George Meany and White Citizens Councils

White Citizen's Councils (2 of 3) [page 2]

White Citizen's Councils (2 of 3) [page 27]

White Citizen's Councils (2 of 3) [page 33]

White Citizen's Councils (2 of 3) [page 37]

White Citizen's Councils (2 of 3) [page 62]

White Citizen's Councils (2 of 3) [page 25]

White Citizen's Councils (3 of 3) [page 11]

White Citizen's Councils (3 of 3) [page 71]

1955 report by National Agricultural Workers Union for confidential distribution within the AFL naming and describing White Citizens Councils (WCCs).
Courtesy of University of Maryland Libraries, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records.
February 17, 1956 letter from union trustee and organizer Jack Gager to AFL President George Meany outlining the challenge to organize white workers in Mississippi in the wake of the AFL-CIO's pro-integration stance.
Courtesy of University of Maryland Libraries, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records.
February 24, 1956 letter from Local 654 of the International Brotherhood of Paperworkers requesting Meany renounce the NAACP after the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department report on integration.
Courtesy of University of Maryland Libraries, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records.
February 13, 1956 letter from Columbia, South Carolina, union worker A. B. Blackwelder, Sr. to Meany after AFL-CIO speech denouncing southern WCCs.
Courtesy of University of Maryland Libraries, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records.
February 1956 letter from Robert Payne of Pell City, Alabama, who was a member of the International Association of Machinists: "I would like to say you are destroying the union in the South. If you people are so much for Communists and Negroes, why don't we move them all up there."
Courtesy of University of Maryland Libraries, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records.
Stock response letter from the office of George Meany, AFL-CIO President, to Robert Payne. Meany expresses that the AFL-CIO is "deeply concerned about the activities of the White Citizens Councils because of violence and the spirit of lawlessness that are rising in their wake," seemingly in comparison to the Klan. "Hiding under the clock of respectability, the leaders of these groups have been stirring up hatred and designing means to destroy the security of union organization."
Courtesy of University of Maryland Libraries, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records.
Letter from M. McDonald, printed March 4, 1956, in Birmingham News section "The Voice of the People," denouncing Meany's characterization of WCCs as "Uptown KKK."
Courtesy of University of Maryland Libraries, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records.
September 8, 1956 article, "Is Big Labor Stalling In The Battle For Civil Rights?", outlines the anti-discrimination policy of recently-merged AFL-CIO and describes the anti-union backlash following Meany's denunciation of WCCs.
Courtesy of University of Maryland Libraries, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records.

White Citizens Councils (WCCs) were neighborhood groups made up of white, middle-class working men. These groups proliferated throughout the South following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. The name “Citizens Council” carried less overtly terrorizing implications than the KKK, but members upheld many of the same whites-only values as Klansmen, namely hard and fast segregation. In 1955 the National Agricultural Workers Union compiled a state-by-state list of southern “klan type organizations” with names like White America, Inc., the Christian Civic League, the National Citizens Protection League, and We, the People. Such groups, the report contended, were responsible for acts of anti-Black and anti-union intimidation and disruption: WCCs drove Black ministers out of town, overthrew integrated labor drives, boycotted local businesses, and scabbed during union strikes. Many white unionists, fearful of both integration and communism, were more loyal to their WCC than their union. When AFL President George Meany gave a speech calling WCCs a “Klan without hoods,” white unionists from across the South flooded his office with angry letters making it clear they would leave the AFL before renouncing their Councils.

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