Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954–1989 by Stephanie R. Rolph (review)

Literature concerning the mobilized pushback to desegregation and larger right-wing movements responsible for such resistance continues to grow in interest and popularity among academics and the general readership. Far too few works, however, delve into the specific actions and mobilization of one of the greater organized antagonists to the civil rights movement as directly as Stephanie R. Rolph's Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954–1989. Rolph explores the origins, activism, and, most importantly, the perseverance of the Citizens' Council's philosophies from their founding until their collapse toward the end of the twentieth century. Intending to push the lifespan of the Council far past the conclusion of the freedom movements in the 1960s, Rolph challenges and expands upon previous scholarship on the Council, in particular Neil McMillen's The Citizens' Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–1964 (1971). With chapters dedicated to local growth, political outreach, national allies, and global expansion, Rolph's study of the Citizens' Council is an engaging examination into the resiliency of white resistance and white supremacist organizations, even though it will leave some readers desiring a more thorough national examination of the movement.

Resisting Equality is extensively researched, drawing heavily from personal papers, correspondence, newspapers and periodicals, and digital collections. The bulk of the analysis focuses on conservative and anti-civil rights movement activism via information gathered from the weekly television program Citizens' Council Forum. Unlike McMillen's scholarship, which chronicles the Citizens' Council as an organization specifically within the confines of the civil rights movement, Rolph stretches the scope of the project past the civil rights era and into the Reagan administration. Moving beyond just their opposition to school desegregation in the 1950s, the book details how Council members and chapters survived and evolved after the rise of school integration and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. Rolph writes, "the Council recommitted itself to white supremacist ideology (following 1964)," and by the 1970s, members merged with "wider trends of white flight" to better blend in within the larger New Right and conservative movements (pp. 156, 160). Unfortunately, for something that Rolph deems such a significant change from previous scholarship, all details of post-1964 Councils are unsatisfyingly isolated to a single penultimate chapter of the book. This is not necessarily an issue of a lack of detail—as the chapter does explore the evolution of the organization's support for other causes in the radical Right. Yet, the chapter and what it offers feels less significant than what was advertised in the book's introduction.

Despite the book's claims for a larger approach to the history of the Citizens' Council, it is also disappointing that Rolph centers her analysis of the Citizens' Council primarily on their work and activism in Mississippi. While the book does include organizing from other states, and sometimes in great transnational detail in the case of the Council's later interest in South Africa, the frustration around Resisting Equality is how it continues to find itself stuck in Mississippi. This is a bit of a shame, as Rolph tends to make broad claims about the Council's activism, longevity, and national popularity in some chapters, only to follow up with these claims with details coming from a singular Deep South state. Source bases could be a possible explanation for this particular geographical attention, although this is unclear. In fairness, Rolph does recognize and defend this choice as she reminds readers that "Mississippi was (the Citizens' Council's) birthplace and its burial site," and that the state held "the deepest impact of organized defiance" (p. 8). It is just unfortunate that other states do not receive more attention, such as the successor and Atlanta, Georgia, founded Council of Conservative Citizens, as it would enhance her argument of the organization's "adaptability" (p. 187).

While there are unsatisfying deficiencies in scope, Resisting Equality...