Guess Who’s Coming To Jackson
Melissa Webster
June 24, 2009
Gordon Baum, the chief executive officer of the Council of Conservative Citizens, can tell a good story. He likes history—early American and European—and his delivery comes with an intimate confidence honed from years as an attorney.
On the phone his voice is avuncular, and he seems charming, almost.
“How left wing are you? Don’t lie to uncle Gordy now,” he asked of the Jackson Free Press before he agreed to an interview.
But when Baum gets serious and explains what the Council of Conservative Citizens stands for, the humor dries up, and you get the whole man: an intelligent, well-spoken and thoroughly racist ideologue. And he’s an ideologue who is bringing his agenda to the majority-black city of Jackson this weekend as the group holds its national convention at the Regency Inn on Highway 80 West.
From his office in St. Louis, Mo., Baum is the operating brain behind one of the more notorious “pro-white” right-wing groups in America—an organization that was built from the mailing list of the Citizens Councils of America (often referred to by critics as the White Citizens Council), which was headquartered in Jackson until 1990.
Like all pro-white groups, the Council of Conservative Citizens deals in the politics of fear and intolerance. The CofCC has 15 principles that read as if they were written by terrified people with little else to celebrate aside from their skin color and their past. Nowhere in the Council’s 15 principles is the rhetoric of last year’s election. There’s no talk of hope here. No promises of change. Not one, “you betcha.”
The rhetoric is a mixture of current conservative wedge issues integrated with old-style race-baiting.
Close the borders, they say. Quit foreign aid. End affirmative action. Get rid of the illegals and slow down legal immigration. Oppose gun control. Oppose hate-crime legislation. Oppose homosexuality “and other perversions.” Oppose any “mixture of the races.” Oppose all welfare for all immigrants. Oppose federal aid to education. No activist judges.
And demand plenty of states’ rights to help make the goals reality.
Recycled Racism
This is an old platform full of old ideas, and it’s promulgated by an old group full of (mostly) old white men. Popularly, this brand of conservatism today is known as “paleo-conservatism,” although the group prefers calling itself “far right wing.” Neither moniker, however, does the group justice because neither label addresses the group’s racial preoccupation.
Currently, several front-page headlines on its Web site (http://www.cofcc.org) prove its race obsession: “Obama Pledges $73 Million to Black-Ruled Zimbabwe”; “Google.com ‘street view’ captures racially motivated attack (by “Muslim immigrants”) on 14 year old (white) boy”; “Blacks pose as marijuana dealers to rob and murder white man”; “Public Defender declares that white crime victims can not properly identify black perps.”
One front-page post “Obama eyes plan calling for mass bulldozing of dilapidated black neighborhoods"—starts out innocuously enough. However, the post ends: “Of course the part no one is telling you is that the idea is to move all the violent thugs, who caused these neighborhoods to deteriorate so badly, into nicer neighborhoods. What is going to stop all these thugs from causing their new neighbors to flee?”
At the site, visitors can also buy “Euro Pride” and “White Pride” T-shirts and other “provacutive” (sic) items with emblems for the “Distressed Hammer of Thor,” “The Prussian War Ensgin” (sic) and a Leif Erikson postage-stamp T-shirt. Erikson (970-1020 CE) is credited with bringing the first Europeans—Norwegian immigrants—to North American soil.
Once, a decade ago, The New York Times labeled the Council’s platform a “thinly veiled white supremacist agenda.” It’s the agenda of fame or infamy, depending on who’s asking, but either way Baum said his group is well known within the right. “Next to the NRA we are the best known right-wing organization in the country,” Baum said.
This year the Council turns 21, and with the economy in the tank, Baum said his group has hit a growth spurt. Suddenly, their agenda is selling, and Baum is a busy man.
“The vast majority of people in America agree with us,” Baum said in a phone interview. Faced with Obama’s victory, Baum claims his base is a “silent majority” unmoved to vote in the last election because “they didn’t have a dog in the fight.”
If Baum is right, and the Council is gaining ground, it should light a fire under Democrats and Republicans alike. Neither party can afford to lose ground to the Council; each gain the fringe makes is a loss of compound magnitude.’ It is not only an ideological loss but, worse, it’s a loss to the past. Especially around here. In Southern politics, a glance backward is a glance straight into the face of the Council of Conservative Citizens, or its precursor, the Citizens Council.
Baum, of course, believes they have a good home in Mississippi, even in (or near) the city where then-Belhavener Bill Simmons directed the national office of the Citizens Council downtown and edited The Citizens Informer, which called for—among other things—the shutdown of Mississippi’s public schools rather than allowing black kids to attend school alongside white ones.
“Mississippi is one of our strongest states, always has been,” Baum said. Mississippi does have more chapters than any other state, but today the Council is not as strong as it was even 10 years ago. Until recently, the CofCC listed events for Mississippi chapters on its Web site, but a link to state activities is no longer listed.
More than a decade ago, the CofCC claimed about 35 Mississippi state legislators as members. It was common for the state’s candidates—including Democrats and, occasionally, even a black hopeful—in the state to speak before the group’s gatherings, including the annual Black Hawk rally in Carroll County, which had long been sponsored by the organization and started to support busing white kids to a whites-only academy. For years, the state’s media barely noticed the vote-pandering in front of a group that didn’t bother to hide its race views and treated Black Hawk as just another place for old-time politicking.
It wasn’t until Sen. Trent Lott and Gov. Kirk Fordice were outed by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media for catering to and speaking before the openly racist group that public opprobrium dampened overt political support for the Council. Fordice even defended the views of the group, even as the national Republican Party called for members to repudiate it.
In 1993, then Arkansas Lt. Gov. Mike Huckbee agreed to speak to the group’s convention in Memphis, but ended up sending a videotaped message instead. The next year, he backed out altogether, stating: “I will not participate in any program that has racist overtones. I’ve spent a lifetime fighting racism and anti-Semitism.”
Baum said a few Mississippi legislators are active members today, but he wouldn’t say who, and neither their photos nor their endorsements are included on the Council Web site. He was similarly reticent with membership numbers in general although he said his organization has somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 members. Like Baum’s claim of a “silent majority” though, this number is highly suspect. While the CofCC’s membership numbers are secret, the group’s Web site lists 38 chapters across the United States, some of which Baum admitted have as few as seven members, while the biggest chapters (including Baum’s St. Louis chapter) have about 500 members. If the Council does have 30,000 members, each chapter would have to have to average 789 members.
In any case, Baum estimated attendance at the national annual Council meeting this week in Jackson would top out at about 250, similar to last year’s. Meanwhile the National Rifle Association, Baum’s group of comparison, claims 4 million members. Speakers include national pro-whites like Paul Fromm and Sam Dickson, along with Mississippi CofCC leader Bill Lord and Leflore County Supervisor Phil White, according to the group’s Web site. It also promises “a surprise big name speaker.” Overflow guests are urged to stay at the Fairview Inn in Belhaven; the Parkside Inn off Interstate 55 North or the Holiday Inn Express on Greymont Avenue.
Roots in Jackson
Spend some time poring over the Council’s online photo album, and it is apparent that many members (if not most) are senior citizens. Baum himself is in his 60s, meaning he was a young man during the upheavals of the 1960s.
The Council may be the last pro-white group these folks belong to, but it was not likely their first or their only. The organization was seeded by the mailing list of the Citizens’ Council of America, which famed Delta newspaperman Hodding Carter Jr. dubbed the “uptown Klan” because of the white-collar Chamber-of-Commerce types who supported protecting the so-called southern way of life through public pressure, smear campaigns, and boycotts of white merchants and residents who tried to stand up for the rights of African Americans.
It is often said that Jackson-based director Bill Simmons—who owned the Fairview Inn for years until its recent sale, followed soon by his death—at one time knew where every white person in the city stood on the race question. In recent years, as an aging innkeeper to people of all races, Simmons told the Jackson Free Press that belief was apocryphal.
Still, Simmons directed the organization in its downtown headquarters until it was demolished in 1990 by a biracial work crew, replaced by the state Department of Transportation buildings. Simmons was also a long-time proponent of “scientific racism,” and used it to pressure whites into following the agenda of the Citizens Council. The practice of using pseudo-science sought to prove that other races, particularly African Americans, are inferior to whites, are more violent, and are less capable of academic and other successes. The “science” of racism was also behind the later debunked study and book, “The Bell Curve.”
In an era when racism was popularly considered to mean bed sheets and burning crosses, the Citizens Council was a rebranding of such bad publicity, and men who look and sound like Baum—smart, well-dressed, articulate, convincing professionals—were at the forefront of the movement. The marketing was meant to expand the group’s base, and for a while the strategy worked.
In the early 1950s, school integration was a mainstream political issue—and was a primary force behind the belief in “state’s rights,” just as slavery had been a century before. After the federal courts mandated integrated schools, the CCA started building private schools, popularly called segregation academies or more simply “seg academies,” or “Council schools.” These schools would form the basis of the Mississippi Private School Association.
While he built his law practice in the 1960s, Baum also built up the CCA in his capacity as field director for the Midwestern chapters, until he broke with CCA in 1988 to found the Council of Conservative Citizens. Baum said he left the CCA because its goals were stiflingly narrow—private-school busing issues weren’t enough to sustain him or a movement. He wanted to found a political group with a broad set of principles, and although the values would be reminiscent of the CCA’s states’ rights and pro-white rhetoric, the new group would not be a single-issue organization.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court had finally enforced the Brown v. Board decision in 1970, forcing recalcitrant Mississippi public schools to integrate with “all deliberate speed—and prompting thousands of white families to flee the Jackson Public Schools—times had changed, even in Mississippi. By the late 1980s, people didn’t talk about integration in every other sentence. For better or worse, it was a dead issue.
University of Southern Mississippi history professor Neil McMillen published “The Citizens’ Council,” still today the only biography of the group, in 1971. When the book came out, the CCA was a thriving “respectable” pro-white group with a headquarters office in downtown Jackson.
By the time of the book’s reissue in 1994, the CCA was gone. “[T]he Council was an anachronism with no place to go but out of business,” McMillen wrote in the introduction.
Standing In for God
Except it didn’t go out of business so much as it went under new management. When Baum and others launched the CofCC in 1988, they used, in part, membership lists from the dying CCA to build their new organization’s roster. Only the rhetoric changed; if integration was a lost cause, the group would develop a more general platform around a combination of putting America first, racial integrity and being Christian.
In a new suit of clothes, the same old faces with the same old attitudes lurched toward the 21st century as the Council of Conservative Citizens.
In the South, the Council was either accepted or tolerated and maybe even expected for years, but national politics of the late 1990s had little relation with the Dixie-fried politics of the 1950s. Times had changed in Washington, D.C. When the American public got wind that senior southern leadership still held ties with the CofCC—thanks to the revelations about Lott’s coziness with the group—they were outraged. In a way, though, those were the good days for the Council. They held the gaze of the nation.
Led by The Washington Post, more than a dozen articles appeared in national media linking Lott, then Senate majority leader, with Baum’s group. The coverage inspired a flurry of Council activity, all part of a grand strategy to get attention—and membership—by any means necessary.
“We’d threaten to sue (the papers) for libel, and they’d give us an op/ed piece,” Baum said. But when the politicians began to distance themselves from the increasingly public rhetoric—Citizens Informer H. Millard, for instance, said minorities are turning American into a “slimy brown mass of glop—the news stories ended, and the CofCC moved out of the limelight and into the shadows.
It didn’t cease to exist, though. “We weren’t being secretive about (our work); it’s just that the liberal media will ignore you,” Baum said in the interview.
Today the politicians who once proudly counted themselves as members of the Council, or at the least pandered to them for votes, are dead or looking for political fortune in a less radical way. A few even repudiated the CofCC. Lott, when accused a decade ago of racism for his support of the Council, balked and claimed he was ignorant of the Council’s politics.
In 2003, then-gubernatorial candidate Haley Barbour caused a stir when he attended the Black Hawk rally and barbecue hosted by the group, but he, too, refused to stand up for them. He called the Council’s racist politics “indefensible,” even as he refused to ask the group to remove his photo—alongside CofCC field director Bill Lord—from the CofCC Web site.
Time and again, Baum says, big-name politicians have sworn loyalty to the cause, and every time they publicly balked once the media got wind of the connection.
Baum decries their hypocrisy. “Believe me, they all knew what we were—we made sure of that. They’re just protecting their rear ends,” he said.
The CofCC CEO is bitter. He compared what happened to the Council after the Lott revelations to Peter’s betrayal of Jesus with the CofCC standing in for the son of God. But unlike Peter, no politicians were moved to tears by their betrayal. They moved on, or they stayed in politics, but none bothered to defend the Council. All the while the Council drifted further from the mainstream.
Then the economy imploded, and unemployment skyrocketed (more than 9 percent in Mississippi in April). A black Yankee Democrat was elected president (from the Land of Lincoln, no less). And then, Baum said, membership in the Council began to climb.
“They’re destroying the middle class of America,” Baum said of the Obama administration. He down played that the president’s race is helping membership grow, though. “It’s not because he’s black, but it’s because he’s pushing a left-wing agenda fast and furious.”
As a result of bad times, Baum is enjoying fecund times for his group. “Regular gas has jumped 30 cents in the last few months, and this is killing the little people,” he said. “If the economy stays in the doldrums, and if we keep pushing this liberal agenda, you’re going to see a massive backlash in this next election.”
During the interview, Baum seldom makes overtly racist comments (especially compared to what’s on his group’s Web site), though he did once tell New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, a black man, that “The Bell Curve” “is not too far off the mark” with respect to black intelligence.
Hodding Carter III, who has seen heard all the rhetoric from decades of the Citizens Council and its sequel, knows better than to buy the slightly softened race rhetoric.
“You can put lipstick on a pig and call it Angeline, but it’s still a hog,” he said. “These people are unrelenting.”
New, Young Blood
Baum reports that his group’s new blood is young blood. “They’re not just old people—the vast majority of our new recruits are under 40,” Baum said. This is a coup for the group if it’s true. He said a few chapters were launched by men in their 20s—men barely older than the Council itself.
Unlike the GOP, which has made some ostensible effort to broaden its base, the Council has done little to redefine its image; it doesn’t have to. Desperate times are a boon for groups like the CofCC.
“Anytime in which people are, in a large degree, appealing to people who have been marginalized, then the pool from which you draw these people expands,” Carter said from his home in North Carolina.
Carter, a lifelong civil-rights advocate, journalist and statesman who battled the old Citizens Council alongside his editor-father, said now is not the time to ignore the Council and its outreach. More than any other group, Carter said Republicans have the biggest responsibility to do the right thing.
“There is an unresolved and occasionally unpleasant aspect within the Republican Party,” he said. “It always irritates most people and all Republicans when I say what I think, but there are people who are considered within the mainstream, and they look and sound and fly like these same ducks. They embrace these same sort of things.”
The Council got some good press from the right wing in January when Ann Coulter published “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America.” The darling of the radical right spent three pages defending the CofCC against charges of racism. The book is selling well on Amazon.com and, so far, 160 readers have given it five out of five stars.
To younger readers unfamiliar with Baum and his Council, or the Council that spawned it, Coulter’s description may well convince a few readers that Baum’s organization is right in line with the Republican agenda.
“There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation,” she writes.
Perhaps she spoke with Baum himself.
“We’re not white supremacist, we’re not white separatists,” Baum told me as soon as he heard I was a journalist. In some ways, Baum’s and Coulter’s apologia is a sign of the times. Not too long ago conservative pro-white groups might not have ducked the “racist” charge, but today the label is anathema even to the Council.
Still, the CofCC’s denial is a clearly false defense. When asked about the large banner ad on the Council’s main Web page selling “white pride” T-shirts, Baum replied: “These people are paying for the banner ads. So far as (the ad) doesn’t go overboard and threaten violence.”
But the group’s second principle (of 15) says in part, “The American people and government should remain European in their composition and character. … We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankindŔ The same principle also does not mince words about the reason that the CofCC is against immigration—of certain people: “We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime.”
If pressed, Baum offers a passionate and lengthy defense about the preservation of “white culture,” which he claims is dying out worldwide. As he went on, his tone grew more piquant until he asked, “What’s wrong with trying to preserve our culture?” Finally, frustrated, Baum admitted, “If that makes us racist, so be it.”
Despite Baum’s claims of broadmindedness, the Council’s Web site is full of intolerance, and racist vitriol is never more than a few clicks away. And in case the second principle didn’t make the race issue clear enough, the sixth principle says, Ӆ we oppose … homosexuality and other perversions, mixture of the races, pornography in all forms, and subversion of the authority of parents.”
The “news” stories on the Council’s site are culled and edited to represent the worst in non-whites and, while the site does not advocate outright violence, it does incite fear, intolerance and misunderstanding. On the bottom right-hand side of every page of the Council’s site there is, in boldface: Shocking Statistics.
But there is only ever a single statistic: “Between 1976-2005, blacks made up 13 percent of the US population, but committed 59 percent of felony murders. Overall, blacks are 9 times more likely to commit murder than whites. Source: US DOJ.”
Today more than ever, Baum and his members are far from “uptown” anything. Heidi Beirich, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s director of research, said that while the GOP shows signs of expanding their tent to include more diversity, groups like the CofCC are becoming more fringe.
But if the fringe expands under an Obama administration, maybe the Council won’t need the support of the country-club set. When asked if Coulter’s three-page defense of the Council worried her, Beirich responded: “I think Ann Coulter is frankly just stupid. I don’t know a member of the Republican Party that would write anything like she did.”
Still, there has been no outcry from the GOP camp over Coulter’s book and, besides, Republican Party spokespeople don’t have to come out and voice support for the Council’s message to be heard; their silence is enough to bolster the group’s efforts on behalf of “conservatives.”
Earlier this year, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele apologized on national television after he called radio demagogue Rush Limbaugh “incendiary” and “ugly.” Steele’s apology came a day after Limbaugh and right-wing radio host Laura Ingram excoriated the GOP chairman. Incendiary right-wing pundits may not represent the party in an official sense, but they are, to a real degree, its spokespeople. This sort of capitulation to the demagogues has people like Carter worried.
“They refuse to repudiate it, and that’s something to be concerned about,” Carter warned.
Repudiation or not, Baum shows no signs of giving up the fight, and on the phone he sounds upbeat, happy almost, at the uphill battle his troops face.
The Council of Conservative Citizens is taking on a popular president who is black and Democratic, and a slew of social programs that will help those whom the Council most dislikes—immigrants and minorities.
The group faces a world in which borders—despite their fences—are opening faster than they’re closing.
With a Confederate battle flag in one hand and marching orders some 60 years old in the other, culture warrior Baum is gunning for the fight. The Jackson conference this Friday and Saturday won’t be the ultimate battle, and it won’t be the first shots fired, but it will be a Council regrouping. It will likely see more strategizing than action, and it might go unnoticed by most of Baum’s despised “liberal media.” But it’s the beginning of something all the same.
“The next four years will be a wild ride,” Baum said.
Additional reporting by Donna Ladd and Kate Medley.
TIMELINE: The Council’s Greatest Hits
The greatest hits of the Citizens Council and the Council of Conservative Citizens, past and (sort of) present. They’ve been quiet lately.
Fall 1953: Robert B. “Tut” Patterson, the manager of the Leflore County plantation and a former star football player at Mississippi State, hears in a local school meeting in Indianola of cases before the Supreme Court that could force integration in public schools. He reports he felt “confused, mad and ashamed.” He urges whites to “stand together forever firm against communism and mongrelization.” Patterson is referred to as “the Dean” by the Council of Conservative Citizens. (4) (2)
May 17, 1954: Supreme Court rules segregation illegal in Brown v. Board of Education. (4)
Sept. 7, 1954: Mississippi State Legislature convenes a special session to preserve segregation in public schools. (4)
April 3, 1956: Both houses of the Mississippi State Legislature officially commend the publication of the first Citizens’ Councils of America handbook. (4)
1964: Citizens’ Councils create a national network in an attempt to consolidate power, though the group is already on the decline, even in the heart of Dixie. (4)
September 1964: Ӆa few token Negroes gain admission to Mississippi’s all white schools.” (4)
1988: Gordon Lee Baum, former field coordinator for the Midwestern Citizens’ Councils and several other former members of the CCA, forms the Council of Conservative Citizens (the CofCC) in Atlanta.
1990: At the behest of the state, the Citizens Councils of America building in Jackson at 605 Plaza Building is demolished. An integrated work crew does the job. (3)
1991: Sen. Trent Lott addresses the CofCC. (1)
1992: Lott addresses the CofCC. (1)
1993: A California chiropractor who allegedly represents CofCC sends a letter to CBS complaining that “Blacks are only 12 percent of the population but have 20 percent to 30 percent of the faces on TV.” In his letter he describes the CofCC as a “large number of people who are more and more turning off the TV when these black propaganda-agenda shows come on.” (1)
September 1994: CofCC holds a Confederate flag rally in South Carolina. “If we can have a Martin Luther King Day, a black history month, why can’t we have the Confederate battle flag fly above the Statehouse?” asks William Carter, the president of the South Carolina CofCC chapter and former campaign manager for klansman David Duke. (1)
1995: Lott addresses the CofCC. (1)
Fall 1995: Conservative columnist Sam Francis is fired from The Washington Times after he criticizes the Baptist Church’s apology of slavery and later speaks at an American Renaissance function wherein he says, “The civilization that … whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe … the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.” (5) (7)
1997: CofCC names segregationist Lester Maddox, former governor of Georgia, “Patriot of the Century.” (1)
1997: Lott photographed with CofCC officials. (1)
June 1998: Rep. Bob Barr addresses CofCC meeting and is photographed. Public opprobrium ensues, and Barr denies any affiliation with the CofCC. (1)
Dec. 12, 1998: Barr scandal won’t rest. Barr pleads, “I strongly disagree with many of this group’s ridiculous views, and have said so publicly.” The AP reveals Senator Trent Lott’s connection with the CofCC, but Lott’s spokesman, John Czwartacki, says Lott “has no recollection of involvement.” (1)
Dec. 12, 1998: Alan Dershowitz says on Larry King, “Bob Barr is the stupidest man in Congress, the most mendacious, or both.” (1)
Dec. 22, 1998: New York Daily News questions Lott’s involvement with the CofCC. Lott’s spokesman explains that he “has absolutely no involvement with them either now or in the future.” (1)
Jan. 14, 1999: New York Times reports Arnie Watson, Lott’s uncle, is a member of the CofCC’s executive board. Watson tells the Times, “Trent is an honorary member.” (1)
Jan. 15, 1999: CofCC chapter coordinator William Lord says Lott was never a member, honorary or otherwise, of the CofCC. Lord tells the Associated Press: “Trent Lott is my friend, as he is a friend of everybody. But he has no association with our group.” (1)
Jan. 19, 1999: Jim Nicholson, chairman of the RNC, urges Republicans to resign from the CofCC. “There is no room for racist views in the Republican Party,” Nicholson tells the Associated Press. “I never heard of the CCC until a few days ago, but it appears that this group does hold racist views.” (1)
Jan. 22, 1999: Roy Romer, chairman of the DNC, urges all Democrats to resign from the CofCC. The Omaha World-Herald quotes Romer as saying, the CofCC “is an organization that should not get the support of any person who believes in democracy in this country.” (1)
2005: Francis pens the CofCC’s Statement of Principles, the second of which says, “We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind … and to force the integration of the races.” He dies of a heart aneurysm a few days later. (6)
1. http://www.adl.org/mwd/ccc.asp
2. http://cofcc.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/ci-2007_3-sample.pdf
3. The Citizens’ Councils of America: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction 1954-1964, 1994 ed.
4. The Citizens’ Councils of America: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction 1954-1964, 1971 ed.
5. http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/02/sam_francis.php
6. http://cofcc.org/?page_id=71
7. http://www.sobran.com/articles/francisTribute.shtml#comments
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