William M. Rainach - White Citizens' Councils

White Citizens' Councils

At his own expense, Rainach founded the first White Citizens' Council in Claiborne Parish. He was also the founder and president of the Louisiana Association of Citizens' Councils from 1955 to 1959. He founded and chaired the Citizens' Councils of America from 1956 to 1958. The Citizens Council was actually first launched in Indianola, Mississippi. Its goals were listed as follows: "to protect and preserve by all legal means our historical southern social traditions in all their aspects... to spell out expressly that the states have the sovereign right to regulate education, health, morals, and general welfare in fields not specifically related to the federal government."

Rainach envisioned the councils as a balance to the NAACP. At a Citizens Council meeting in Minden, the seat of Webster Parish in the spring of 1956, Rainach said of the civil rights movement: "The entire battle is one of political power, and political power is made up of votes. Therefore, the key to victory lies in the polls." Rainach questioned why Webster Parish had 1,773 African American registered voters in 1956, while his neighboring Claiborne Parish had none. This difference in voter tabulations led to the dismissal of Webster Parish Voter Registrar Winnice Clement by the state board of registration, but incoming Governor Earl Kemp Long reversed the directive, and Mrs. Clement retained her post.

Rainach was the primary supporter of the Louisiana "pupil placement law" which made parish school superintendents responsible for assigning individual students to their schools. Liberals contended that the law was a subterfuge to maintain segregation. "I believe that segregation must be maintained throughout the width and breadth of our great state", Rainach proclaimed, as cited in A.J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana.

Part of Rainach's strategy was to purge the rolls of African American voters, an important part of Governor Earl Long's coalition. To do this, Rainach and his supporters relied on an unenforced section of the Louisiana Constitution of 1921 (replaced in 1974), which required all registrants to fill out applications without assistance and to read and interpret a portion of the U.S. Constitution selected by the registrar. Rainach said that some 100,000 black voters at the time were illegally registered because they could not interpret the Constitution. Black registration fell afterwards from 161,410 to about 130,000 because of purges in several north Louisiana parishes.

By the time of the 1966 elections, large numbers of blacks were registered and voting for the first time in the Deep South from Louisiana to South Carolina. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 employed the use of federal examiners, if needed, to halt local officials from preventing the registration of blacks who desired to exercise the franchise.

Rainach became the state's most visible defender of segregation through his role as the first and only chairman of the Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Segregation (1954–1959). He challenged the authority of the United States Supreme Court to strike down segregation. His efforts were, however, repudiated in the New Orleans federal court, which declared state segregation laws unconstitutional.

Rainach noted that Article III of the US Constitution gives the Congress the power to remove certain matters from the review of the high court. At that time, Congress had not yet struck against school segregation: it was the Supreme Court which had done so. In 1959, Rainach delivered a racially inflammatory speech before the legislature in which he professed to "love the nigger, but I know he can't run this country. The breeding in him does not allow him to run a civilization, and I won't let our civilization go to ruin." Like his segregationist associate from Plaquemines Parish, Leander Perez, Rainach equated racial integration with communism in his book Subversion in Racial Unrest.

Rainach once telephoned Sheriff J. Howell Flournoy of Caddo Parish to inform him that an African American deputy sheriff was speaking in support of integration. Flournoy then dismissed the deputy.

After desegregation, public schools in his Claiborne Parish, which includes the principal towns of Homer and Haynesville (near the Arkansas border), quickly became majority black in student composition because many white families left the system and either moved out of the parish, opted for private schools, or, later, home schooling. Rainach was the founder in fact of the private Claiborne Academy. The parish population itself was 47% black in the 2000 census.