More recently he praised the Citizens Council, a segregationist group, for keeping the peace in his town when he was growing up, though he retracted later.
Evidently neither Bull Connor, the segregationist police commissioner of Birmingham, nor the merchants expected this quiet beginning to blossom into a large-scale operation.
Following the U. S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), African American and white supporters attempted to end entrenched segregationist practices.