed the state board of education to nullify graduation certificates from any integrated public school, withheld books and lunches from integrated schools, and criminalized all efforts to violate segregation laws. ^{373 N.V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950’s (Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 74.} In Rainach’s words, “A vote against these bills is an open invitation to the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and National Association for the Advancement of the [sic] Colored People to integrate our schools.” ^{374 Ibid.} In 1958, Rainach and other leaders of the White Citizens’ Council mounted a campaign to systematically disenfranchise thousands of Black voters by requiring literacy tests and targeting the credentials of Black registrants for scrutiny. These tactics reduced the Black electorate by 85 percent in Washington Parish and 75 percent in Ouachita Parish — until litigation by the Justice Department restored some 1400 voters to the rolls. ^{375 U.S. National Park Service, “Civil Rights in America: Racial Voting Rights” (2009), https://www.nps.gov/nhl/learn/themes/Civil-Rights_VotingRights.pdf.}

Virginia Johnson was an Arkansas politician and the wife of Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson. As a member of the staff of the Arkansas State Senate from 1951 to 1953, Johnson promoted her husband’s ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to require the Arkansas Legislature to defy Brown “in every constitutional manner.” ^{377 Guy Lancaster, Arkansas in Ink: Gunslingers, Ghosts, and Other Graphic Tales (Little Rock, Ark.: Butler Center Books, 2014), 38.} The campaign succeeded and the amendment remained in the state constitution until it was repealed in 1990. ^{378 Ibid.} Johnson supported segregation throughout her career. She ran for governor in 1968 on a platform that publicly affirmed her segregationist views, and despite losing the election, ^{379 Racine (Wis.) Journal Times, “Woman Candidate, Legislator Vie in Dem Runoff Primary in Arkansas,” August 13, 1968} she remained active in Arkansas politics and strongly supported George Wallace’s presidential campaign. ^{380 Lancaster, Arkansas in Ink, 39.} Johnson never renounced segregation. In 2005, she wrote: “The people of Arkansas have solid convictions and, if offered the opportunity, they will demonstrate once again that they prefer their own.” ^{381 Ibid., 38.}

Olin DeWitt Talmadge Johnston was governor of South Carolina from 1935 to 1939 and 1943 to 1945, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1944, 1950, 1956, and 1962. Johnston supported President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which put him at odds with other segregationists, including his 1938 opponent for governor, “Cotton Ed” Smith. ^{383 Walter Edgar, “Johnston, Olin DeWitt Talmadge,” South Carolina Encyclopedia Guide to the Governors of South Carolina (2012).} Despite this economic liberalism, Johnston’s championing of the common man did not extend to the civil rights of African Americans. He was unapologetically racist in his rhetoric, opposed all federal efforts to weaken segregation, and attempted to maintain all-white primary elections even after the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. ^{384 Ibid.} In 1944, Johnston refused to use his powers as governor to stop the execution of George Stinney, a 14-year-old Black boy convicted of killing two white girls in a sham trial with no investigation or evidence, even though Johnston had granted clemency to a white man just six years before. In 1985, on the 50th anniversary of his first inauguration as governor, a marker honoring Johnston was erected in his native Abbeville County and the local highway was named for him. ^{385 5 Greenwood (S.C.) Index-Journal, “Highway to be Named for Late Senator,” July 24, 1895.} Strom Thurmond was among the honored guests at the dedication. ^{386 Ibid}

Horatio Seymour, governor of New York from 1853 to 1854 and 1863 to 1864, was outspoken in his support for Southern slavery. At a campaign rally, he opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, warning that “[t]he scheme for an immediate emancipation and general arming of the slaves throughout the South is a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, of arson and murder, unparalleled in the history of the world.” ^{388 Vitor Izecksohn, Slavery and War in the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 108.} In 1868, Seymour ran for president on the Democratic ticket, billing himself as the “white man’s candidate” ^{389 Pittsburgh (Pa.) Weekly Gazette, “Horatio Seymour,” October 8,1869.} and accusing his opponent, Ulysses Grant, of standing for “Negro supremacy.” ^{390 The Lives of Horatio Seymour and Frank P. Blair, Jr. (Philadelphia: T.B.Peterson & Bros., 1868), 59.} A prominent reminder that pro-slavery views were not confined to the South, Seymour lost the election but remained active in New York politics and contributed to the foundational racial rhetoric that politicians called upon well into the next century.

Theodore Bilbo served as governor of Mississippi from 1916 to 1920 and 1928 to 1932, and as a U.S. senator from 1935 to 1947. A towering figure among white supremacist and segregationist politicians, Bilbo praised Nazi racial philosophy ^{392 Steven E. Atkins, Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism in Modern American History (ABC-CLIO, 2011), 49.} and was famous for his extreme and inflammatory rhetoric. In a 1938 filibuster against anti-lynching legislation, Bilbo said on the Senate floor that the bill would “open the floodgates of hell in the South” by encouraging Black men to rape white women. ^{393 Ibid.} In 1946, after four white men beat a Black Army veteran for attempting to register to vote, Senator Bilbo delivered a radio address urging every “red-blooded Anglo-Saxon man in Mississippi to resort to any means to keep hundreds of Negroes from the polls in the July 2nd primary.” He continued, “And if you don’t know what that means,you are just not up on your persuasive measures.” ^{394 Pittsburgh (Pa.) Press, “Stop Negro Voter, Bilbo Demands,” June 23,1946.} Southern senators successfully defended Bilbo against an NAACP-led effort to remove him from office for inciting violence against Black voters. ^{395 5 Boyett, Right to Revolt, 43.} Before succumbing to cancer at age 69, Bilbo spent the last weeks of his life writing a book, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, in which he outlined his fears of “race-mixing” and advocated for the relocation of African Americans to West Africa. (He had proposed a relocation bill in the Senate in 1938, but it failed.) ^{396 Andrew Glass, “Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo Dies at Age 69, Aug. 21, 1947,” Politico, August 20, 2016.} Bilbo never repudiated his racist views and remained an influential figure among leading segregationists in the South long after his death.

Robert “Bob” Jones was an evangelist and radio broadcaster who founded segregated Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. With financial backing from the Klu Klux Klan, Jones began his career as an itinerant evangelist, preaching to millions of people across the United States. ^{398 Wayne Flynt, Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie (University of Alabama Press, 1998), 355; Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (Liveright Publishing, 2017), 81.} By the 1920s he was among the most famous evangelists in the country. His university opened in 1927 as a private, Christian, all-white college that banned African American students throughout Jones’s lifetime. ^{399 “Bob Jones University Apologizes for its Racist Past,” J. Blacks in Higher Ed. 62 (2009): 22-23.} Now a popular destination for conservative presidential candidates on the campaign trail, Bob Jones University did not admit Black students until 1971 and banned interracial dating until a visit from George W. Bush drew press coverage that forced the school to withdraw the policy in 2000. ^{400 Colbert I. King, “Bush Caters to the Bigotry of Bob Jones,” Washington Post, February 28, 2000; Christianity Today, “Bob Jones University Drops Interracial Dating Ban,” March 1, 2000.} Jones’s commitment to segregation was rooted in his Christianity and was a foundation of his belief system. In a radio address on Easter Sunday in 1960, he explained his conviction that God was the author of segregation and that opposition to segregation amounted to opposition to God. ^{401 Bob Jones Sr., “Is Segregation Scriptural?”; Justin Taylor, “Is Segregation Scriptural? A Radio Address from Bob Jones on Easter of 1960,” Gospel Coalition, July 26, 2016.} The sermon, titled Is Segregation Scriptural?, was printed and widely distributed to students at Bob Jones University well into the 1980s. ^{402 Taylor, “Is Segregation Scriptural?”}

Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas from 1955 to 1967, is most widely remembered for defying a federal order to desegregate Little Rock Central High School. On September 2, 1957, Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard to block nine Black students, the Little Rock Nine, from enrolling at all-white Central High. ^{404 Blytheville (Ark.) Courier News, “First Arrest Made in Little Rock Crisis,” September 6, 1957; see also Karen Anderson, Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School (Princeton University Press, 2013), 2.} A federal court ordered that the guardsmen be removed, but an angry mob of white men, women, and youth blocked the school entrance. ^{405 Ibid.} To restore order and enforce the court’s ruling, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and dispatched the Army to escort the Black students into the school. ^{406 Elmira (N.Y.) Advertiser, “Ike Clears Way for Troop Use: Bloody Assaults Block Little Rock Integration,” September 24, 1957; Anderson, Little Rock, 16.} Faubus was not as staunch a segregationist as some Southern governors, but under pressure from hardliners and his own constituents, he embraced the segregationist cause for political gain. ^{407 Benjamin Schwarz, “Insidious Weakness,” The Atlantic (May 1998).} Though his stand did not stop school desegregation in Arkansas, it cemented his identity as a segregationist leader and earned him four more terms as governor. ^{408 Peter Applebome, “Orval Faubus, Segregation’s Champion, Dies at 84,” New York Times, December 15, 1994.}

As Louisiana’s attorney general from 1956 to 1971, Jack Gremillion played prominently in state efforts to resist desegregation. After a federal judge ordered New Orleans public schools desegregated, Gremillion drafted a new law giving the state legislature exclusive authority to determine schools’ racial composition. ^{410 Davison M. Douglas, “Bush v. Orleans Parish Sch. Bd. and the Desegregation of New Orleans Schools,” in Federal Trials and Great Debates in United States History (Federal Judicial Center, 2005), 34.} In response, a panel of three federal judges declared the state law unconstitutional, ordered state officials to cease interfering with integration, and restored control of desegregation to the school board. ^{411 Ibid.} Gremillion famously was held in contempt of court for calling the federal court a “den of iniquity,” ^{412 Lake Charles (La.) American Press, “Gremillion Is Found Guilty,” October 7, 1960.} and he successfully used litigation to bar the NAACP from operating in Louisiana for a period. ^{413 Del Dickson, The Supreme Court in Conference (1940-1985) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 321; Louisiana ex rel. Gremillion v. NAACP, 366 U.S. 293 (1961).} Gremillion’s tenure as attorney general ended in 1972 when he was convicted of federal perjury charges and sentenced to three years in prison. ^{414 New York Times, “Jack P. F. Gremillion; Louisiana Attorney General, 86,” March 6, 2001; Laura Foreman, “Louisiana Attorney General Sentenced,” Greensburg (Ind.) Daily News, January 6, 1972.}

Mrs. J.E. Andrews served as president of the Women’s National Association for the Preservation of the White Race, an organization that promoted white supremacist propaganda in the early 1930s. ^{416 Ibid.} Andrews was an especially vocal critic of anti-lynching activism and she accused the NAACP of being dedicated to promoting the ruin of the “pure white race.” She published a pamphlet advocating the need for a militia to protect whites. ^{417 Ibid.} In a confrontation with the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, a white organization, Andrews distinguished her group as “an organization of white mothers [that] has arisen to defend our girls, both against Negro men and you.” ^{418 Ward, Defending White Democracy, 14} Georgia Women’s World, which her organization published in the 1930s, featured sensationalized messages, such as “White People! We again beg you to wake up before your heritage and your race are obliterated.” ^{419 Georgia Women’s World, “If the White People of the State Remain Silent...,” February 20, 1936.}

A dominant figure in Georgia politics and a virulent racist, Eugene Talmadge was elected governor in 1932 after he ran on a white supremacist and segregationist platform, and won re-election three times. ^{421 SMC Lemmon, “The Ideology of Eugene Talmadge, Georgia Hist. Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1954): 226-48; Sue Bailes, “Eugene Talmadge and the Board of Regents Controversy,” Georgia Hist. Quarterly 53, no. 4 (1969): 409-23.} Talmadge defended racial hierarchy and demanded the same from others. In the early 1940s, when he suspected that the dean and faculty at the University of Georgia were not committed to racial segregation, Talmadge expelled members of the Board of Regents, fired professors, and censored books that promoted social equality. The Ku Klux Klan supported Talmadge’s unprecedented actions and even orchestrated a scheme to get “evidence” against the dean by kidnapping one of his Black employees. The resulting scandal cost Talmadge the 1942 election, but voters overwhelmingly returned him to office in 1946 after a campaign so steeped in racist rhetoric that it sparked violence across the state. The FBI later investigated Talmadge for inciting mob violence and sanctioning the 1946 lynching of two Black couples in Walton County in an effort to sway rural white voters during his campaign. ^{422 Greg Bluestein, “FBI Investigated Ga. Gov in Old Lynching,” Washington Post, June 15, 2007.} The case was dropped after a federal grand jury claimed it could not identify any members of the lynch mob. ^{423 Ibid.}

Eugene “Bull” Connor was an Alabama politician and notorious segregationist with close ties to the Ku Klux Klan. ^{425 Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 111-23.} As Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety during the Civil Rights Movement, Connor facilitated — and in some cases ordered — acts of violence against peaceful protestors. In 1961, he allowed a white mob armed with pipes to attack the Freedom Riders, Black and white college students who rode buses through the South to challenge illegal segregation in interstate transportation. When the students arrived in Birmingham, Connor intentionally failed to protect them, having promised local Klan members that he would “see to it that 15 or 20 minutes would elapse before the police arrived.” ^{426 Ibid. at 126, 596; Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Oxford University Press, 2007), 137.} The Freedom Riders were brutally beaten, and several suffered serious injuries. In 1963, the entire world witnessed Connor’s brutality when Martin Luther King Jr. came to Birmingham to lead a children’s protest against racial segregation. Connor ordered the fire department to blast nonviolent protestors — most of them children — with high-pressure firehoses and commanded police to attack them with batons and police dogs. ^{427 Muncie (Ind.) Star Press, “200 Held After Police Dogs, Fire Hoses, Turn Back Parade,” May 4, 1963; McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 347-77.} Televised images of demonstrators being bitten by dogs, beaten by officers, and slammed into walls by firehoses cemented Bull Connor’s role as a national icon of racist ideology and segregationist violence. ^{428 McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 15.} Connor never repudiated his defense of racial segregation or denounced his use of police violence. ^{429 New York Times, “Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor Dies at 75; Police Head Fought Integration,” March 11, 1973}

The political legacy of four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate George Wallace is enduring and increasingly relevant. Wallace’s 1962 gubernatorial campaign used the slogan “Stand up for Alabama,” and he vowed to fight integration at the University of Alabama. ^{431 Ibid.} Wallace gave a furious inauguration speech, written by Ku Klux Klan organizer Asa E. Carter, in which he condemned integration and federal intervention in state affairs. ^{432 All Things Considered - National Public Radio, “The Artful Reinvention of Klansman Asa Earl Carter,” April 20, 2012.} Six months later, Wallace launched himself into the national spotlight by physically blocking two Black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from enrolling at the University of Alabama. ^{433 Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom, 168-72.} The dramatic “stand in the schoolhouse door” was broadcast on national television, and within a week, Wallace received over 100,000 telegrams commending his actions. Wallace developed a political identity that combined racial demagoguery and fiery rhetoric to defend segregation under the veneer of “states’ rights.” By appealing to racial sentiments, Wallace gained the support of voters who felt threatened by increasing Black political power. ^{434 Ian Haney Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: Strategic Racism, Fake Populism, and the Dividing of America (Oxford University Press, 2013), 13-17.} His overt appeals to segregationists later burdened Wallace’s presidential campaigns and he never reached national office. Today, a portion of Interstate 10 in Alabama and community colleges in the cities of Dothan and Eufaula bear George Wallace’s name. He remains one of the most infamous and influential segregationist leaders of this era.

Lester Maddox first entered the national spotlight in 1964 when he violated the Civil Rights Act by refusing to serve three Black patrons at his Atlanta restaurant, the Pickrick. ^{436 Indianapolis (Ind.) Star, “Atlanta Motel, Restaurant Told To Desegregate,” July 23, 1964; Richard Severo, “Lester Maddox, WhitesOnly Restaurateur and Georgia Governor, Dies at 87,” New York Times, June 25, 2003.} Maddox provided his white customers with wooden pick handles, dubbed “Pickrick drumsticks,” to threaten Black people against entering his restaurant. ^{437 Leon Daniel, “ ‘Pickrick Drumsticks’ Selling Like Hot Cakes; They’re Axe Handles, Not Chicken,” Greenville (S.C.) News, August 20, 1964} When a federal court ordered him to integrate the restaurant, Maddox sold it. In 1966, he capitalized on his notoriety by running for governor on a segregationist “states’ rights” platform and, with the KKK’s endorsement, won. ^{438 Bill Kovach, “Anger, Frustration, GOP Elected Maddox in Georgia,” Tennessean, October 2, 1966.} During his four years as governor, Maddox promoted a racist, segregationist agenda, vigorously opposed integrating Georgia public schools, and refused to permit Martin Luther King Jr. to lie in state after he was assassinated in 1968. ^{439 The Guardian, “Lester Maddox,” June 25, 2003; Errin Haines, “King Funeral, Tributes Reflect Gains in Civil Rights Movement, Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, February 4, 2006.} In a 2001 interview, Maddox remained recalcitrant. “I want my race preserved,” he said, “and I hope most everybody else wants theirs preserved. I think forced segregation is illegal and wrong. I think forced racial integration is illegal and wrong. I believe both of them to be unconstitutional.” ^{440 Severo, “Lester Maddox.”} He died two years later at age 87. ^{441 Ibid.}

A towering figure in Louisiana history, Allen Ellender was a U.S. senator from 1937 until his death in 1972. Though widely regarded as a moderate and a pragmatist who supported liberal New Deal policies, Ellender was deeply committed to racial separation and consistently supported segregationist policies. ^{443 T. Becnel, “Louisiana Senator Allen J. Ellender and IWW Leader Covington Hall: An Agrarian Dichotomy,” Louisiana History 23, no. 3 (1982): 259-75.} In voicing his opposition to President Harry Truman’s proposed civil rights bill, Ellender insisted that “the Negro himself cannot make progress unless he has white leadership. If you call that ‘supremacy,’ why suit yourself. But I say that the Negro race as a whole, if permitted to go to itself, will invariably go back to barbaric lunacy.” ^{444 “Should President Truman’s Civil Rights Program Be Adopted?” (University of Chicago Roundtable, February 6, 1949), Papers of Philleo Nash, Harry S. Truman Library, (Independence, Mo.), 7-8.} Ellender organized a six-day filibuster to kill an anti-lynching bill, categorically voted against all civil rights legislation, ^{445 Joseph P. Fried, “Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana Dies,” New York Times, July 28, 1972.} voted to retain the poll tax, and joined Strom Thurmond and other segregationists in signing the 1956 Southern Manifesto that criticized the 1954 Brown decision desegregating public schools. ^{446 Becnel, “Louisiana Senator Allen J. Ellender,” 268.} Today, several Louisiana public schools and a dorm and library at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux are named after him, and he was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in 1994.

A wealthy Mississippi plantation owner and U.S. senator from 1942 to 1978, James O. Eastland was nationally known as a stalwart of Southern resistance to desegregation. In 1956, Eastland became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which reviewed civil rights bills and judicial nominations. Under his leadership, the committee became known as the “graveyard” for civil rights legislation. ^{448 E. W. Kenworthy, “Rights Bill: Wins 2 Tests in Senate by Wide Margins,” New York Times, March 27, 1964} Civil rights bills passed during this period only if they managed to bypass Eastland’s committee. ^{449 Marjorie Hunter, “James O. Eastland Is Dead At 81; Leading Senate Foe of Integration,” New York Times, February 20, 1986.} Eastland also opposed federally mandated desegregation by proposing a constitutional amendment that provided that “there shall be no limitations upon the power of any state to regulate health, morals, education, marriage and good order in the state.” ^{450 McAllen (Tex.) Monitor, “Court Curbs,” January 6, 1957.} Near the end of his life, when asked if he would change anything he had done as a politician, Eastland answered, “I voted my convictions on everything.” ^{451 Hunter, “James O. Eastland Dead at 81.”}

John Stennis represented Mississippi in the Senate from 1947 to 1989. More restrained than his predecessor, Theodore Bilbo, Stennis carried on Bilbo’s segregationist, white supremacist agenda using the coded language of “states’ rights.” Stennis opposed anti-poll tax amendments, anti-lynching legislation, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968. ^{453 Matthew Yglesias, “The White Supremacist Caucus,” The Atlantic, November 26, 2007.} After Brown, Stennis proposed maintaining segregation by improving African American schools so that integration could be rendered constitutionally unnecessary, and he urged white Mississippians to abandon public schools rather than permit their children to attend classes with Black children. Stennis was among 19 Southern senators who signed the Southern Manifesto in defiance of Brown. ^{454 Ibid.} Many state and federal institutions in Mississippi bear his name, including a hospital in DeKalb, a federal dam near Columbus, and the John C. Stennis Institute of Government and Community Development at Mississippi State University.

Willis McCall, Sheriff of Lake County, Florida, from 1945 to 1972, was infamous for using violence to enforce segregation and terrorize the African American community. In 1951, in the midst of a high-profile retrial of two Black men wrongly convicted of raping a white woman, McCall shot the two men while they were handcuffed and in his custody. The men, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irving, were two of the four Groveland Boys, named for the town where the alleged rape occurred. ^{456 Gilbert King, “An Apology in Lake County,” The Atlantic, May 15, 2017.} Shepherd was killed but Irving survived the two gunshots to his chest and told the FBI that McCall had shot him and Shepherd in cold blood. McCall claimed self defense and was never charged. ^{457 Ibid.} A staunch segregationist, McCall insisted on posting segregated bathroom signs at the Lake County Jail until the Justice Department forced their removal. ^{458 Stephen Hudak, “From Willis v. McCall Road to County Road 450a,” Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel, October 3, 2007.} In 1954, he enforced the Lake County School Board’s decision to ban five children from a segregated school after personally deciding they were “Negro” even though their parents insisted they were white. ^{459 Gallagher, “McCall: End of an Era.”} McCall’s reign of terror ended in 1972, when an intellectually disabled Black man was kicked to death in his jail. ^{460 Ibid.} With the support of many local whites, McCall was acquitted by an all-white jury, and lost a bid for an eighth term as sheriff by a slim margin. ^{461 Ibid.} McCall died in 1994 at the age of 84 after writing a memoir in which he defended his commitment to segregation and the morality of his methods. ^{462 John Hill, “A Southern Sheriff’s Law and Disorder,” St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, November 28, 1999.}

James F. Byrnes was an influential South Carolina politician and avowed segregationist who held high-level positions in state and federal government for more than four decades. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate for more than two decades, Byrnes personally blocked a Senate investigation of a South Carolina lynching and opposed federal anti-lynching legislation, insisting that “rape is responsible, directly and indirectly, for most of the lynching in America.” ^{464 Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past(New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2008), 55-57; Aiken (S.C.) Standard, “Anti-Lynching Bill Attacked: Hon. James F. Byrnes Gives Figures,” January 11, 1922.} When Byrnes was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1941, the NAACP opposed his confirmation in a telegram to the White House: “If Senator Byrnes at any time in his long public career failed to take a position inimical to the human and citizenship rights of 13 million American Negro citizens, close scrutiny of his record fails to reveal it.” ^{465 Bartlett, Wrong on Race, 58.} Byrnes was confirmed to the Court, and later held the office of Secretary of State under President Harry Truman. He remained a vocal opponent of integration throughout his term as South Carolina governor from 1951 to 1955. In his inaugural address, Byrnes proclaimed, “Whatever is necessary to continue the separation of the races in the schools of South Carolina is going to be done by the white people of the state. That is my ticket as a private citizen. It will be my ticket [as governor].” ^{466 Orangeburg (S.C.) Times and Democrat, “James F. Byrnes Stands Firmly Against Change: Separating in Schools Must Be Maintained,” June 7, 1950.} Since his death in 1972, Byrnes has been widely recognized; a building and a professorship at the University of South Carolina bear his name, as do Byrnes Auditorium at Winthrop University, Byrnes Hall dormitory at Clemson University, and James F. Byrnes High School in Duncan, South Carolina.

Harry Byrd Sr. was a Virginia politician and segregationist who served as governor from 1926 to 1930 and as a U.S. senator from 1933 to 1965. He was well known for his vocal opposition to Brown and to racial integration of any kind. ^{468 Munster (Ind.) Times, “Spread of ‘Dixie Revolt’ Threatens Harmony of Democratic Convention,” July 20, 1944; Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 198} On February 25, 1956, Byrd announced an anti-integration strategy that became known as “Massive Resistance.” ^{469 Jack Bell, “Byrd Urges ‘Massive Resistance’ in South to Race Integration Edict,” Indianapolis (Ind.) Star, February 26, 1956.} He supported a group of laws passed in 1956 to prevent integration of Virginia public schools by ending compulsory school attendance, providing vouchers to white parents to enroll their children in segregated private schools, and creating a Pupil Placement Board with the power to assign students to particular schools. ^{470 Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 329. Invariably, [Byrd’s] opposition to integration was couched in the rhetoric of states’ rights. However, having lived his entire life in a segregation community, he had adopted its racial mores and believed that segregation was ‘essential to the maintenance of peaceful and friendly relationships between the races.’ Blacks were appropriately consigned to the positions that race and society had designated for them.} The mainstay of Massive Resistance was a law that cut off state funds and closed any public school that attempted to integrate. ^{471 Bell, “Byrd Urges ‘Massive Resistance.’”} Byrd also built a coalition of nearly 100 Southern politicians who endorsed the Southern Manifesto, which declared the intent to resist racial integration “by any lawful means.” ^{472 Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times, “Here’s Southern Manifesto Text,” March 12, 1956.}

In the role of Dallas County Sheriff from 1955 to 1966, James Gardner (Jim) Clark was an intransigent and violent opponent of integration and the expansion of civil rights. ^{474 Adam Bernstein, “Ala. Sheriff James Clark; Embodied Violent Bigotry,” Washington Post June 7, 2007} Clark described the civil rights movement as an act of “Black supremacy,” and regularly wore a white button bearing the word “Never” in response to the protest anthem, We Shall Overcome. ^{475 Ibid.} Clark dressed in military attire, wielded a .38-caliber pistol, and attacked activists with his nightstick and an electric cattle prod. ^{476 Ibid.} He was often accompanied by a group of mounted volunteers armed with whips and clubs who beat and teargassed protestors at his command. ^{477 Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965- 1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 55.} On March 7, 1965, known as Bloody Sunday, Clark ordered his posse to beat hundreds of peaceful protesters attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black residents. ^{478 Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times, “At Least 67 Persons Said Hurt In Alabama Civil Rights March,” March 8, 1965; see also Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 55; Robert A. Pratt, Selma’s Bloody Sunday: Protest, Voting Rights, and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 52-68.} After the 1965 Voting Rights Act enabled Dallas County’s Black residents to register to vote, Clark lost his 1966 re-election bid. ^{479 Lake Charles (La.) American-Press, “Baker Ruled Winner Over Sheriff Clark,” May 25, 1966.} In an interview in 2006, a year before he died at age 84, Clark said “I would do the same thing today if I had to do it all over again.” ^{480 Alvin Benn, “1960s Selma Sheriff Won’t Back Down,” Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, March 3, 2006.}

Descended from Spanish ancestors who settled in Louisiana, Leander Perez Sr. was a Louisiana politician of unrivaled power and influence and one of the state’s fiercest foes of African American civil rights. As a judge, district attorney for Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes, and kingmaker in Louisiana politics, ^{482 Sid Moody, “Leander I and His Swampland Empire,” Binghamton (N.Y.) Press and Sun-Bulletin, May 3, 1964} Perez developed a national reputation as a leading segregationist aligned with high-profile Dixiecrats like Alabama Governor George Wallace, Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, and Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. ^{483 G. Jeansonne, “Huey P. Long, Gerald L. K. Smith and Leander H.Perez as Charismatic Leaders,” Louisiana History 35, no. 1 (1995): 19.} As the Louisiana campaign manager for the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George Wallace in 1968, Perez helped win segregationist majorities in the parishes under his control. ^{484 Ibid.} He mobilized resistance to integration by founding the 50,000-member white supremacist Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans, and argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible even after the Archdiocese of New Orleans excommunicated him for opposing integration in Catholic schools. ^{485 Ibid., 8, 19.}

Widely known for his segregationist views, Allan Shivers served as governor of Texas from 1949 until 1957. ^{487 Glenn Fowler, “Allan Shivers of Texas Dead; Was Governor in the 1950’s,” New York Times, January 15, 1985.} Unlike more outspoken politicians, Shivers avoided outright name-calling in favor of more carefully phrased white supremacist rhetoric. ^{488 Ricky F. Dobbs, Yellow Dogs and Republicans: Allan Shivers and Texas Two-Party Politics (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), 41.} He was a staunch advocate of “state’s rights,” which he used to rationalize his refusal to implement federal desegregation orders. ^{489 Ibid., 96.} After Brown, Shivers expressed his intent to defy federal orders to integrate Texas public schools and warned that racial violence would inevitably result. ^{490 Ibid., 108.} He gained national prominence in 1956 when the Mansfield school district near Fort Worth received Texas’s first desegregation order. An angry mob prevented three Black students from entering Mansfield High, and Shivers sent Texas Rangers to protect the mob and prevent the students from attending school. The Eisenhower administration, in the middle of a re-election campaign, did not intervene. ^{491 Pampa (Tex.) Daily News, “Shivers Defends Mansfield Action,” September 7, 1956; ibid., 138-41.} Shivers’s action inspired Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus to adopt similar tactics at Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. ^{492 Dobbs, Yellow Dogs and Republicans, at 138-41.} Throughout his political career, Shivers defended segregation and stood as a leader and supporter of white opposition to racial equality.

A journalist and prominent voice of the white resistance to civil rights, James Kilpatrick was editor of Virginia’s Richmond News Leader and gained national attention in the 1950s and 1960s for his ardent defense of segregation. In a series of influential editorials, Kilpatrick encouraged Southern politicians to resist the Brown decision and laid out a framework for resistance under the banner of “states’ rights.” ^{494 Richard Goldstein, “James J. Kilpatrick, Conservative Voice in Print and on TV, Dies at 89,” New York Times, August 16, 2010.} He regularly appeared on television to represent the segregationist cause, including in a televised debate in 1960 with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during which Kilpatrick insisted that civil rights protestors who violate segregation laws they believe are invalid must share the moral high ground with white Southerners who resist desegregation orders they deem unjust. ^{495 Nation’s Future, “Debate: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with James J. Kilpatrick,” November 26, 1960, http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/debate_with_james_j_kilpatrick_on_ the_nations_future/index.html#fn1.} Though he often used coded language to talk about race, Kilpatrick’s beliefs were transparent. In 1963, he drafted an article titled The Hell He is Equal in which he argued that “the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race.” ^{496 Goldstein, “James J. Kilpatrick.”} After four Black girls were killed by a bomb that white supremacists planted in their Birmingham, Alabama, church to punish the congregation for its civil rights activism, the Saturday Evening Post’s editor deemed Kilpatrick’s article in “bad taste” and declined to publish it. ^{497 Ibid} In the 1970s, as a syndicated conservative columnist seeking to shed his reputation and attract a wider audience, Kilpatrick minimized his defense of segregation as a viewpoint he naturally adopted because he was “brought up a white boy in Oklahoma City in the 1920s and 1930,” but he never publicly renounced his white supremacist views. ^{498 Ibid}

Ross Barnett, a prominent segregationist and governor of Mississippi from 1959 to 1964, campaigned as a defender of white supremacy and declared, “The Negro is different because God made him different to punish him.” ^{500 Richard Pearson, “Segregationist Governor Ross Barnett Dies at 89,” Washington Post, November 8, 1987.} Barnett used state funds to support the segregationist White Citizens’ Councils, actively sought to arrest and jail Freedom Rider activists protesting illegal discrimination, and denounced constituents who asked federal agents to investigate a lynching. ^{501 Ibid.; New York Times, “Ross Barnett, Segregationist, Dies.”} Barnett is best remembered for attempting to stop a 29-year-old Black Air Force veteran named James Meredith from enrolling at the all-white University of Mississippi after Meredith won a federal lawsuit challenging segregation at Ole Miss. In 1962, on the day U.S. Marshals were to escort Meredith to campus, Barnett warned a segregationist crowd nearby that Ole Miss was “ready to be invaded” and issued “a call to arms.” The mob flooded the campus in violent riots that left two people dead and injured hundreds before they were quelled by federalized National Guard troops. The federal court held Barnett in contempt and imposed a large fine and jail sentence, but these penalties were never enforced and the charges were dropped in 1965. ^{502 Greenville (S.C.) News, “Gov. Barnett Defies Federal Courts: Meredith Is Refused Admission to Ole Miss,” September 21, 1962; Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, “Gov. Barnett Convicted of U.S. Court Contempt,” September 29, 1962; Morning Edition, National Public Radio, “Integrating Ole Miss: A Transformative, Deadly Riot,” October 1, 2012.} Reflecting on his role years later, Barnett said, “Generally speaking, I’d do the same things again.” ^{503 New York Times, “Ross Barnett, Segregationist, Dies.”}

Strom Thurmond was a prominent South Carolina politician and vocal segregationist. While governor of South Carolina, he led the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948 as the pro-segregationist presidential candidate; he won significant support in the South but lost the election. In 1954, Thurmond was elected to the Senate, where he grew in national influence as a leading opponent of civil rights. In 1956, he was a primary drafter of the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education and encouraged Southern states to prevent public school integration. ^{505 Ibid.; Strom Thurmond, “The Southern Manifesto,” Orangeburg (S.C.) Times and Democrat, March 16, 1956.} A staunch opponent of civil rights legislation, Thurmond famously staged a 24- hour filibuster to prevent passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. ^{506 Danville (Va.) Bee, “Senate Approval Comes After Senator Thurmond Ends 24-Hour Filibuster,” August 30, 1957.} He also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ^{507 Greenville (S.C.) News, “Drift from Federalism Hit,” May 16, 1965.} and its reauthorization in 1975. ^{508 Cincinnati (Ohio) Enquirer, “Southerners Disapprove: Senators Reaffirm Voting Rights Act,” July 19, 1975; Ari Berman, “The Lost Promise of the Voting Rights Act,” The Atlantic, August 5, 2015.} Thurmond served 48 years in the Senate and died in 2003 at the age of 100. He never publicly renounced his segregationist views. ^{509 Timothy Noah, “The Legend of Strom’s Remorse,” Slate, December 16, 2002.}

“Justice Jim” Johnson was an outspoken segregationist who served as an Arkansas state senator and associate justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s. ^{511 Elizabeth Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation (Free Press, 2007), 28-45} After the Brown decision, Johnson launched a campaign to ensure that defense of segregation remained a central political platform in Arkansas. Johnson formed the White Citizens’ Council of Arkansas, which protested plans to integrate schools in the town of Hoxie and proposed an amendment to the Arkansas Constitution that would authorize state officials to ignore federal law. ^{512 Ibid} (Voters passed the proposal, but it was later struck down as unconstitutional.) In 1956, Johnson challenged incumbent Orval Faubus and ran for governor on a segregationist platform with the endorsement of the KKK. ^{513 Hope (Ark.) Star, “Johnson Called Hate Purveyor by Governor,” July 17, 1956; Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son, 28-45.} Although Johnson lost the election, he leveraged his supporters to pressure Faubus to embrace the segregationist cause. He was instrumental in persuading Faubus to defy federal orders to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957. ^{514 Anderson, Little Rock, 61-62.}

The son of Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, Herman Talmadge carried on the segregationist cause after his father died. During his 1948 gubernatorial campaign, Talmadge sought to disenfranchise as many African Americans as possible and told party leaders, “If we can’t have a white primary, we want as white a one as we can get.” ^{516 Joseph E. Finley, “Why South Took Civil Rights Program from F.D.R. but Refuses it When Offered by Truman,” Pittsfield (Mass.) Berkshire Eagle, April 2, 1948.} As governor, Talmadge advocated for segregationist and racist policies, often framed as “states’ rights” issues, which had become a popular segregationist tactic. Talmadge appointed Klan members to public office, including Samuel Green, Grand Dragon of Georgia’s KKK, as Lieutenant Colonel and Aide-de-Camp, and Klansman Sam Rober as head of the State Bureau of Investigation. Following Brown, Talmadge vehemently opposed integration, ominously warning that “blood will run in the streets of Atlanta” and declaring, “We intend to maintain separate schools in Georgia one way or another, come what may.” ^{517 Harold Jackson, “Herman Talmadge: The Stereotypical Southern Senator Who Proved Highly Skilled at Washington Politics,” The Guardian, March 24, 2002; Bruce Wilson, “How Segregation Helped Create The Religious Right And The School Privatization Movement,” Talk To Action, October 18, 2013.}

From 1973 to 2003, Jesse Helms represented North Carolina in the U.S. Senate, where he established himself as a seminal leader of the segregationist movement. Helms ran heavily racialized campaigns, vehemently opposed civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and condemned civil rights activism like the 1963 March on Washington. He appealed to racist sentiment to win elections throughout his career. In 1984, Helms overcame his opponent’s 20-point lead to win re-election by filibustering a bill to make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday and by distributing literature that denounced Black voter registration drives. ^{519 David S. Broder, “Jesse Helms, White Racist,” Washington Post, July 7, 2008.} Helms defeated a Black opponent in 1990 after running a campaign ad that showed white hands crumpling a rejection letter as a narrator said, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” ^{520 The clip is available for viewing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIyewCdXMzk.}

State Senator Sam Engelhardt was the principal architect of the Alabama Legislature’s strategy to defy desegregation, and he served as the Executive Secretary of the Citizens’ Councils of Alabama. ^{522 McMillen. The Citizens’ Council, 47, 220-21} His home district of Macon County was 85 percent African American — the largest percentage of any county in the country — and Engelhardt was terrified by the prospect of Black voters controlling the county. ^{523 John Bartlow Martin, “The Deep South Says Never,” Saturday Evening Post, June 29, 1957.} His state senate campaign cards read, “I STAND FOR WHITE SUPREMACY SEGREGATION.” ^{524 Ibid.} Engelhardt proposed a bill in the Alabama Senate to redraw Tuskegee’s city limits to exclude nearly all Black residents, and later suggested eliminating the majority-Black county by dividing Macon County among its neighboring counties. ^{525 McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 220-22.} Engelhardt served as Alabama’s State Highway Director from 1959 to 1963, and he oversaw the construction of interstate highway projects that destroyed Black communities. ^{526 Eric Avila, “The Freeway Is the Perfect Place to Protest Ferguson,” Zocalo, December 15, 2014. In Southern cities like Nashville, Charlotte, Atlanta and Kansas City, highway planners were often in league with white supremacist organizations as they designated Black neighborhoods for destruction. In his dual capacities as Alabama’s state highway director and executive secretary of the White Citizens’ Council, for example, Samuel Engelhardt routed interstates through the Black neighborhoods of Montgomery and Birmingham. See also Sarafina Wright, “Highways Ruined Black Communities, Says Transportation Chief,” Louisiana Weekly, April 11, 2016.}

Isaac “I.” Beverly Lake was a prominent lawyer who fought school desegregation in North Carolina before joining the North Carolina Supreme Court. Lake unsuccessfully ran for governor in 1960 on a segregationist platform that publicly denounced “race-mixing.” ^{528 Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times, “If You Really Know Dr. Beverly Lake You’ll Vote For Him!” (advertisement), March 27, 1960; Thomas F. Eamon, “The Militant Republican Right in North Carolina Elections: Legacy of the Old Politics of Race,” in The Disappearing South?: Studies in Regional Change and Continuity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 158-59.} He warned white families that integration would “destroy both their school system and their children’s pride in their racial heritage.” In 1957, Lake accused the NAACP of “trying to condition [white] children, even before they are old enough to be conscious of sex, to accept integration not only in the classroom, but in the living room and the bedroom as well.” ^{529 John Drescher, Triumph of Good Will: How Terry Sanford Beat A Champion of Segregation and Reshaped the South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 53.} As late as 1987, he declared it “a disgrace to have a state holiday for a man of deplorable character like Martin Luther King.” ^{530 Eli Hager, “A One-Man Justice Crusade in North Carolina,” Marshall Project, July 29, 2015.} His portrait hangs in the North Carolina Supreme Court, and the North Carolina Bar Association ^{531 Williams, “NC Bar Association Award.”} and Wake Forest and Campbell University law schools give awards in his memory.

Thomas Pickens Brady became a national figure after he publicly denounced civil rights and desegregation. A circuit court judge in Brookhaven, Mississippi, ^{533 Jackson (Miss.) Daily News, “Eli Pigot Slaughtered By A Brookhaven Mob,” February 10, 1908; Pittsburgh (Pa.) Courier, “Slain on Lawn of Courthouse,” August 20, 1955. More than 2000 people lynched a Black man named Eli Pigot in Brookhaven in February 1908, and in August 1955, a Black voting rights activist named Lamar Smith was shot and killed on the courthouse square in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses.} when Brown was decided, he attacked it as a “stereotyped psychological opinion,” denigrated the “bestiality” of African Americans, and implored white Southerners to choose “between segregation or amalgamation” ^{534 Brady, Black Monday; McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 18; New York Times, “Thomas P. Brady, Mississippi Judge,” February 1, 1973.} in a speech called Black Monday that became the intellectual foundation for segregationist White Citizens’ Councils throughout the South. Council members resisted integration through political action and targeted African Americans with violence and economic intimidation. ^{535 McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 235.} Brady was appointed to the Mississippi Supreme Court in 1963 and served on the Democratic National Committee from 1960 to 1964, in which capacity he advocated dissolving public schools to avoid integration. ^{536 Tammie Santos Brewer, et al., Lincoln County (Arcadia Publishing, 2016), 122; Brady, Black Monday.}

Elected on the strength of his opposition to integration and civil rights, Fielding Wright was governor of Mississippi from 1946 to 1952. To avoid the Supreme Court’s ban on whites-only primary elections, Wright called a special session of the Mississippi Legislature to pass a bill that gave party leadership discretion to approve or disapprove primary voters. ^{538 New York Times, “Fielding Wright, ‘48 Dixiecrat, Dies,” May 5, 1956} In his 1948 inaugural address, Wright called for the South to break from the Democratic Party unless it opposed President Harry Truman’s civil rights program. ^{539 Harold Foreman, “Mississippian Flays Truman: Governor Asserts Southern ‘Way of Life’ Endangered,” Blytheville (Ark.) Courier News, January 20, 1948.} Wright helped establish the States’ Rights Democratic Party, the “Dixiecrats,” to flex Southern segregationists’ political clout and thwart challenges to white supremacy. In 1948, he ran for vice president alongside Strom Thurmond on the Dixiecrat ticket, which won some 1.1 million votes. ^{540 Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt, 3; U.S. Election Atlas, “1948 Presidential General Election Data - National,” 2012, https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/data. php?year=1948&datatype=national&def=1&f=0&off=0&elect=0.} Several Mississippi institutions bear his name, including the Fielding L. Wright Art Center at Delta State University and the Fielding L. Wright Science Complex at Mississippi Valley State University.