The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

14. Resisting the Wind of Change: The Citizens' Councils and European Decolonization

265 14 Resisting the Wind of Change The Citizens’ Councils and European Decolonization Daniel Geary and Jennifer Sutton “Will Western Europe Be Driven Out of Africa?” So worried Medford Evans in a 1978 article in the Citizen, the official publication of the leading white segregationist organization, the Citizens’ Councils of America (sometimes known colloquially by its original name, the White Citizens’ Councils). Evans quoted the 1910 edition of the Cambridge Modern History, which claimed that the “colonies of France, Britain, Portugal, Germany, and Italy” had made Africa an “annex of Europe.” “There is no indication,” Evans reflected, “that the learned historian had any idea that fifty years later—that is, in 1960, the African possessions of those West-European nations would begin a chain-reacting process of ‘liberation’ and ‘independence ’ which seemed to leave the continent not an annex of Europe, but a disconnected shambles.”1 The Citizens’ Councils strongly identified with an ideal of a racially homogeneous Europe, yet they sharply criticized European decolonization measures, which they perceived as an abandonment of civilization to the anarchy of majority black rule. In the mid-twentieth century, the relationship of white southern segregationists to Europe pivoted on its policies toward former colonies in Africa. Segregationists such as Evans identified most strongly with whites in former British colonies of southern Africa, whom they believed were in an embattled position analogous to their own. As seen in the pages of the Citizen, American segregationists in solidarity with whites in Africa resisted the “wind of change” that British prime minister Harold Macmillan identi- 266 Daniel Geary and Jennifer Sutton fied in his famous 1960 speech indicating a shift in British policy in favor of decolonization in Africa. During the 1960s and 1970s, British colonial policies strained segregationists’ affinity for Britain. However, by the 1980s their hostility toward Britain gave way to a more positive view of metropolitan Britain under its new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. They perceived her as committed to advancing the interests of whites in Britain, southern Africa, and, through her close affiliation with Ronald Reagan, the United States. The agendas of white supremacists in the American South have too easily been assumed to focus on highly local concerns—matters of school boards and lunch counters—rather than global ones. Most historians have overlooked those whites who couched their resistance to racial equality in international frameworks. In contrast, many scholars have shown that resistance to segregation and racism promoted associations during the mid-twentieth century among African Americans and colonial peoples around the world.2 Historians also have demonstrated how Cold War imperatives shaped American policy makers’ responses to the civil rights movement in the United States, as Jim Crow proved an embarrassment to Americans seeking to win the support of the new nations of Africa.3 In comparison to the scholarship on the international dimensions of antiracist protest and government policy making, only a few scholars have considered the international dimensions of white resistance to racial equality. Similar to how African Americans understood the outcome of the civil rights struggle to be linked to the outcome of African struggles for independence , international-minded segregationists merged their cause with that of whites in decolonizing African states and, later, with that of metropolitan Britons affected by an influx of nonwhite immigrants from the former empire. Even one of the best of the few scholarly works on the international views of southern segregationists, Thomas Noer’s “Segregationists and the World,” stops short of fully recognizing the international dimensions of white supremacist outlooks. Noer contends that “segregationists used selected international issues largely to gain support for their major domestic goal of defeating the civil rights movement.”4 To be sure, southern segregationists ’ public opposition to decolonization in Africa reinforced their arguments for segregation at home by demonstrating the perils of black rule. In addition, as Noer demonstrates, segregationists framed their arguments against decolonization in Cold War terms that facilitated alliances Resisting the Wind of Change 267 with anticommunist American conservatives outside of the South. Yet an examination of the sustained engagement of the Citizen with decolonization in Africa suggests that their international concerns went beyond an interest in defending American segregation to an intense identification with embattled whites in Africa’s European outposts. Noer’s account concludes with the third-party presidential campaign of segregationist George Wallace in 1968, but the international concerns of white segregationists continued long past that date.5 Indeed...