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1 The NAACP and the Origins of the Johns Committee, 1956 Since the NAACP elected to fight with the weapons of pressure instead of persuasion, it should not now complain when similar weapons are turned against it. William D. Workman, The Case for the South, 1960 In 1956, the Florida legislature established an investigating committee charged with identifying legal infractions by the NAACP. Florida joined other southern states that were creating sovereignty commissions, education commissions, and committees on un-American activities. All of them shared a single goal: to keep white schools white. Florida’s committee was the product of a wildly unrepresentative state legislature in which elected officials from small rural counties held political power beyond their numbers. Employing any tactic that would help in the cause of maintaining segregated schools, including passing an interposition resolution, a bloc of segregationist legislators argued that an investigating committee was necessary to expose the state’s NAACP chapters as lawbreakers bent on creating chaos and attaining social equality, duped by national leaders in New York City. Opposing them stood the moderate governor, LeRoy Collins, who faced reelection in 1956. Collins had defeated state senator Charley Johns in the governor’s race of 1954, and now Johns was leading the fight to preserve segregation. The investigating committee that came to bear his name was part of one strand of massive resistance in the region , but it also represented the tensions between old Florida and new, p The NAACP and the Origins of the Johns Committee, 1956 · 17 between traditional expressions of white supremacy and an approach to segregationist resistance that tied it to America’s global battle against communism. * * * At midcentury, Florida was growing faster than almost any state in the nation. Between 1940 and 1950 the population increased from two million people to three million. By the end of the 1950s, that figure had jumped to nearly five million. Florida’s rate of urban growth also outpaced all of its regional counterparts. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of Floridians living in cities doubled, from 1.8 million to 3.7 million.1 Many of the new residents came from the Northeast and Midwest. While towns in the Panhandle and the northeastern section of Florida remained largely populated by white, southern, and Protestant residents, central and south Florida cities drew new inhabitants from a variety of ethnic and religious groups, including Cubans, Italians, Spanish, and Jews. For most of the century Florida had boasted a higher rate of urbanization than any other state in the South, but the differences between city and countryside became even more pronounced in the decades after World War II as cities and suburbs grew.2 Other major transformations were underway in Florida as well. At the beginning of the twentieth century, over half of the state’s population worked in agriculture, raising cattle and growing cotton, tobacco, and citrus. Industries included phosphate mining, lumber, and shipping. During and after the war, construction, finance, insurance, and real estate boomed. Computers, the space program, and trade with Latin America catapulted the state into a position of importance in the national and global economies by the early 1960s.3 These rapid changes occurred in the context of an outmoded political system characterized by one-party politics, a governor who could not serve two consecutive terms and who shared power with an elected sixperson cabinet, and an undemocratically apportioned legislature. The “Pork Chop Gang,” or porkchoppers, were a group of conservative white Democrats from rural counties who controlled state government during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The editor of the Tampa Tribune introduced the moniker in 1955 in an attack on their extravagant pork-barrel spending on their own constituents at the expense of Florida’s growing urban areas.4 The state constitution enabled the president of the 18 · Communists and Perverts under the Palms Florida Senate to appoint all committee members and chairmen, to determine the order in which legislative business was conducted, and to recognize members during senate debates, all of which solidified porkchoppers ’ power during the postwar period.5 In 1950, the state’s seven largest districts were home to half the population but elected only 20 percent of Florida’s representatives. By the early 1960s, legislators representing less than 15 percent of Floridians controlled state government.6 Still, moderates were gaining a foothold after World War II, particularly those who stressed economic and educational reform. Dan McCarty was just such a gubernatorial candidate in 1952...

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