Reading Room Document

Designation of White Citizens Councils

This opinion considered whether the Attorney General had authority to designate White Citizens Councils as a “totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive” group under Executive Order 9835. The opinion described the “deep and aggressive hostility to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments” expressed by members of White Citizens Councils, but conveyed concerns about “labeling as subversive, and classing with Communists and Fascists, so large and otherwise loyal a group of individuals as compose the membership of the Citizens Councils.”

February 26, 1957