And I Said No Lord: A Twenty-One-Year-Old in Mississippi in 1964

3. Interview with the Citizen's Councils of America: Contrast and Conflict

71 3interview with the citizens’ councils of america contrast and conflict 72 Robert Dale Williams, public relations director of the Citizens’ Councils of America, lived up to northern stereotypes of the southern segregationist. He was a heavy, sloppy man, although he confided to me that as a youth he had been terribly underweight and suffered severely from asthma. His office, which occupied a third of the third floor of the Plaza Building on Congress Street in downtown Jackson, was a large room in a well-appointed, carpeted suite with white walls. Our conversation began with Williams’s statement that the Citizens’ Council was devoted to effecting the repeal of or a successful court challenge to the civil rights law passed a short time before. Elaborating a bit, he explained that he believed sections of the law to be “quite unconstitutional.” In reply to my request to be more specific, he referred to the Thirteenth Amendment, claiming that the restaurant owner compelled to serve blacks against his will was being forced into involuntary servitude. In the 1880s, he went on to say, the Supreme Court threw out identical legislation. “They’re trying to get around it now with interstate commerce. Now if the government has any right to compel desegregation , it ought to end with interstate commerce. You go into the Greyhound bus terminal here in town. There used to be two waiting rooms, and there are two restaurants. Now I believe that when a person 73 get a lot of young nigra college students. Well, the young nigras get arrested, and where are the civil rights workers? They’ve took off to another town with the money without even leaving them enough for their bail. That’s why the nigras down here are helping COFO so slightly, and I get a tremendous laugh out of that.” He laughed. I asked him where he thought the Mississippi Summer Project fit into the civil rights movement. “The Mississippi Summer Project is an extension of the whole program. It’s the attempt to organize what hadn’t yet been organized, the white college students. Only difference is, they ask them to bring their own bail money down. The same group’s behind them. They’re just running their heads into a brick wall.” “What brick wall is that?” “Mississippi.” “Oh,” I said. “But the way they’re doing it, Mississippi’s the underdog. So Mississippi’s going to profit from two things, the backlash and sympathy for the underdog. Just you wait and see.” He chuckled, wanly. “All they’re trying to do is get the state taken over by federal troops, and they’re not going to do it because nothing’s going to happen. Civil rights gets all kinds of publicity, but the majority of people are not for it. travels on a bus, and the bus stops, every person has a right to get out and get something to eat and refresh himself. There’s no segregation up there in that terminal , but you’ll still find 99 percent of the nigras eating in what used to be the nigra restaurant.” “Why is that?” “Because people have enough sense not to go where they’re not wanted. I know I sure wouldn’t want to eat where I’m not wanted, and the nigras don’t either. Now stopping at a motel is a voluntary act and has nothing to do with the interstate commerce clause, and that’s what this motel owner in Atlanta who’s testing the bill is trying to prove.” I asked Mr. Williams about the civil rights movement in general. “Civil rights is nothing but a big promotion gimmick. It all began with the Montgomery bus boycott , which was part of the Communist plot, and I can document it, I’ll show you right in the Communist Party platform, that’s what they want. You see, a whole lot of nigras are prospering more under civil rights than they could by going out and getting a job and working, that’s why they’re in it. The rest of the nigras, they’ve seen this kind of thing for eight, nine years. These agitators come in shouting, ‘We’re going to set you free,’ so they call a big meeting and pass the plate, and then they pass the plate some more, and then they call for a big demonstration and 74 “Now...