The Squeeze

“In August [1955], South Carolina parents petitioned for desegregated schools. They petitioned in Elloree, Sumter, Orangeburg, Florence, Hopkins, Charleston, and Mount Pleasant. In Elloree, about eighteen miles from Summerton, thirty-nine parents asked for school desegregation. Within days of their August 5 petition, Mayor W. J. Deer started a White Citizens’ Council (WCC). Petitioners were given thirty days to move out of homes and off land. An NAACP leader was warned to leave town. In Sumter, about twenty-three miles away, eighty-one parents in town and forty-two more outside of town petitioned. A meeting to form a Sumter WCC brought in five hundred. In Orangeburg, about thirty-five miles from Summerton, fifty-seven parents petitioned. In response WCCs popped up within Orangeburg, Edisto community, and neighboring Bowman, North, and Eutawville.
In Summerton, Reverend [E.E.] Richburg signed up sixty-five potential new petitioners at Liberty Hill AME. Attorney [S. Emory} Rogers (who argued for South Carolina in Briggs v. Elliott and Brown v. Board] had already made sure that Summerton had a WCC. Neighboring Manning formed a WCC, with 267 joining during the initial meeting. Eight more WCCs, all in towns within fifty miles of Summerton, added hundreds more members. On August 27 a newly organized Klan met midway between Summerton and Manning on U.S. 301, where the rally couldn’t be missed. Speaker Bryant Bowles, of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, drew 1,000 in robes.”

“This was life under siege. A plantation manager in Sunflower County, Mississippi, had founded the first WCC in July 1954, determined to maintain segregation after Brown I [May 17, 1954]. The councils—sometimes described as the ‘new Ku Klux Klan’ or ‘manicured Kluxism’ —spread quickly throughout South Carolina, in part due to Rogers’ efforts. Rogers spoke at most initial meetings, stirring up white resistance not only to segregation but also to the NAACP. As one South Carolina journalist explained it, WCC members intended to ‘expose left-wing tendencies of the NAACP which would come among our innocent colored citizenry and foment race hatred’ and try ‘to destroy our way of life.’ Often mayors led the councils. Every one of Kingstree’s lawyers joined its council. As Rogers traveled the state, he also promoted the power of economic retaliation, refined from Clarendon County use into what was now called ‘the squeeze’ or sometimes ‘the freeze.’”

“In its October 20, 1955 issue, Jet magazine devoted six of its 68 pages to White Citizens’ Councils efforts to intimidate and punish black parents in South Carolina who signed school desegregation petitions and/or sympathized with or belonged to the NAACP. In describing the ‘vicious squeeze,’ Jet’s expose focused on Orangeburg: ‘In cutting off food and merchandise to Orangeburg Negroes (who compose roughly half of the town’s 16,000 citizens), Mayor Robert H. Jennings himself spearheaded the council’s boycott which virtually blocks every distributor from delivering bread, milk, soft drinks and groceries in Negro neighborhoods.’ And ‘To further harass Orangeburg’s Negroes, the council has forced the withdrawal of credit to an estimated 2,000 suspected NAACP members’ in all downtown stores and businesses and has furnished merchants a list of names of the persons.’ The magazine, founded in 1951 by John H. Johnson of Johnson Publishing Company, billed itself as ‘the weekly Negro news magazine’ and paid close attention to the civil rights movement. ”