Freedom's Teacher by Katherine Mellen Charron

Author:Katherine Mellen Charron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The African American children at Septima Clark’s school, Archer Elementary, had offered some spirited responses to Brown. “They’ll be plenty of fighting now,” one boy predicted, while another chimed, “The first one to call me a nigger, I’ll bop him in the nose.” Many complained, “I don’t want to go to school with them.” The forward-looking expected to enter white high schools but dared their future classmates “to say anything to me.” One third-grader advised his teacher “that he was leaving the next day because he lived near a white school.” White students had their own reactions as well. As Clark’s principal left one afternoon, he overheard a group of white boys snarl, “That’s the nigger who is going to be over us.”46 Maybe they repeated what they had heard at home. What their parents said and did was infinitely more frightening.

In the months and years that followed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision and its implementation decree issued a year later, white people across the South went on the offensive to protect their segregated way of life. Robert Patterson organized the first chapter of the all-white Citizens’ Council (CC) on July 11, 1954, in the Mississippi Delta. White South Carolinians established their inaugural branch in Elloree the same month that Highlander hosted its United Nations workshop in August 1955. Less than six months later, South Carolina counted a total of fifty-six CC chapters and significant backing from the state’s political leaders. U.S. representative L. Mendel Rivers, from Charleston’s First District, identified himself as a member. U.S. senators Strom Thurmond and Olin D. Johnston thought it best not to join but publicly affirmed their support for the organization.47

Solidifying public opinion behind the preservation of segregation and organizing local resistance to federal intrusion formed the backbone of the CC’s agenda. It drew members from the upper and middle classes, respectable civic leaders and businessmen who literally had considerable investments in preserving white economic and political power. Participation by their wives ensured the success of the covered dish suppers and Low Country oyster roasts that served as a pretext for more serious business and validated assertions that the “Council movement is truly a people’s movement . . . organized from the bottom to the top, rather than the top to the bottom.” The editor of the Charleston News and Courier, Thomas R. Waring Jr., described CC members as “among the best people” in South Carolina, “the citizens who belong to the civic clubs and the churches . . . and do the other housekeeping chores of a community.” Joe Brown, president of the Charleston NAACP branch, dubbed them “the tuxedo gang of the Ku Klux Klan.” Unlike the Klan, CC leaders publicly disavowed violence, preferring to rely instead on economic intimidation and legislative action.48

Staying within the law was hardly difficult for the men who wrote it, and white Carolinian legislators had been preparing specifically for the Brown decision for a good three years before it was handed down on May 17, 1954. In

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