Published this month, Joe T. Patterson and the White South's
Dilemma details the ways white resistance operated and adapted to the
sweeping forces of racial change throughout the Civil Rights Movement. Books will available for sale after the presentation.
As Mississippi's attorney general
from 1956 to 1969, Joe T. Patterson led the legal defense for Jim Crow in the
state. He was inaugurated for his first term two months before the launch of
the Sovereignty Commission—charged "to protect the sovereignty of
Mississippi from encroachment thereon by the federal government"—which
made manifest a century-old states' rights ideology couched in the rhetoric of
massive resistance. Despite the dubious legal foundations of that agenda,
Patterson supported the organization's mission from the start and served as an
ex-officio leader on its board for the rest of his life.
Patterson was also a card-carrying
member of the segregationist Citizens' Council and, in his own words, had
"spent many hours and driven many miles advocating the basic principles
for which the Citizens' Councils were originally organized." Few ever
doubted his Jim Crow credentials. That is until September 1962 and the
integration of the University of Mississippi by James Meredith.
That fall Patterson stepped out of
his entrenchment by defying a circle of white power brokers, but only to a
point. His seeming acquiescence came at the height of the biggest crisis for
Mississippi's racist order. Yet even after the Supreme Court decreed that
Meredith must enter the university, Patterson opposed any further desegregation
and despised the federal intervention at Ole Miss. Still he faced a dilemma
that confronted all white southerners: how to maintain an artificially elevated
position for whites in southern society without resorting to violence or
intimidation.
Once the Supreme Court handed down
its decision in Meredith v. Fair, the state attorney general walked a strategic
tightrope, looking to temper the ruling's impact without inciting the mob and
without retreating any further. Patterson and others sought pragmatic answers
to the dilemma of white southerners, not in the name of civil rights but to
offer a more durable version of white power. His finesse paved the way for
future tactics employing duplicity and barely yielding social change while
deferring many dreams.
 |
| Robert Luckett |
Ted Ownby of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture,
says, “Luckett's volume is one of the most intricate studies so far of what
scholars are calling "practical segregation," the effort to preserve
the privileges of white southerners without harsh language, violence, openly
racist organizations and the bad publicity they created, or outright opposition
to the federal government. This book is full of surprises, and it shows what
scholars can accomplish by studying conflicts over the methods of preserving
white supremacy.”
Robert E. Luckett Jr., Madison,
Mississippi, is associate professor of history and director of the Margaret Walker Center for the Study of the African-American Experience at Jackson State
University. His research has appeared in The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi (University Press of Mississippi), as
well as in numerous journal articles.
Comments