Joe T. Patterson and the White South's Dilemma: Evolving Resistance to Black Advancement

JOE T. PATTERSON AND THE WHITE SOUTH’S DILEMMA

Joe T. Patterson

AND THE

White South’s Dilemma

Evolving Resistance to Black Advancement

Robert E. Luckett Jr.

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

JACKSON

www.upress.state.ms.us

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2015 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2015

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Luckett, Robert E., Jr.

Joe T. Patterson and the white south’s dilemma : evolving resistance to black advancement / Robert E. Luckett Jr.

     pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4968-0269-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4968-0270-5 (ebook) 1. Patterson, Joe T., 1907–1969. 2. African Americans—Civil rights—Mississippi—History—20th century. 3. Civil rights movements—Mississippi—History—20th century. 4. Mississippi—Race relations—History—20th century. 5. Mississippi—Politics and government—1951– 6. Racism—Mississippi—History—20th century. 7. Mississippi. Attorney-General’s Office—Biography. I. Title.

E185.93.M6L83 2015

323.1196’0730762--dc23

2015005900

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY FATHER, WHO BELIEVED IN THE POWER of education and the ability of all people to achieve their dreams, and to my wife and children, who inspire me to be more like my father.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1    Lessons in Practical Segregation

2    Challenges for the Jim Crow Hierarchy

3    Fissures in the Segregationist Fold

4    White Paranoia and Black Informants

5    Black Advancement and Federal Intervention

6    Braying Jackasses

7    Would-Be Ruthless Dictators

8    Freedom Summer

9    Practical Racism

10  School Desegregation and Freedom of Choice

CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Acknowledgments

LEAVING MISSISSIPPI FOR YALE IN 1995, I EMBARKED ON A JOURNEY filled with the tragedies and the triumphs of life, and I have been blessed along the way with unforeseeable opportunities and with lifelong friends at all my stops. I stand on the shoulders of so many more people than those listed on these pages. To all of you, please accept my deepest gratitude. For those named here, know that your impact has led directly to this book.

At Yale, I learned to think critically and analytically and began to write adequately, but most of all I encountered a community of students and scholars who loved learning and who proved to be fantastic friends. My college roommate and brother for the past twenty years, Danny Sims, provided an example of how to maximize hard work and play that I try to emulate to this day. And he wasn’t alone. My six years in New Haven were marked by incredible folks: Freddy Sheahan, Ryan Joelson, Katy Grubbs, Hugh Flick, Kelly Brownell, Robyn Harris Stout, Mike May, Nathan Gault, Roger Schonfeld, Jennifer McTiernan, Anita Kishore, and the list could go on. I love you all.

Yale also enabled me to live in places like Nebraska, where I found a home away from home and another family. Jill Runge Gable, Jason Cumberland, Tom Furman, Tyler Furman, Bob Furman, Doogie Niemiec, Zy Pajnigar, and the entire Camp Kitaki community have made me a better person. Thanks to a semester abroad in Paris, I met a friend, Ilya Khaykin, whose loyalty and friendship are unmatched. While at Yale, friends from home like Anthony Moore, Quincy Moore, Scott Higdon, Johnnie Johnson, Kathryn Prybylski, and Jenni Valentine Clemons helped keep me grounded as much as possible. And Yale introduced me to Glenda Gilmore. If it had not been for her, I would have never ended up at the University of Georgia. For that, I am eternally grateful.

Many others led me down the path to write this book. I’d particularly like to thank my high school history teacher and basketball coach, Richard Wilkinson, who first inspired my love of history and had as big an impact on my life as anyone outside my own parents. Bill Patterson and the entire Patterson family made my research a possibility. Joe Crespino’s scholarship and encouragement were extremely influential. His insight into this manuscript made it immensely better. The same could be said for Jason Ward. His own fabulous work affected how I thought about the topic, and his careful reading vastly improved this book. In Jackson, I’ve had the good fortune to get to know another fabulous historian, Stuart Rockoff, whom I’m grateful to call a friend. His scholarship, perspective, good humor, and leadership are all traits I admire. And then, there was John Dittmer. His book Local People made me want to become a civil rights historian.

In the archives, where projects like this one either live or die, so many people provided essential assistance. The entire staff at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History helped me at one point or another, and Mattie Sink in the Mitchell Library at Mississippi State as well as Jennifer Ford and Leigh McWhite at Ole Miss were indispensable in their knowledge and support. Various staff members at the National Archives in College Park and the Library of Congress were supremely helpful, as were the people at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, where a research grant made it possible for me to spend time in its incredible collections. And I should add my deepest thanks to the University Press of Mississippi and Craig Gill. They have stood behind this project for nearly a decade.

As for the University of Georgia, I could not have been luckier than to have spent eight years in the company of the friends I found in Athens, and I want to thank the faculty there for all that they did to make me realize what the study of history could contribute to the world around me. From the beginning, I was challenged to become the best scholar I could be, even when I wasn’t so sure I wanted to grow up to be a historian. Jim Cobb, John Inscoe, Ed Larson, Kathleen Clark, Paul Sutter, Derrick Alridge, and Bryant Simon all had an indelible impact, but in particular Robert Pratt accepted me under his tutelage. His door was always open, and he provided anything and everything I ever needed or asked for. I learned more about scholarship and teaching from him than I could possibly recount. In all of my professional endeavors, I strive to meet his example.

With that said, a cohort of colleagues saw me safely through the best and worst times of my life. All the nights I spent at Foxz and on my front porch swing were highlighted by the company of great friends. In this case, the list is not a small one: Ivy Holliman, Bert Way, Judkin Browning, Bruce Stewart, Chris Manganiello, Chris and Allison Huff, Ichiro Miyata, John and Kim Turner, Sara Sylvester, Betty Thomas, Justin Nystrom, Anne Marshall, Jim Giesen, Cassie Sheldon Strawn, Daniel Seaton, Marija Bekafigo, Matt Stambaugh, and Alex Hayes all made for an incomparable amount of good times. But far and away, the boys of Local 578 made my days in Athens special. John Hayes and Frank Forts are two of the best people I know, and their friendship will forever be cherished. Not only are all these remarkable people my friends, they continue to set a high standard for professionalism and scholarship.

And then, Jackson State University and the Margaret Walker Center came into my life. I could not have been luckier than to have landed in my hometown working for a place and a cause that have become my passion. Never trained to be a public historian, I have learned how much I love the work that goes into a museum and archive. Plus, as a historian, it’s not a bad career move to have your office sit on top of a repository for historic collections that you can access any time you’d like.

While Margaret Walker has been my professional focus since coming to Jackson State, the people I’ve met and the colleagues I’ve made are at the heart of my personal commitment to this place. Again, the list of people I’ve grown to admire thanks to my connections at Jackson State is not a short one: Robert Smith, members of the Margaret Walker Center Board and National Council, Maryemma Graham, Bill Ferris, Randy Klein, Deborah Barnes, Otha Burton, Mario Azevedo, Rico Chapman, Noel Didla, Jean Chamberlain, Preselfanie McDaniels, C. Liegh McInnis, Daphne Chamberlain, Monica Flippin-Wynn, Robert Blaine, Garrad Lee, Theron Wilkerson, Kat Hughes, Kimberly Jacobs, Michael Morris, Tesia Nagorka, and so many others. Through Jackson State, I’ve also been blessed with the chance to know and work with David Cunningham and his students at Brandeis University. He’s not only a world-class scholar but an all-around great guy and trusted friend.

None of this mentions the staff members at the Margaret Walker Center, who’ve remained committed to our vision through a lot of ups and downs. Brandon Thompson, Juliette Hill, Frenchie Crowley, Janice Robinson, Diana Evans, and all of the grad assistants and work study students who’ve come through Ayer Hall, like Ortez Williams, have brought their talents, good will, and hard work to bear on the Center’s burgeoning status in the field of African American history and culture. Of course, I have been blessed by the work of my predecessors, Alferdteen Harrison and Margaret Walker Alexander. They insured the longevity and stability of this place. However, two women have been my rock and the foundation of our success at the Margaret Walker Center since the day I arrived. Trina Toles is absolutely the best ambassador for the Center and my most trusted source of counsel. She is unfailingly committed, and I depend on her more than she knows. And Angela Stewart is the single most knowledgeable archivist I’ve ever met; she has taught me everything I know about the work of a legitimate archive. Without her and Trina, the center would not run, and this book would not have happened.

More than anything, I have been lucky to come home. Gone for nearly fifteen years, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever make it back to Jackson on a permanent basis, but I immediately found a group of old and new friends who’ve added happiness to my life and supported me through the hard work of beginning a family and a career. The St. Alexis family and Chuck Culpepper have been a huge part of that story. Nate and Sarah Ballard and the twins, the Turpin family, Judy Barnes and her crew, Pete and Lucy, and all the others have given our family the absolute best fellowship. And I could say the same for the Buffingtons, Doug McBride, and many others who have come into my life since I moved back to Jackson.

Still, this book would not have been possible without the constant support and love of my family. From the Lucketts to Bee, Rick, Taylor, and Mae, my extended family is the best anyone could ask for. Most of all, I have my parents to thank. I cannot put into words all that my mother and father have meant to me. I will never be able to fill his shoes, but Dad’s example is the only inspiration I will ever need. I miss him every day but know that he has seen me through all that’s brought me here. As for Mom, she has wanted nothing but the best for me. She has worked tirelessly toward that end and never asked for anything but my love in return. I owe her the world and can only strive to be half the human being she is. I am so thankful that C. B. Carroll has become her rock.

Finally, I have Serenity, Hazel, Silas, Eva, Rhett, and Flip, our newest addition, to thank for bringing long-lost fulfillment to my life. Along with Molly and Jackson, our family means the world to me. For Rhett, I hope that you will be inspired by this book to love the lifelong process of learning as much as I do. For Eva, understand what this book represents: you can do anything you set your mind to. Silas, since the day you were born, you have filled my life with joy, and you gave me the strength to finish this book. May it always encourage you to hold on to your love of life. Hazel, you have your mother’s tenacity, and your energy lifts me up each morning. At this point in your early years, you love books as much as anything. I hope this book fuels that love long into the future. To Flip, you too have joined this crazy band of Lucketts, and this book represents what I pray will be a future full of knowledge, love, and happiness. And to Serenity, you have stood by me, pushed me, pulled me, and demanded my best. This book is a product of your love and dedication. Thank you. I hope that I can prove to be a father and husband that you will all be proud of.

JOE T. PATTERSON AND THE WHITE SOUTH’S DILEMMA

INTRODUCTION

The Dilemma of the White South

AS MISSISSIPPI’S ATTORNEY GENERAL FROM 1956 TO 1969, JOE T. PATTERSON led the legal defense for Jim Crow in the state. He was inaugurated for his first term two months before the launching of the Sovereignty Commission, whose purpose—to protect the sovereignty of … Mississippi … from encroachment thereon by the federal government—rehashed a century-old states’ rights mantra.¹ Despite the dubious legal foundations of that cause, Patterson supported the organization’s mission from the start and served as an ex officio leader on its board for the rest of his life.

In addition to his leadership on the Sovereignty Commission, Patterson was a card-carrying member of the segregationist watchdog group, the Citizens’ Council, and in his own words, had spent many hours and driven many miles … advocating the basic principles for which the Citizens’ Councils were originally organized.² These two groups were the brainchildren of elite, powerful bitter-enders who flexed a lot of segregationist muscle, and because of Patterson’s role in those organizations, few people ever doubted his Jim Crow credentials. That is, until September 1962.

That fall, Patterson stepped out of his historical mold when he defied a circle of white power brokers, among whom he had been entrenched, and did so at the height of the biggest crisis of Mississippi’s racist order. From the time that James Meredith filed his application for admission to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in January 1961, Patterson had been on the front line of the state’s defense. Even after the US Supreme Court decreed that Meredith must enter the university, Patterson opposed the school’s desegregation and the federal intervention he saw at Ole Miss. But he faced a dilemma that confronted all white southerners: how to maintain an artificially elevated position in southern society without resorting to violence or intimidation. Once the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Meredith v. Fair (1962), the state attorney general looked to temper the impact of the ruling without joining the mob.

It was not a new problem for white southerners, and in the wake of James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss in 1962, riots erupted on the university’s campus. Most white Mississippians held that institution in reverence as a symbol of their status, constructed upon white supremacy, and Meredith’s entrance threatened their deep-seated notions of white privilege. That threat prompted an expression of white fear and outrage that led to a violent clash with federal marshals and the deaths of two people. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), blasted the state for its history of racist violence and lack of official intervention at Ole Miss. We call Mississippi our worst state…. It is not representative of America…. Our task is as much to bring Mississippi whites into the 20th Century as it is to secure justice for the Negro.³ Laced with the bitterness and frustration of an exhausted activist, Wilkins’s words represent a point of general agreement among activists and civil rights scholars: white Mississippi’s exceptionalism for racial hatred and the depth of its commitment to opposing the quest for racial equality. For good reason, the notion of Mississippi’s singular racist extremism has held consistent sway, but it has obscured some complex trends in the white community.

Few scholars have examined the actions of a politician whose highest office was that of state attorney general, but Patterson’s career allows a localized inspection of the inner workings of a Jim Crow regime, much in the same way that historians have moved to an analysis of local people as a means to better understand the complexities of the modern civil rights movement.⁴ While most white Mississippians were committed to the cause of white hegemony and many were willing to employ any means necessary, they never reached a total consensus on how best to maintain that power. Instead of a monolithic white South, the adherents to Jim Crow disagreed over the means to the same racist ends. If all white Mississippians had been the same in a commitment to violence as an enforcement mechanism for their hegemony, they would have made easier targets for the advancing black freedom struggle since they would have been more identifiable.

But the bad guys did not always announce themselves through the demagogic rhetoric that became so associated in Mississippi with leaders like James Vardaman, Theodore Bilbo, and Ross Barnett or through spectacle lynchings and the violence that led to the Meredith crisis and the murders of Emmett Till, George Lee, Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, and others. To understand the differences in white strategies for opposing black advancement and to recognize the often savvy methods employed by whites for doing so is to have a more complicated and complete understanding of what African Americans were up against. It suggests that even more credit is due those activists who fought the racist white power structure in Mississippi and the rest of the South.

As for white massive resistance to black advancement, the idea that the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 launched a new form of racist backlash is misguided. White southerners had had to deal with a black freedom struggle since Reconstruction and the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. Those whites had employed various strategies for the better part of a century to oppose black progress. Of course, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the use of lynching in the state were the most visible products of diehard resistance, born from the Redemption of the white South, but the Mississippi Plan, which led to a new state constitution in 1890, proved effective as well. Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement had a practical side to it for the proponents of white supremacy. Along with the rise of sharecropping, racist laws guaranteed second-class black citizenship but were enforced when necessary by violence and mob rule.⁵

During the Meredith crisis, Governor Ross Barnett and his cronies chose a path of total resistance that was not new and that they had trumpeted throughout Barnett’s administration. Rather than admit one black student, they came up with a secret plan to go back on guarantees made to the Kennedy administration that Meredith was going to receive safe passage through campus. Instead, they planned to arrest him on trumped-up charges and keep him out of Ole Miss. At that point, Joe Patterson chose to desert their ranks and reveal the double-cross to the US assistant attorney general for civil rights, Burke Marshall. Patterson’s actions did not guarantee Meredith’s entrance to Ole Miss, which occurred under the guard of federal marshals, but he did undermine the cause of those whites who shouted never and who had believed him to be one of their own. It was the pinnacle of a conflict among southern segregationists that reshaped the region’s political landscape, but it did not happen because Patterson had some kind of racial egalitarian epiphany.⁶ Patterson and others sought pragmatic answers to the dilemma of white southerners as they took on the Ross Barnett and Citizens’ Council establishment, not in the name of civil rights but to offer a more durable version of white power.

Without a doubt, reinvigorated, hard-line white resistance played a critical role in the South after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, but many historians and the general public frequently envision that resistance as something born in response to Brown. Rather, its roots were in the white Redemption of the post-Reconstruction South and had its heyday in the century leading up to Brown. From this perspective, the all-or-nothing defense of white supremacy as well as the defiance of African American progress began during the late nineteenth century. At that time, the white South predicated its opposition upon the intimidation and violence that led to segregation and disfranchisement.⁷

While it may have been most notably expressed by southern politicians, white racist extremism did not have a top-down history nor did it reside exclusively in the South. It was an expression of popular white beliefs throughout the country. The resurgence of the Klan in the early twentieth century exemplifies that fact, and its popularity in places like Indiana contradicts views of southern exceptionalism. In the same way, political strategies bent on solidifying white supremacy arose across the nation as the civil rights movement expanded beyond the confines of the South. Likewise, the mitigation of white resistance did not come to the people from their leaders; elected officials like Patterson expressed a broad dissatisfaction with the ability of racist demagogues like Barnett to maintain white prerogatives. Soon after the Meredith crisis, the relatively progressive Delta Democrat Times (Greenville) applauded a Growing Disenchantment with Council in the state, and editor-in-chief Hodding Carter III hoped that Patterson would be able to reduce the group down to the scope of a yapping dog.⁸ By 1962, others had turned against the Citizens’ Council and its ilk in favor of practical segregation, as Sovereignty Commission director Erle Johnston termed it.

In the early 1960s, racist violence as an opposition strategy became vulnerable because the people who dedicated themselves to its methods became more susceptible, though still dangerous, targets for the civil rights movement. With the diehards, it was clear who the bad guys were, but as white diehard resistance weakened, Jim Crow became more insidious and effective. Thus, Police Chief Laurie Pritchett thwarted civil rights efforts in Albany, Georgia, by studying Gandhian nonviolence and employing nonbrutal tactics in dealing with the movement, whereas Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, was much less effective in the long run with his fire hoses and police dogs.⁹ A hard-line and violent white supremacy did rear its ugly head in response to Brown, but its ascendancy was rather brief in comparison to the much longer scope of its dynamic history before 1954.

The power and longevity of diehard resistance varied from place to place, but Patterson’s career reveals that its decline, in terms of how and when the majority of white Mississippians embraced it, began with Meredith, much earlier than most scholars have suggested. It did not disappear and in some ways only changed its form, but the resistance that civil rights activists like Roy Wilkins denounced never had the same power in Mississippi after 1962.¹⁰ Instead, the white attempts to maintain a failing, racist social system evolved into something more subtle and durable.

Committed to the cause of segregation, Patterson was a pragmatist who saw little good in attempting to thwart the dictates of the federal government. In the 1930s, Mississippi’s US senator, Pat Harrison, influenced a young Patterson, who came to work for him as a legislative assistant in 1936. With significant national clout during the New Deal, Harrison tried to maintain white power in the South while balancing the politics of his more famous and outspokenly racist colleague in the Senate, Theodore Bilbo. Thus, by the time Patterson came to power as the state attorney general in 1956, Mississippi’s leaders already had a brand of Jim Crow politics that held up under the scrutiny of the American public and the federal government, neither of which embraced black efforts to assert independence and authority. That position meant he was destined to butt heads with more militant segregationists who saw any willingness to bend in the fight against the civil rights movement as an inexcusable weakness. This conflict foreshadowed a career marked by the struggle between Patterson’s legal convictions and his segregationist bias.¹¹

Whites all over the country laid claim to insidious brands of racism that were more suitable for protecting white supremacy than all-or-nothing opposition to the black freedom struggle. Although a sizeable number of stalwarts, who were more than capable of making their presence felt, clung to it, the viability of total resistance as the dominant white political strategy in Mississippi waned after 1962. Men like Patterson, who recognized the vulnerability of a doctrine rooted in complete defiance, were no less dedicated to white power even as they moved away from the intimidation and violence of extreme resistance. Their efforts comprised what Patterson’s friend and colleague on the Sovereignty Commission, Erle Johnston, termed practical segregation.¹²

Raised in Calhoun County in the northeastern part of the state, Patterson was from the hill country of Mississippi. His socially constructed status as an entitled white man did not depend on the economic exploitation of African Americans; his father was a judge, and they lived on the town square. In some ways, even as he dedicated himself to the preservation of segregation and black disfranchisement, this independence freed him from a more strident commitment to Jim Crow, such as that espoused by his two biggest antagonists, who walked in lockstep with diehard resistance. Yet Ross Barnett and John McLaurin, one of Barnett’s representatives at Ole Miss during the riots, were not Delta planters either.

One of the most virulent racists in the state’s history, Barnett was from Leake County in the middle of the state; McLaurin was a lawyer and state senator from Rankin County, a few miles south of Jackson.¹³ Strands of racism with various tactics for preserving Jim Crow cut across geographical and socioeconomic lines in the state, making such distinctions inadequate. Instead of a more complete picture of the complexity of racist intransigence in the South, events like the rise of the Citizens’ Council as well as the Meredith crisis fueled an even more dogged dedication to the dominant popular conceptions of white Mississippians as being one and the same since the days of slavery.

A professor at Ole Miss who became one of James Meredith’s confidants, James Silver advanced those conceptions when he offered an acerbic examination of the state’s racial climate during his presidential address at the 1963 meeting of the Southern Historical Association. Titled Mississippi: The Closed Society, the same name as his future book on the subject, Silver’s address compared Governor Barnett to John Jones Pettus, who had led the state one hundred years earlier. Silver painted a picture of continuity and uniformity in the segregationist order, where the voice of reason is stilled and the moderate either goes along or is eliminated. Those in control during such times of crisis are certain to be extremists whose decisions are determined by their conformity to the orthodoxy.¹⁴ While it contained much truth, the proximity of the Meredith crisis and his subsequent departure for the friendlier confines of the University of Notre Dame colored Silver’s message. The trauma inflicted upon black Mississippians and civil rights activists cannot be denied, nor can the extremism of many white southerners. Still, for Silver, all segregationists were one and the same.

Other observers have echoed Silver’s arguments, furthering the notion that there was little to no difference between segregationists.¹⁵ To a certain extent, there was continuity in the spirit and motives for all adherents to Jim Crow, but to dismiss their differences in tactics as something negligible is to miss significant conflict between segregationists who avowed hard-line resistance and those who espoused tokenism. It was the difference between line-in-the-sand defense of white hegemony and the acceptance of some black power as a means of perpetuating that hegemony. White Mississippians who found themselves on either side of those divides saw a distinction and engaged each other in bitter debate over them. In the end, hard-core segregationists lost to a strategy that was more effective in preserving white power.

The tendency to write off all white Mississippians as one and the same has been heightened by a desire to rightly canonize civil rights heroes for their sacrifices and by the memories of activists and historians who lived through that era. Those factors have led to explanatory models of the movement as a simple confrontation of good versus evil. Those models have done a disservice to the complexity and sophistication of white resistance that activists encountered. If all white southerners had been of one mind and wholly committed to diehard resistance, they would have made clearer albeit still dangerous targets.¹⁶ It was never that easy.

The history of white resistance to African American progress in the South is a diverse one. With nearly 250,000 members, the Citizens’ Council was a varied, decentralized group with many local Councils. Overall, the Council expressed a broad commitment to total defiance of the modern civil rights movement while its primary public partner, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, represented a growing political moderation among some of its segregationist members. Little did most people know, some public Sovereignty Commission funds were being funneled to the Council to pay for its propagandistic news program, the Forum Films. Sharing money and members, the Commission and the Council had a close relationship for many years, but tensions rose between the two, particularly over their competing visions of how best to preserve Jim Crow.¹⁷

From the construction of a desegregated, federally run Veterans Administration (VA) hospital in Jackson to the curtailing of funds for the Forum Films, members of the Sovereignty Commission confronted Council leaders at times. Joe Patterson was at the heart of many of those disagreements and even resigned his membership in the Council after it refused to endorse him during his bid for reelection in 1963. An ever-increasing number of white leaders in Mississippi, Patterson included, tried, as historian Yasuhiro Katagiri notes, to make the state’s white citizenry realize the importance of a nonviolent accommodation to the reality of the 1960s—a reality that witnessed civil rights activists advancing on the ranks of massive resisters.¹⁸ That evolving segregationist effort meant that white leaders like Patterson, who accepted some black advancement for the sake of preserving most of white power, squared off with those more dedicated to complete defiance of black advancement, who in turn hoped to protect total white hegemony. Despite the internal disagreements, the Commission remained a potent foe of the civil rights movement.

Like the eight white religious leaders in Birmingham who criticized Martin Luther King for not promoting a more gradualist approach to civil rights and who in return found themselves subject to criticism in King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Joe Patterson’s story broadens perceptions of the white South. Patterson was not of the same relatively moderate-to-liberal mold as the ministers in Birmingham; he would have been one of their biggest critics. But life in the South made them susceptible to arguments from both segregationists and civil rights activists, just as Patterson was. As white community leaders who espoused a gradual accommodation of the movement, those ministers were labeled Communists from the far right and cowards from the Left. Still, they did share a common sense of purpose as moral and spiritual leaders of the community and thereby provided some ground for white southerners to accept limited black advancement. Along with Patterson, they deserve a place at the historical table.¹⁹

While the definition of a moderate is debatable, many whites and blacks existed outside the dichotomy of good-versus-evil portrayed in popular memory of the civil rights movement, and over time, most whites came to reject hard-line resistance even if they wanted to maintain their social prerogatives based on race. Patterson’s role in the desegregation of public schools is a good example of the growing complexity of white reactions to the social and political progress of African Americans. Espousing freedom of choice plans that gave parents the freedom to choose which school in a district their children attended, Patterson knew that few black parents were going to risk being the first to choose an all-white school for their children. If some did, Patterson could claim that desegregation had occurred in those districts even if the few black children enrolled were immediately resegregated within their schools and their parents faced intense social and economic repercussions.

While his racist intentions may have been thinly veiled, Patterson framed the debate over Jim Crow in terms more appealing to nonsouthern whites and more satisfying to both the white masses in Mississippi and the federal government than the Ross Barnett brand of resistance proved to be. Therein lies the difference between Patterson’s principles and line-in-the-sand resistance: Patterson espoused a politics fundamentally different in methods than that of the Ross Barnett camp. Having tied themselves to the sinking ship that was total resistance, Barnett and his friends were either too stubborn or too afraid to change even as they were floundering.²⁰

Similarly, when a federal court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Atlanta, white Georgians faced a serious problem. Thanks to the general white hysteria and relative silence of more moderate voices after the Brown decision, the Georgia General Assembly passed a statute in 1954 that mandated the privatization of education in the state should any desegregation be forced at some future point by the US Supreme Court. When that point came in 1959, it turned out that most folks, white and black, preferred to keep public schools. The Court did give the state time to write a new law and stave off the extinction of public education. With that reprieve, Governor Ernest Vandiver, who became a relative moderate after being elected on a staunch segregationist platform, appointed John Sibley to head the Georgia General Assembly Committee on Schools, a gubernatorial power granted under special legislation that created the committee. A powerful pro-business banker and lawyer, Sibley conducted hearings across the state in 1960. The plan was not so much to solicit the opinions of Georgia voters but to convince them that diehard resistance had to stop, particularly for the sake of economic development. In the end, public education was saved, but the moment did not mark a triumph for white moderation or the civil rights movement. Instead, a type of practical segregation, like the one that Joe Patterson espoused, emerged in Georgia.²¹

Patterson’s story also allows us to debunk the exceptionalism of Mississippi as compared to the rest of the United States. That supposed exceptionalism allows others to point fingers at the state of Mississippi for its backward and dogged dedication to Jim Crow while ignoring or glossing over a racist past that has defined much of American history. As for Patterson, he was at the forefront of developing a political philosophy that appealed to and was adopted by a growing national conservative movement. In this analysis, previous arguments about Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy that brought racist rednecks into the conservative, Republican fold are turned on their heads. Instead, the conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s emanated from the grassroots level in the South.²² White Mississippi was never monolithic, and the diversity of the white experience needs further investigation in order to reveal a more complete understanding of the civil rights movement. No politician was better at manipulating a calculated version of white accommodation than Patterson.

Civil rights movement histories have largely ignored Patterson’s story. While this volume uses Patterson as a lens to look into the evolution of white southern politics and resistance in particular, it serves more as a collective biography of white southerners like Patterson who recognized that a more nuanced response to the movement than that of diehard segregationists was necessary. In addition, it examines the widespread and diverse nature of practical segregation. Patterson represented a viable political alternative to line-in-the-sand resistance at a time when many historians have claimed that such options were nonexistent, and he expressed a political and social ideology that was not so exceptional. This alternative framing does not mean that Patterson advocated the advancement of the civil rights movement or even stopped resisting it. To the contrary, he continued to fight for Jim Crow and against civil rights activism for the rest of his life.

Patterson’s opposition to the Ross Barnett camp was born out of the practical segregation that grappled with the dilemma common to white southerners.²³ Ultimately, Patterson saw his position as the best option for maintaining Mississippi’s bigoted social order, and most white Mississippians came to agree with him. Together, they resisted the modern civil rights movement without the systematic threat of violence or absolute rejection of federal court orders. In addition to reducing hard-liners into not much more than yapping dogs, it was an intransigent brand of racist politics that in many ways was never defeated.

CHAPTER 1

Lessons in Practical Segregation

JOE PATTERSON’S EARLY LIFE AND CAREER LAID THE FOUNDATIONS FOR his future in public life and for his political philosophy. Much like the reality that white southerners had resisted black advancement with every means possible, including outright violence, from the moment that African Americans began exercising their rights of citizenship after emancipation, those white southerners disagreed over the best means of doing so long before Mississippi Senator James Eastland issued the Southern Manifesto in