Confrontation or Containment? Civil Rights Groups, Southern Extremists and the Unsolved Hate Speech Issue
At the height of the black freedom struggle, civil rights organisations refrained from legally campaigning for restrictions on hate speech. White southern extremists made extensive use of the media to rally resistance to racial integration. Radio was one of the most effective means by which Bryant Bowles of the National Association for the Advancement of White People and John Kasper of the Seaboard White Citizens' Council enlisted allies for their respective fights against school desegregation in Milford, Delaware and Clinton, Tennessee. Civil rights groups initially attempted to ban militant segregationists from the airwaves. However, by the late 1950s they abandoned this strategy. First, they feared that hate peddlers would gain greater exposure by publicising themselves as victims of a campaign to deny them their constitutional rights. Second, when civil right activists turned towards direct action tactics they came to understand that their own ability to demonstrate relied on a broad reading of First Amendment rights by the courts. Paradoxically, only by protecting the right of their enemies to freedom of speech could they promote their own struggle for political freedom. For these reasons, civil rights organisations formulated a more subtle approach to hate speech known as the quarantine strategy. In the early 1970s, civil rights groups abandoned this policy and once more directly challenged hate speech. Focusing on an incident in 1972 when white racist J. B. Stoner ran a series of racially inflammatory political advertisements, this paper addresses the causes for the change in strategy and the reasons for its failure.Clive Webb, University of Sussex