AP Release on CCC

By Allen G. Breed, Associated Press Southeast regional reporter
Associated Press, Tuesday, February 2, 1999, 11:22 PST

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- Behind a wooden partition in a back room of the Lizard's Thicket restaurant, about 30 members of the Council of Conservative Citizens -- many wearing Confederate battle flag pins and belt buckles -- hovered over plates of fried catfish and chocolate cream pie as Dennis Wheeler laid out the struggle before them.

Wheeler, a freelance writer from Atlanta, opened last week's meeting with a reading from Revelation about the beast that "opened his mouth in blasphemies against God."  Among those blasphemies, he told the group, is a "Yankee radicalism" known as equalitarianism.

"(I)t is exactly this philosophy that our Confederate forefathers fought against in the War Between the States," said Wheeler, head of a council chapter in Georgia.   "The current mark of the beast is the equalitarian religion which names as sins racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia, among others, rather than the Ten Commandments."

The only blacks within earshot were the waitresses and busboys working the tables on the other side of the partition.

Just what is the Council of Conservative Citizens? It was formed 13 years ago, it claims 15,000 members and lately it's been in the news since Sen. Trent Lott and Rep. Bob Barr landed in hot water after it was revealed they had addressed the group.

But what else? Is it a reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils, as some suggest? Is it a white supremacist group?

"We are not racists," insists South Carolina director Frances Bell, citing her American Indian background and noting the group has some Jewish members.

Is the council merely an organization so devoted to free speech and assembly that it refuses to silence racist or bigoted views?

The questions have sent Lott, R-Miss., and Barr, R-Ga., scurrying for cover.  The chairman of the Republican National Committee has called on GOP members, including national committee member Buddy Witherspoon of Columbia, to quit the organization that calls itself the "active advocate for the no longer silent conservative majority."

Gordon Baum, the St. Louis attorney who runs the group, says attacks on the council -- especially by people like law professor Alan Dershowitz -- are liberal diversions to take the heat off President Bill Clinton. "It all has to do with protecting Billy's butt," he said.

"Why are they so afraid of us?"  Baum said in a telephone interview last week, noting that the council is best known for opposing affirmative action and quotas and defending the Confederate battle flag against those who would remove it from public display.

He answered his own question:  "Because these are all politically incorrect (stances), and they would prefer that we would not have a voice. I mean, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats will touch these issues, and they're afraid of the people out here's growing discontent with the parties."

But to the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference along with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the group is "the Ku Klux Klan with a coat and tie."

"What they stand for sounds like just a recycled White Citizens Council," the Atlanta preacher said. "A cocklebur by any other name is just as thorny."

In fact, some of the group's original members came from the old Citizens Councils of America, a pro-segregation group formed as a response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision integrating public schools.

Baum was its Midwest field organizer and Robert "Tut" Patterson its founder.   Patterson now writes a column for The Citizen Informer newsletter for Baum's group.

Mark Potok, a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., said the Council of Conservative Citizens is more dangerous than the KKK or neo-Nazis because it has been "successfully masquerading as a mainstream conservative organization."

"They're not going to produce a Timothy McVeigh; they are much more interested in genuine political power than in any kind of violence or terrorism," Potok said.   "I mean, Timothy McVeigh can kill 168 people, but he is never going to be elected your senator or president or congressman. So, yeah, on a political level they're much more dangerous."

Indeed, the group claims as dues-paying members dozens of elected officials, from local school boards to state legislatures. It does not, however, claim ex-Klan leader and sometime GOP candidate David Duke, who caused Baum considerable discomfort in November by showing up at a national board meeting in Jackson, Miss.

The group's Web site welcomes visitors to "join the vast right-wing conspiracy!" -- an ironic reference to Hillary Clinton's comment about who was behind the impeachment effort -- and offers such publications as a pamphlet revealing "the ugly truth about Martin Luther King."

The South Carolina chapters have fought to keep the Confederate battle flag flying over the state capital and criticized The Citadel for not playing "Dixie" often enough during functions at the military college.

"Being pro-white is not equal to being anti-black," said Rebekah Sutherland, an executive committee member from Aiken who ran for state school superintendent last year.  "It's OK to be white, isn't it? That's what this group is about. It's OK to be white."

Don MacDermott, a Birmingham, Ala., city councilman and Council of Conservative Citizens member, campaigned with his chapter last year against a proposed 1-cent sales tax that he felt would go to fund "just a bunch of wish lists for some local bureaucrats."  He said he wouldn't belong to the organization if he felt it was racist.

"The chapter I belong to is definitely not," he said.  "They're just some well-grounded beliefs in conservative values.  Most of the group I'm involved with were Ronald Reagan supporters in 1976."

A.J. Parker, a siding contractor who is director of the group's North Carolina chapter, doesn't like being condemned for the views of a few members.

"Why should I pay for deeds that took place 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago?" he said during a break from burning brush in front of his Asheville home.   "They've tried to identify us with David Duke and people like that, and anybody who speaks out against affirmative action and quotas and immigration, they're automatically tagged with that dirty brush."

But critics point to anti-Semitic postings on the group's Web site, and to Informer columns like this from Patterson last fall:

"Western civilization with all its might and glory would never have achieved its greatness without the directing hand of God and the creative genius of the white race. Any effort to destroy the race by a mixture of black blood is an effort to destroy Western civilization itself."

Baum noted that the Informer has a disclaimer, "like all newspapers."

"It was there; we can't lie.  We did not endorse it," he said.   "Our people don't walk in lock step. Organizing conservatives is like herding cats."

But Dick Harpootlian, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, offered a different animal analogy:  "Birds of a feather flock together."

"If David Duke and those kinds of folks are showing up at those meetings, they obviously have some interest in them," he said.

"There's a fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.  Is it the party of Lincoln or the party of extremes?  So far, the extreme's winning."

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., is calling on members of Congress to denounce the Council of Conservative Citizens.  "They can hide behind whatever curtain they want to hide, but we know what they are," Wexler said in a telephone interview.

Baum said the debate has devolved into a kind of '90s McCarthyism, where guilt by association is the order of the day.

"Really, Trent Lott's involvement wasn't other than what he would do with any larger constituent group," Baum said.  "I mean, to us it's sending a signal that any political figure should not meet with conservatives. I mean, they did this with the Christian Coalition; they did it with the pro-life movement. They've tried to demonize them."

The Council of Conservative Citizens meeting last Saturday in Columbia was supposed to be open. But when members learned an Associated Press reporter planned to attend, the executive board voted to close the partition.

"They're all afraid," Mrs. Bell said.  "People are afraid they'll lose their job if their name comes out."

But Wheeler exhorted the back-room crowd to "look at our duty. ...

"The war for the hearts and the minds of the people must be won before the political war can be won."