[After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, segregationists
attempted to use state power to punish progressive corporations, civil
rights groups, and media outlets; pundits condemned what they saw as
the narrowing of acceptable discourse.]
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THE SEGREGATIONIST ROOTS OF ANTI-WOKE IDEOLOGY  
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Lawrence B. Glickman
July 5, 2023
Slate
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_ After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, segregationists
attempted to use state power to punish progressive corporations, civil
rights groups, and media outlets; pundits condemned what they saw as
the narrowing of acceptable discourse. _

L: Current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who likes to fight against
“woke.” R: Former Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins, who liked to say
“Let’s not put the whammy on mammy.”, Photos by Giorgio
Viera/AFP via Getty Images and the Florida Memory Project via the
State

 

In recent months, the campaign against “woke” has reached the
point where even Donald Trump, who in the past has thrown around this
phrase quite a bit, has claimed it’s gone too far. “I don’t like
the term _woke_
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he told an Iowa audience recently. “Half the people can’t define
it; they don’t know what it is.” Notwithstanding Trump’s
assertion, many conservatives have targeted “woke” as the enemy du
jour. A PAC supporting Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron
DeSantis, for example, recently produced an ad praising last month’s
boycotts of Target and Bud Light for their supposedly trans-friendly
policies and concluded with him proclaiming, “We will never ever
surrender to the woke mob.
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Aping Churchill’s famous 1940 inspirational speech encouraging the
British in the early days of their fight against fascism, DeSantis,
who earlier this year said “woke” seven times in 26 seconds
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implored, “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke
in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations
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While the war on what DeSantis has also called “the woke mind
virus” is new, the rhetoric and tactics employed by the Florida
governor and many other conservatives date back at least to the start
of the modern Civil Rights Movement. In the period after the _Brown
v. Board of Education_ decision of 1954, segregationist politicians
attempted to use state power to punish progressive corporations, civil
rights groups, and media outlets; pundits condemned what they saw as
the narrowing of acceptable discourse and the demonization of their
racist worldview; and citizen groups organized boycotts to maintain
segregation.

Most of these efforts failed, and their targets—which included large
corporations like Ford and Philip Morris, companies that advertised on
popular television programs like _The Ed Sullivan Show_, and school
districts that adopted textbooks that expurgated racist
materials—flourished. But understanding the precedents for
DeSantis’ Stop WOKE Act helps us see that the contemporary
conservative playbook has deep roots in history. While the
nomenclature and the targets have changed, the strategy and rhetoric
of anti-wokeness bear remarkable similarities to what John Patterson,
the Alabama governor and staunch segregationist, called the “all-out
war on integrationists
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in 1959.

In May 1956, the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most important African
American newspapers in the country, reported on a recent development
that it took to be encouraging news. NBC and CBS, two of the major
television networks, the paper noted, “have finally taken a step in
the right direction and have now started cleaning up some songs and
jokes and banning others to hereafter prevent slurring any race of
people.” Specifically, the networks had begun an informal policy of
refusing to air offensive lyrics in Stephen Foster songs, and had even
banned the song “Old Black Joe” in order “to stay clear of
adverse public reaction.” Just two years after the _Brown v.
Board_ decision, the networks were recognizing that lyrics that
valorized racial inequality were no longer appropriate, even in the
oeuvre of Foster, one of America’s most beloved songwriters and the
mid-19th-century creator of “Oh! Susanna,” “Jeanie With the
Light Brown Hair,” and many other songs that remained popular
through the mid-20th century.

The following year, Rep. Charles Diggs, one of only four Black members
of the United States House of Representatives and the only member of
Congress to have attended the recent trial of the accused killers of
Emmett Till, described the actions of the television networks as “a
matter of good taste
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He considered the practice of amending or eliminating “expressions
which tend to degrade” to be “in line with the progress of our
country.” The NAACP, the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights
organization, applauded the replacement of “any term that denotes a
racial slur
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when Foster’s songs were broadcast.

Not everyone viewed what the Arkansas Gazette called the “outrageous
excision of ‘darky,’ ‘mammy,’ etc., from old Stephen Foster
lyrics” as a positive development. Just as Jim Crow was breaking
down and racial equality was on the horizon, many white Americans felt
that they were losing something precious, and they described these
efforts as portents of a world turned upside down. One letter writer
to the Shreveport Journal in 1960 described his fear that if the
(relatively weak) civil rights bill under consideration in Congress
passed, white Southerners would be placed in a subordinate position.
“I say we are in Egyptian bondage, with no Moses to bring us out
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he wrote.

Extending and amplifying the language of inversion, an editorial about
the reworking of Foster’s lyrics by the networks and prominent
performers like Dinah Shore, which was reprinted in the Citizens’
Council (the official publication of the segregationist White
Citizens’ Councils that emerged throughout the South after
the _Brown_ decision) in 1960, described what Rep. Diggs called a
small victory for civility as a catastrophic cultural defeat and a
portent of a radical diminution of white political power. “We have
almost given professional pleaders like the NAACP power almost equal
to that of the early Egyptian Kings,” the editorial proclaimed.
Positing a zero-sum view of cultural and political power, it
concluded, “Today Negro agitators are not only setting up their own
monuments, but, like the Egyptian monarchs, they are destroying the
monuments of others, and attempting to rewrite American culture
retroactively.” It described those asking for the suspension of
racist lyrics as “touchy,” “narrow-minded,” and “petty,”
an “arrogant gang” engaged in monument destruction.

Tom Ethridge, whose column in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger was regularly
reprinted in the Citizens’ Council publication, condemned the
television networks, also employing the language of inversion. NBC and
CBS, he argued, in their effort to “salve tender vanities,” had
chosen “to trample on the rights of others—including millions of
network listeners and viewers who love the songs which allegedly
offend Negroes.” He predicted that these “high handed” actions
would set off a backlash, and thus “destroy rather than increase
racial good will.” Using the language of the Cold War that was at
its peak in the mid-1950s, Ethridge described the lyric substitution
as “blacklisting Stephen Foster songs.” Others compared these
actions to the Soviet Union’s rewriting of history for propaganda
purposes.

Politicians weighed in critically as well, many of them calling for
the state’s disciplinary apparatus to hold the networks, textbook
publishers—some of which had followed suit changing mentions of
Foster’s lyrics in their pages—and school boards that adopted
these revised texts accountable for what Rep. Robert L. Sikes called
“inexcusable … disgraceful censorship,” seeing the changes as a
cowardly capitulation to what the newspaper of the White Citizens’
Council called “minority group pressure.” Rep. Frank Chelf argued
that the network’s sanctioning of changes in lyrics from
“darkies” to “old folks” was emblematic of “an age gone
haywire.”

LeRoy Collins was one of many white politicians who viewed the actions
of the networks as “ridiculous.” Long before Ron DeSantis’
“war on woke,” this Florida governor coined his own term:
“Let’s not put the whammy on mammy
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Collins also averred that “there are a lot of people who will feel
that the networks, not massa, should be put in the cold, cold ground
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referring to the title of an 1852 minstrel song by Foster.

The segregationist war against racial equality, like the contemporary
war on woke, was not limited to actions by government officials.
Organizations like the White Citizens’ Councils played a significant
role. The first branch of the Citizens’ Council formed two months
after the _Brown_ decision in Indianola, Mississippi, and the group
quickly spread through the state and the rest of the South. This group
saw itself as the vanguard of the backlash against the movement toward
Black equality; they fought to “preserve white supremacy via
economic pressure
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and other modes of political action, pledging “eternal resistance to
racial integration.”

Among their most common targets were television shows that had
interracial casts. “Let’s start a drive throughout the South to
have ten million sets follow my example and bar the negro from our
homes by way of television,” wrote the author of a letter to the
editor of the Citizens’ Council publication in 1956. He urged fellow
segregationists to ensure that the show’s sponsors are “notified
of our actions.” The following year, E.W. Hooker, who had been the
chair of the States’ Rights Democratic Party (aka the
“Dixiecrats”) in 1948, published an open letter to the Johnson Wax
company. That company was a sponsor of _Robert Montgomery Presents_,
which had aired a show in February featuring an interracial cast.
Segregationists launched a similar boycott of the Philco Corporation
for its sponsorship of a _Television Playhouse_ episode that
they mistakenly thought included an interracial couple
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(It turned out that Hilda Simms, who was paired with Sidney Poitier in
that show, was actually also Black.) _The Ed Sullivan Show_ was
another popular target.

Segregationist boycotters also took on popular companies like the Ford
Motor Company and Philip Morris that they claimed supported civil
rights. (Ford Motor Company supported the Ford Foundation, and Philip
Morris supported the Urban League, both organizations that promoted
racial equality—or what the Citizens’ Council called “race
mixing” in denouncing the Ford Foundation in December 1956.) As a
segregationist leader from Louisiana told reporters Carl T. Rowan and
Richard P. Kleeman in 1956, “We expect the dealers to stop Ford’s
contributions to the fight for civil rights or there isn’t going to
be a damn Ford sold in the South.”

Even as segregationists employed boycotts as an extension of their
politics, they cried foul when economic pressure was employed against
them. In 1957, columnist Ray Tucker described Washington, D.C., as
being “under NAACP siege
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since its two professional sports teams, the Senators and the
Redskins, were “picketed regularly because neither organization has
a colored player on its roster.” Tucker called this a “cultural
offensive” that he connected with that organization’s insistence
that “Stephen Foster’s ballads be censored.”

We can also find precedent for several familiar modes of anti-woke
rhetoric in the battle against racial equality. Segregationists
complained about what they took to be the constraints on free thought
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by civil rights extremists. One example of this was the conservative
columnist Westbrook Pegler’s 1955 piece, later reprinted in the
Citizens’ Council, on how the word “racist” had become a
“smear word
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This slur, he argued, “is to be spat out, even in print, an
accusation of some vicious crime placing the defendant beyond some
pale. It presumes automatic condemnation without trial.” Pegler
argued, “A racist is a person who approves his own race and prefers
the society of his own people.”

This became an enduring line of argument. In the 1980s, Jesse Helms
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in arguing against the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday,
repeated Pegler’s argument, along with the conservative
columnist Paul Harvey
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And in 2017, Paul Joseph Watson, the British right-winger, similarly
claimed that it had become a “new smear word against anyone who
opposes leftist agendas
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Related from Slate

JOSHUA CLARK DAVIS

Birmingham’s Use of Dogs on Civil Rights Protesters Shocked Liberal
Onlookers. But the Backstory Was All-American.

READ MORE
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The idea that being sensitive about language that Black people
considered offensive was dangerous—a kind of nascent “political
correctness” argument—was widely repeated. Chelf, the Kentucky
congressman who condemned the network censoring of Foster’s songs,
said that “if we follow the same logic of the networks” then “we
may have to change the name of the White House because this might
conceivably be classified as discrimination.” Highlighting this
slippery-slope logic, he asked, “If you can censor a folk song which
is part of American history, where does it stop?” Along these lines,
leading conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, complaining about the
proliferation of Black Studies programs in the late 1960s, asked in
one of his syndicated columns, “Why do we hear of no ‘white
studies’ programs?
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Opponents of racial equality regularly invoked a recently invented
term—brainwashing—to describe their feeling that progressive
forces were using the media in a sustained propaganda campaign to make
segregation seem “unconstitutional, un-American, un-Christian and
unscientific,” as a Georgia publisher complained in 1957. One
segregationist complained in a letter to the Arkansas Gazette in 1956
that “Anti-Southern forces are now conducting the greatest
brainwashing campaign in the history of the world,” and that, if it
were to succeed, “our Southern Way of Life will be lost forever and
our proud white race will be doomed to mongrelization and
extinction.” A Citizens’ Council editorial titled “Brainwashing
Babies” complained about a poster in public transit that said,
“Keep her free from racial and religious prejudice.” That modifier
is regularly used today, as in Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s 2021
description of critical race theory as “the left’s effort to
brainwash our children
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Another popular backlash trope of segregationists was the fear that
“the civil rights planners hope to force their ideas down the
throats of the people of the nation,” as the Citizens’ Council
claimed in March 1956. Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus also condemned the
federal government for “cramming integration down our throats
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during the Little Rock crisis of 1957. Recently, popular podcaster Joe
Rogan, in criticizing Target for selling trans-friendly swimwear,
employed similar language to describe his feeling that the sale of
clothing at a department store was like an aggressive form of
humiliation: “Enough, stop shoving this down our throats!
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Recent coverage of the boycotts of Bud Light and Target for their
trans-friendly ad campaigns and merchandising suggest that they are a
new thing under the sun. But this brief survey of segregationist
culture wars puts such actions in context. Charlie Kirk, who recently
wondered aloud whether his household condiments
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“literally” woke, is far from the first conservative activist to
worry that seemingly mild acts of outreach to marginalized groups by
corporations might be the warning signs of an imminent civilizational
war that would weaken the political power and moral standing of him
and other like-minded citizens, a revolution that would require a
coordinated and equally aggressive response.

The economic campaigns against Ford and other putatively pro–civil
rights companies were mostly flops
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as a 1959 article about a segregationist boycott in Little Rock noted.
In contrast, the boycotts of Target and Bud Light have thus far
been surprisingly effective
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However, it remains to be seen whether they will have staying power or
will soon fade, as did the segregationist boycotts that also began
with much fanfare. (A headline in the Citizens’ Council in March
1956 announced that Philip Morris had suffered “a 17 per cent loss
in Cigarette sales.”) Similarly, it is unclear how far the anti-woke
platform of DeSantis—whose current standing in the polls suggests
that Trump might be correct about the political limitations of
anti-wokeism—will take him in the contest for the Republican
presidential nomination. While it is too soon to judge the
effectiveness of the current war against woke, one thing should be
clear: It is less a novel form of politics than a new iteration of an
enduring style of backlash politics—one that, if history is any
guide, is likely to return, even as the particular targets change.

_LAWRENCE B. GLICKMAN
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Evalyn Milman professor of American studies in the department of
history at Cornell University and the author, most recently of Free
Enterprise: An American History
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