Attack Culture? Go for it, Don! I'll Watch You Lose!
Downbeat, the legendary jazz magazine, reports that the White Citizens Council (WCC) told New Orleans radio station WNOE that they were targeting rock & roll, specifically that “radio stations and jukeboxes featuring [Black] performers were to be monitored by members of [the WCC] and [if they discovered rock & roll or rhythm & blues music being played] action would be taken by them against stations, sponsors, operators, and locations.”
Rock & roll music, in particular, said Asa Carter, executive director of North Alabama WCC, is “pulling the White man down to the level of the [Black man]…undermining the morals of the youth of our nation” with music that is “sexualistic, unmoralistic, and the best way to bring young people of both races together” [sic]. Carter singled out the NAACP as the lead pusher of the “poison.”
Before you spit out your coffee with a “Are you serious? They’re coming after rock & roll now, in 2025? My lord!” know that the article I’m quoting is from 1956, back when White Supremacist groups, especially in the South, were very active in trying to take down rock music and its big sister R&B. It’s a story nearly every popular music fan knows at least a bit of, but for context’s sake, here’s the short version.
The seeds of rock & roll were planted in the South thanks to radio stations which played music made by Black musicians (blues, gospel) and White musicians (country/hillbilly, trad folk). The radio stations weren’t race-mixing – “White” stations played “White music” and “Black” stations played “Black music” – the listeners were.
Because radio waves don’t know race, radio listeners and music fans were free to turn the dial, discover sounds that they hadn’t heard before, and enjoy what they were listening to with no concern over the skin color of the people making the music. This racial cross pollination of music via the listener was not only radical, it inspired musicians to snatch sounds from different genres, ultimately creating rock & roll, a desegregated style of music, then played by both Black and White people, sometimes together.
At first, bigots and the establishment had no idea rock & roll was happening, though as it gained popularity, the new music was impossible to ignore. It was loud and brash (for the time), played by musicians who dressed strangely and spoke in slang. Because rock & roll was new and “weird,” played by “untalented people” for “primitives,” it was considered a fad that would go the way of flagpole sitting and goldfish eating. When that didn’t happen, “proper people” started to look closely at rock & roll.
The first thing that the proper people – preachers, cops, teachers, government officials – saw was Black and White people enjoying the company of each other while digging rock & roll. They saw Black musicians like Ike Turner and Little Richard wowing audiences of White teenagers and Black kids digging the wildness of Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. Worse of all, they saw White and Black people dancing together, touching even. And that is when they took rock & roll seriously.
The proper people saw more than race-mixing. They saw a form of music that could undermine the rigid racial codes that they had created, codes that enabled and enforced White supremacist power. They saw the beginning of the end of their time on top, so they attacked. Preachers railed against the “Devil’s music.” Teachers warned that this “jungle music” would turn kids into “savages.” Cops trotted out fake crime statistics and vowed to break up any gathering of Black and White kids listening to rock & roll. Politicians focused election campaigns on the “issue,” promising people that they would do their best to outlaw the music and punish those who pushed it, most likely the Commies.
None of these threats did anything to slow the popularity of rock & roll. Right-wing extremists doubled down on the attack, using moral panic to grow their power. At the vanguard of the battle against rock & roll was the White Citizens Council, a collection of Southern racists, who had come together on the local level.
WCCs were the “respectable” side of organized racism, with membership that often overlapped with the local (segregated) Chamber of Commerce. WCC members were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other local leaders, and as such they worked mostly above ground, using the law and official means to enforce legal segregation, Jim Crow, and White rule. They also sent not-so-subtle messages to their partners in the underground, the Ku Klux Klan, who terrorized whomever the WCCs targeted.
With the KKK, Southern Baptist Convention, Southern Democrats, and others, the WCC did what they pledged to do – they organized petition drives, protests, boycotts, and record-burnings. They endorsed police repression and quietly supported violence. They failed. While the bigots were trying to kill it, rock & roll record sales boomed and boomed and boomed.
Rockabilly and early rock & roll segued into instrumentals, surf music, and garage rock, which was joined by the British Invasion and Beat music, which inspired more garage rock, psychedelia, and hard rock. By the 1970s, the American music industry was pretty much the rock & roll industry, same with the Brits, who gave the world some things called The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Rock & roll was no longer a “fad” and there was no stopping its “threat.” Though radio stations and major record labels colluded to bleach rock music and dub nearly every Black popular musician an R&B artist, record buyers continued to buy records no matter the artist’s race or raced-based genre a music was assigned to.
Multi-millions and then billions of dollars were being generated by sales of rock & roll music. Rock musicians set attendance records across the globe and the largest music festivals in history were pretty much rock concerts. And when rock & roll started to fade, it wasn’t the racists or right-wing who were responsible, it was a genre of music with deep roots in Black America – Hip Hop, which cut into rock record sales, while becoming the US’s most popular form of music thanks, in part, to White fans.
Back to the Sixties: While the White Citizens Council failed to stop rock & roll, they made some minor political gains, gains which extended Southern racist control of “Dixie,” but that didn’t last. Major Southern cities elected Black mayors, city councilmembers, state legislators, and Congressional reps. Jim Crow and racial codes started to fall. And while things changed, the WCC started to die. When its members tried to regroup, they found that the soil that they once tilled was no longer rich in racism. The KKK shrunk. Desperate, they became more militant and less respectable. By the mid-Seventies they were a fringe domestic terrorist organization, still deadly but small.
There is one thing that made the WCC and its allies’ attack on rock & roll a joke, and ultimately led to their decline: Their ideological blinders led them to fight against forces they had little understanding of. Race-hatred had them blame the NAACP for the popularity of rock & roll, an accusation that riled up their followers but was directed towards the wrong target.
Certainly, the NAACP were mortal enemies of WCC, but that is because they were/are a civil rights organization with a strong legal arm, a variety of tactics, and a willingness to fight. The NAACP also was supported by White anti-racists, which helped give them political heft. What the NAACP did not do is anything involving rock & roll. They didn’t teach people how to play it, train radio disc jockeys what to play on the radio, promote rock & roll concerts, or sell the records.
As Capitol Records’ Mel Mallory told Downbeat, the only formal group promoting rock & roll in 1956 were record-pluggers, and they were doing it to make money, not to create an integrated, multi-racial society. Black musician, songwriter, producer, and A&R man Dave Bartholomew said, “The record companies are owned 100 percent by White people. They are the ones responsible for the success of r&b [aka rock & roll], by promoting it with their top names to create bigger and better records. To give the NAACP credit for its rise in popularity is laughable.”
The WCC et al were not only ignorant of entertainment industry economics, they were stupid when it comes to culture. Trapped in a Whites-only world, they had no inkling that those outside of their bubble might have different tastes than they did. Pigheadedly loyal to made-up racial codes, they never considered that when the ears, brain, heart, and/or soul unconsciously starts toes tapping to a beat, it’s an action that is beyond one’s control. Nowhere in their minds could they comprehend the idea that “I dance therefore I am.” They failed to understand the power of culture.
Last week, Donald Trump took control of the Kennedy Center, one of this country’s premier cultural institutions. Trump’s reasons for the takeover are not totally clear but its safe to assume that his motivations have something to do with feeling slighted (by culture makers and/or culture in general), a need to control perceptions (of himself through the arts), and money (there has to be a scam in there!). Whatever, Trump’s attack on culture is as misguided and doomed to fail as the WCC’s assault on rock & roll.
Although he played a businessman on TV, Trump doesn’t seem to understand the entertainment industry. If he did he’d know that the United States government is a poor supporter of the arts and culture. Erase all government spending on culture and few of us would notice, and that is because our culture is a private affair. It is businessmen not bureaucrats who make the big institutional decisions, the artists who make culture, and everyday people who consume it. Hell, even the sports world – with high school and college sports – is more reliant on government money than culture is. Take over the Kennedy Center, hell, shut it down, and very few people will even know that it is gone.
And being a control freak, Trump cannot comprehend that ultimately the people who control our cultural world are those who are immersed in culture – the listeners, viewers, fans, and participants. From way back, corporations have tried to control what culture we interact with only to find that they might influence this or that but we are the ones who tune in or turn it off. They can promote Knife or Death like it is Survivor, Shakespeare, and a side of schnitzel rolled into one but if no one is watching it, it goes the way of The Ashlee Simpson Show. The star is only the star because we make them the star, Don.
I am not going to downplay the damage being inflicted on the country, however, when it comes to culture, I am feeling good. The response to Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover was artists and creators ditching the Kennedy Center. The Center might flounder for a while or even die, but culture will survive…and a lot of that culture will be aimed at Trump and his thugs.
As in the 1980s, when Reagan put culture in his sights, our response to Trump could wind up revolutionizing the control and economics of culture, and thus make society a little better. Back then we saw the creation of a DIY scene that covered most artist disciplines and enabled independent artists to make good livings while being free of corporations and the government.
Because this scene was apart from the establishment, there were few pressures to conform to irrational rules such as “Black people couldn’t play rock & roll,” “Women could sing but not play lead guitar or drums,” and “There’s no room for queers here.” Through the 1980s, social mores started to change, first within the subculture and then in the mainstream.
The 1990s saw a significant rise of Black rock & rollers, which broke down racial barriers. Two movements - Riot Grrl and Queer Punk (or Homocore) – challenged and changed punk rock, then rock & roll, popular culture, and finally our society…and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it, nor is there anything that Trump, Musk and the rest of them can stop us now.