DESPERATE AND TENSE, the Southern segregationist swings hard, not looking at his club. As he battles for a way of life, he grabs whatever he can, and too often at hand is a weapon tinged with anti-Semitism. The fervent battle against Negro rights in the South has brought with it a subtle but powerful spread of hatred for the Jew.

Few segregation groups have policies that include anti-Semitism. Most openly avow the opposite. But their criterion for propaganda is only that it attack the Negro and help keep him separated. This has left the field open for the hate drummer. He has discovered that his literature and speeches, filled with anti-Jewish sentiments, will be used as long as anti-Negro remarks are included too.

For example, Robert B. Patterson, executive secretary of the Mississippi Citizens Councils, once issued a list of organizations from which segregationists might obtain reading material. “Some of these groups are anti-Semitic,” wrote Patterson, adding:

"However, all of the religious groups, including the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish — have been pushing the anti-segregation issue and it is time for all of us to speak out for separation of the black and white races, regardless of our race or creed."

But Patterson’s comments were too blatantly unclever. They aroused some protest, including editorials by Hodding Carter, Pulitzer Prize editor of the Delta Democrat Times in Greenville, Mississippi. Patterson had to issue a second letter, his apology. “I receive literature from all over the United States that contains arguments against integration,” wrote Patterson. “I am not anti-Semitic, but I am against any man or group... who aids and abets the NAACP which is trying to destroy our way of life.”

To Patterson the logic was simple: He is against the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some Jews are for the NAACP. He is against Jews. But, in most cases where anti-Semitism can be linked to elements in the Citizens Councils, these sentiments are less heavily expressed, and perhaps more dangerous.

To see this spread of hate, observe Dr. Emmett Lee Irwin, a prominent New Orleans physician, who keeps a copy of Bilbo’s “Take Your Choice—Segregation or Mongrelization” on his desk where Gray’s “Anatomy” belongs. Dr. Irwin is chairman of the New Orleans White Citizens Council, a group that has never officially endorsed anti-Semitism and that, most likely, has numerous Jewish constituents.

Dr. Irwin, a white-haired, kindly-sounding gentleman, once showed me six or seven copies of a speech Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have delivered to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. According to the typewritten copies, Franklin told the delegates to exclude Jews from the United States in order to preserve the new nation. “Why did you bother making copies of that speech?” I asked Dr. Irwin. He only smiled and shrugged.

The speech is one that has been circulated since the advent of Hitler by anti-Semites in this country. No one has ever found the original in the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, and J. T. Jameson, when he was chief of the division of manuscripts at the Library of Congress, declared it to be a “clumsy, impudent and vicious forgery.” The speech was something Dr. Irwin picked up in his anti-Negro reading, and while he never attempted to publish it, his acquaintance with the speech showed that he has found some material for addresses and press releases.

One such source came to light when Dr. Irwin attacked the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in New Orleans. The Citizens Council chairman accused the Jewish organization of distributing literature that, he decided, attempted to brainwash children into accepting integration. The literature turned out to be a comic book titled “The Rabbit Brothers,” which implies that people should emulate the rabbit that says, “I try to find some good in all rabbits” and not the rabbit that says, “I hate all rabbits who are not like me.” The school board discovered that one school actually had two booklets in its library, and they were removed promptly.

But Dr. Irwin, while attacking the distribution of the comic book, also told the school board that the Anti-Defamation League was under serious criticism as a “possible Communist-front organization.” When pressed for his source, Dr. Irwin, on television, announced that he found the criticism in “The Coming Red Dictatorship,” a supplement to a publication called “Common Sense.”

“The Coming Red Dictatorship” tells its readers that “it is the Jewish plot to enslave the Gentiles and to rule over them as kings over slaves.” The publication adds that “the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, its B’nai B'rith, the American Jewish Congress, are subversive conspiracies, carrying out the Jew plan. They are a ‘Gestapo’ in every community.” In 1954, the House Un-American Activities Committee branded “Common Sense,” published by Conde McGinley of Union, New Jersey, as a “hate group.”

Yet Dr. Irwin continues to maintain that he has seen no evidence of anti-Semitism in his Citizens Council. “If we did see any,” he explained recently, “we would ignore it. That’s the only way to wipe it out.” But, the Doctor added, he could not control all things said or distributed at meetings. The New Orleans Citizens Council is a loose federation of several smaller councils. Meetings of the smaller groups, he explained, were out of his jurisdiction. A few weeks later, the chairman of the Gentilly Citizens Council, one of the smaller groups, told a meeting that vast amounts of money are being poured into the NAACP by a small group of Jews with known Communist ties.

The Citizens Council leaders bristle when anyone compares them with the Ku Klux Klan. One Klan tactic, however, has been readily accepted. Attorney General Eugene Cook of Georgia, a frequent speaker at rallies in the South, has called for preservation of the “Anglo-Saxon race,” an expression that excludes Jews and Catholics as well as Negroes, and an expression frequently used by the anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish Klan.

Almost all Southern Citizens Councils, however, accept Jews; many welcome them. But a few do not hide their feelings. The Seabord Citizens Council of Washington, D. C., led by John Kasper, the man jailed for inciting segregation riots at Clinton, Tennessee, limits its membership to white persons “who believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.”

Out of the circle of “respectable” Citizens Councils, the anti-Jewish expression becomes more obvious, more ugly, and more stupid. Typical is the Southern Digest, a magazine published in New Orleans that reprints pro-segregation articles. It claims that “10,000 copies have been going out monthly” and that some are distributed by the Southern Gentlemen, a militant segregation organization in Louisiana.

The periodical refers to the president of the NAACP as “(Arthur) Spingarn, Jew.” A perusal of a few issues will turn up:

“Jewish agitators have been pushing Negroes forward for years. . . .” “Northern people should never forget, however, that when the Jews have destroyed the white South and set up their black-and-tan mobocracy, they aren’t going to stop there... .” “The Jews tried to promise the Negroes that the whole South would be made into one vast Harlem.” “The growing vogue for Negro musicians is no accident [sic] but has been assiduously cultivated by the Jews who own, control and dominate our entertainment industry....”

When observers search for the cause of this coupled hate of Jew and Negro, they pick up the stock answers. When a man hates, they are told, his disease forces him to hate all things that are different, not just the Negro, not just the Jew. Anti-Semitism and anti-Negro feeling pour out of the same meat-grinder. “Notice the coordination in thinking among segregationists,” says the Rey. Joseph H. Fichter, former chairman of the Commission of Human Rights of the Catholic Committee of the South. “They are against UNESCO, the UN, foreign aid, and Jews, and they are pro-McCarthy.” But Father Fichter’s perceptive appraisal does not tell the whole story of why the Southerner continues to spread increasing amounts of anti-Jewish propaganda.

Many a Southerner quotes anti-Jewish statements with no hate in his heart, at least none for the Jew. He is determined to keep the Negro segregated, and sometimes this determination also carries no hate for the Negro with it. But he has been given no guidance. He has picked up a weapon and swung, and there has been a dearth of complaints, for few Jews have screamed, “Ouch!”

The strangest aspect of anti-Semitism in the South has been the near total absence of Jewish protest. Jewish organizations and leaders have shied away from public denunciation of the attacks. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, has collected many examples of segregation literature that attacks Jews and has exposed some of the examples to selected leaders. But it has declined to make any general public acknowledgment of the existence of anti-Semitism in segregation literature. The league has cried out only to fend off a personal attack and has kept quiet while taking notes about attacks on the Jewish people.

Two theories may be advanced for this lack of Jewish outcry. One is simple, for like segregation leader Dr. Irwin, some Jewish groups feel the best way to fight anti-Semitism is to ignore it. But the second theory is far more complicated and disturbing. Some Jews, like other white people in Southern communities, share the segregation viewpoint of their white Christian neighbors, and similarly belong to segregation groups. If they discovered that some segregation money was being spent for anti-Semitism, they would have a tremendous internal conflict. Should I stay in the segregation group and perhaps hurt myself as a Jew, or should I quit the segregation group and perhaps hurt myself as a white Southerner? Understandably, Jewish organizations do not want these Jews to face this question. First, whatever the answer, it may hurt the individual Jew. Second and foremost, it may make the Jew resent the organization that forced him to face the question.

So the stream of anti-Jewish hate rushes on without breakers in the way, without Jewish organizations fighting back. Few newspapers or public officials have troubled themselves to offer the segregationist guidance, to inform him when he has gone too far. The segregationist still is able to plead that nobody told him anti-Semitism does not go hand in hand with segregation, state’s rights, and the Southern way of life — three concepts that seem very respectable to him. That excuse, “phoney” or real, must be removed.