As a consequence of economic pressures brought to bear against the petitioners by the Citizens Councils, many of the former asked that their names be withdrawn. They frequently maintained that their signatures had been obtained through misrepresentation. Usually they claimed they did not realize that the petitions were asking for integration. Some said they had understood the petitions as simply requesting interracial talks on the subject of integration. The number of those asking their names be withdrawn was large, in some cases more than half the number of signers. In one case, Elloree, fourteen of the original seventeen signers asked that their names be struck from the list.[275]
The NAACP recognized this problem and also the fact that for the time being little could be done about it. “Names being struck from petitions” was understandable, said Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP. He did not believe, however, that the signers failed to realize what their signatures meant. He blamed withdrawals on “pressures” operating on the Negro. The Sumter chapter of the NAACP gave a similar explanation for the withdrawal of several signers of a local petition. The signers “knew very well the content and intent of these petitions,” said a statement issued by the chapter. No “coercion, persuasion or pressure” had been used to secure signatures.[276]
As of the early spring of 1958 no school board has acted favorably on a petition for school integration and no Negro petitioner has resorted to the courts to secure affirmative action.
The NAACP has born the brunt of the opposition to the desegregation drive. Until white South Carolina recognized the extent of the “threat” represented by the NAACP, its opposition to the organization had not been particularly bitter. The hardening of attitudes was the result of the NAACP’s increased pressure for racial integration and occurred relatively late. For instance, when the NAACP was holding its annual conference at Charleston in 1953, J. Walker Evans, executive vice-president of the Charleston Chamber of Commerce, was “happy to extend a cordial and sincere welcome” to the organization and hoped that its deliberations would be “fruitful,” “pleasant,” and “most profitable.”[277] But after the segregation decision all this changed. Even white “moderates” felt obliged to deprecate the NAACP. Editor O’Dowd of the Morning News, who had frequently defended the association against irresponsible charges such as communist-front action, stated that the organization was doing nothing more than “paying lipservice to the idea of Negro advancement.”[278]
The attack on the NAACP has taken many different forms but basically the association is pictured as a radical organization responsible for the “climate of recalcitrance” in the South by insisting on its “pound of flesh” and refusing to adopt a “moderate” attitude. The NAACP refused to “barter or compromise,” complained the Morning News, and instead had adopted a program of “absolutism” which only made the problem more difficult. New assaults by the NAACP against “the traditional citadels of Southern society,” the Florence paper asserted, were “lacking in good sense and good taste.” According to the Independent, “responsible Negroes” knew that NAACP’s “radical agitators” had done “far more harm than good” in the school crisis. The Record argued that the NAACP was acting “neither wisely nor tolerantly, preferring neither understanding nor cooperation.”[279] The same papers choose to overlook the fact that the dominant white community has offered no basis for compromise or conciliation within terms of the Supreme Court decision.
As a result of the NAACP’s “radical” stand, i.e., its refusal to accept segregation indefinitely, an attack has been made on all fronts to discredit the organization in the eyes of both whites and Negroes. The goal is to create an atmosphere in which any program, policy or pronouncement by the association will be condemned automatically, without regard to its merit. “If there’s one thing against our way of life in the South,” announced Lieutenant Governor Hollings, “it’s the NAACP. And if the U. S. Supreme Court can declare certain organizations as subversive, I believe South Carolina can declare the NAACP both subversive and illegal.” In the Lieutenant Governor’s home town the News and Courier proclaimed that the NAACP was “not genuinely devoted to the advancement of the colored people,” but rather ignored the real need of the Negro in its “search for headlines and racial martyrs.” The News and Courier believed that the association was not interested in Negro “rights” but “that whites be forced to associate with Negroes.”[280] The paper regretted that so many Negroes would swallow the “unwholesome and impractical poisons” of the NAACP. The Record declared the Association was interested in cases of violence against Southern Negroes solely for their fund raising value. “The NAACP would have been disappointed” if the slayers of Emmett Till had been brought to justice because the case provided the occasion for the raising of vast funds. The Reverend E. R. Mason, a retired officer and minister of the white South Carolina Methodist Church, termed the NAACP a “militant” and “vicious” minority group interested only in the “prominence of the front page and money.”[281]
A favorite tactic in this campaign of vilification is to equate the NAACP’s desegregation aims with the communist conspiracy against the United States. Attorney General T. C. Callison told the Columbia Rotary Club that the NAACP was led by “meddlers” who were “playing directly into the hands of Communism.”[282] The leadership of the Citizens Councils has given especially strong emphasis to this phase of the attack. Henry E. Davis, a Florence attorney, speaking at the organizational meeting of the Lake City Citizens Council, announced that “the NAACP is financed by Russia.” On another occasion he indulged in anti-Semitism, a tendency which has become increasingly open in the Citizens Council movement. Davis referred to the NAACP as “a communist-front organ,” which was “in reality a Jewish organization with financial backing from the Communists” purporting “to aid the advancement of the Negro while stirring up disorder.” G. L. Ivey, a leader of several white supremacy groups in Florence, including the Citizens Council, described the NAACP as “the radical Negro organization dominated by communist-front leaders.”[283] Stanley F. Morse, one of Ivey’s many Charleston counterparts, noted that the objectives of the NAACP coincided “strangely with the aims of the American communist party.” He declared that the policies of the NAACP were “dictated by white radicals rather than Negro patriots.” In 1954 the bellwether News and Courier did not believe the “aggressive race movement among Negroes” was communist-dominated. But a year later, the same paper intimated to its readers: “We believe the NAACP represents only a small but belligerent group of people. (In Russia only a small number of Russians belong to the Communist Party yet they rule the rest.) We aren’t saying the NAACP is Communistic. We are only pointing out how much power can be wielded by a noisy and energetic minority.”[284]
The charges of communism are accepted by the state NAACP as merely one of many “brainwashing” devices used by the whites. President Hinton answered with the following statement: “The NAACP is an American and legitimate organization, and not once has it been even thought of by right thinking people as a subversive organization. It has never done more than go into the courts, and fight the issues out before white judges using white men’s laws.”[285]
The NAACP, of course, has defended itself against such attacks. It claims, with much truth, that instead of being a communist-front organization it is in reality responsible for the fact that the communists have been unable to make any headway among American Negroes. The Record, however, has taken issue. The real reason why communists were so unsuccessful in winning over American Negroes, said a Record editorial, was the fact that most of them lived in the South “and were, like their friends among the Southern whites, conservatives.” They were not members of the Negro “intelligentsia” where, according to the capital city paper, communism had made its only headway among Negroes, and were by every sign “generally content [and] a happy race” and therefore “anything but a fertile ground for communist wiles.”[286]
A new device against the NAACP became popular in 1957, one which can be used against both the NAACP and labor unions. This is the so-called “permit system” under which counties and municipalities might require “any organization, union or society of any sort” that charged membership fees to obtain permits to sign up new members. Applications can be denied in the interest of “peace and good order.” Florence and Abbeville counties have led in requiring the permits. Several other localities have followed suit.[287]