The Citizens' Council Had a Dress Code, Man
Same floor, nicer rug. A brief history of respectable-tier hate.
This was inspired by a recent Podcast series of episodes for “Weird Little Guys”1 on Byron de la Beckwith, the man who killed Medgar Evers. The Dude hopes you enjoy reading this!
So I’m at Hollywood Lanes, minding my business, working on a White Russian, and some kid two lanes over steps clean over the foul line mid-approach. Nobody pulls a piece. Nobody has to. The rules just are. Everybody in the building agreed to them before they laced up. That’s the whole beauty of a bowling league, man — the rules are right there on the sheet, and they apply to everybody the same, all the way down.
Which got me thinking, because apparently that’s a thing I do now — about a different set of rules, from a different lane in American history, that weren’t printed on a sheet at all. They were printed on a membership roster. Coat and tie required.
1954. Brown v. Board comes down, 9-0, no dissents, no wiggle room. And down in Mississippi, the response isn’t just what you’d figure — crosses, hoods, the usual nighttime theater. There’s also a whole other outfit that shows up the same year, and this one doesn’t wear a hood. It wears a blazer. The White Citizens’ Councils: bankers, legislators, guys who probably bowled in a league not unlike mine on a Tuesday. Marketed itself as the reasonable version. The Klan for people who found crosses a little gauche.
That’s the part that really tied the room together for me, and not in the good way. You know how a rug can cover a stain so well you forget the floor underneath is the same ugly floor the whole time? That’s the Council. Nicer rug. Same floor.
Walter, obviously, has thoughts.
“Rules, Dude. These clowns loved rules. Procedure. Order. Bylaws, for Christ’s sake. You know who else loves a well-run committee? Every son of a bitch who ever needed a respectable-looking delivery system for something rotten. Rules aren’t good, Dude. Rules are a container. You can put soup in a container. You can also put — this is not ‘Nam, but it rhymes with it.”
Nobody’s arguing with that. Walter’s on one, but he’s not wrong.
Here’s my favorite part, though — and I mean this in the way you laugh at something so you don’t have to feel the other thing. This Council was recruiting so hard, so relentlessly, that its own leadership had to pull one particularly enthusiastic guy aside and ask him to dial it back. Per an old magazine profile, the man could not let a conversation end without finding an angle into it — Noah’s Ark, dinner, doesn’t matter, he’d get there. His own club, the actual Citizens’ Council, thought he was too much. That’s a hell of a note to get. That’s a note that should end a career.
Donny pipes up, because Donny always pipes up right when the moment needs exactly the wrong amount of context: “Wait — so, was it like, BYOH? Bring your own hood?”
“Donny, you’re out of your element,” Walter says, and that’s the end of Donny’s turn, as usual, but the kid wasn’t wrong either. A club too racist for its own racists isn’t a club with standards. It’s a club with a dress code and nothing else.
Maude wandered through around here — she does that, drops a paragraph and leaves before you can ask a follow-up — and put it about as clean as it gets: the Council didn’t need rope, she said. Blacklisting. Getting a man fired. Choking off his credit at the bank so he couldn’t feed his family for the crime of registering (or even attempting to register) to vote. Coercion doesn’t stop being violence just because it comes with a receipt instead of a rope. She said “vagina” at some point too, unrelated, just to see who’d flinch. Nobody did. We’ve bowled with her before.
So that’s the con, man, the whole three-card-monte of it. The suit was never a disguise for the violence. The suit was the delivery mechanism. Same cargo, nicer packaging, and a receipt you could show your pastor. You lift the rug, it’s the same floor as the guys with the hoods — just installed by people who wore better shoes while they did it.
I don’t have a big finish for you. I’m not gonna pretend a coat and tie is scarier than a hood, or that respectability is the real villain here, because that lets the hood off the hook, and screw that guy too. I’ll just say this: I’ve spent a lot of years abiding a lot of people I didn’t love. That’s kind of the whole philosophy. But I’ll take a man in a bathrobe who’s honest about being a bum over a man in a blazer who thinks the blazer makes him something else. At least the bathrobe isn’t lying to anybody.
The Dude abides. He’s just watching the coat closet a little closer these days.
Weird Little Guys is hosted by Molly Conger and it is outstanding. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts