Gordon Baum

Baum supported former Klan boss David Duke in his bid to be the governor of Louisiana, and his organization became more openly racist after being "outed" in a 1998/1999 political scandal, when it was revealed that then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) had spoken at the group's meetings. Baum died in March of 2015, leaving the future of the organization unclear. 

In His Own Words

“Why can’t European-Americans be concerned with this genocide [of white people]? Is it racial to say that?”
— Associated Press interview, 1998

“The Citizens Councils of America were never known as the White Citizens Council. They were never involved in violence. They had over a million members… . They had governors, senators. And I can guarantee you there’s people sitting up in the United States Congress with you today that were members of the old Citizens Councils of America … that you call it the ‘white-collar Klan.’ Well, give me proof of one person other than the Southern Poverty Law Center that’s ever called it that. That’s a fiction out of your own brain!”
— On Fox News Channel’s “The Crier Report,” 1999
 
“And I will stand by the contention that the most discriminated group in this country are the poor white working males. I will not back down from that, but I don’t think Congress ought to condemn us.”
— On Fox News Channel’s “The Crier Report,” 1999

Background

A personal injury lawyer specializing in auto accidents and workmen's compensation claims in St. Louis, Mo., Baum helped form the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) in 1985 based on the mailing lists of the segregationist White Citizens Councils (formally called the Citizens Councils of America) for whom he had been the Midwest field organizer. The CCC grew to include some 15,000 members, mostly in the Deep South, and to have genuine political power in the mid- to late 1990s. During part of that period, it boasted 34 members in the Mississippi legislature, but revelations of the CCC's racism have since ended most of its pull in the halls of power. 

Baum was instrumental in building up the CCC, having come up with the idea of using the old mailing lists and then presiding over one of the few white supremacist organizations to gain substantial membership and support from political figures. By nature a quiet, behind-the-scenes operator, Baum rarely took the spotlight for himself, instead highlighting the work of his colleagues and the CCC's local chapters.

Most Americans only learned of the CCC in late 1998, when a scandal erupted over prominent Southern politicians' ties to the brazenly racist group. After it was revealed that former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) gave the keynote speech at the CCC's 1998 national convention and that then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) had spoken to the group five times, both claimed they knew virtually nothing about the group (although Lott's uncle told The New York Times that the senator had, in fact, been a member for years). However, an Intelligence Report investigation picked up by several network newscasts and major newspapers made it crystal clear what the CCC was: a hate group that routinely denigrated blacks as "genetically inferior," complained about "Jewish power brokers," called LGBT people "perverted sodomites," accused non-white immigrants of turning America into a "slimy brown mass of glop," and named Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, "Patriot of the Century." 

As evidence of widespread associations between Southern GOP officeholders and the CCC mounted, Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson took the unusual step in 1998 of asking party members to resign from the group because of its "racist views." A resolution moved through the U.S. Congress "condemning the racism and bigotry espoused by the Council of Conservative Citizens," although it ultimately failed.  

Initially, after the Intelligence Report and others detailed the CCC's racism, Baum seemed to react calmly, defending himself and the group as best he could and insisting that his was a "mainstream" group. But as politicians and the press turned against him, Baum showed an angry and petulant side, and did not help his cause when he went on national media outlets and fretted about black men raping white women and similar racially charged matters.      

After the Lott scandal, the CCC essentially abandoned its longstanding attempts to portray itself as a mainstream conservative organization. Baum, who as late as 2001 was telling reporters that the council was "not anti-black" or "anti-anything," went on to preside over an organization that did not hesitate to publish screeds calling blacks "a retrograde species of humanity" or to post pictures on its website of alleged black criminals and terrorists over a headline reading, "Is the face of DEATH black after all?" 

Starting in 1995, Baum and his local St. Louis chapter leader Earl Holt had a radio show, "Right at Night," on WGNU-AM in that Missouri city. As the CCC moved further to the right, the radio show reflected the group's radicalization. For example, Holt got into hot water in 2003 after attacking an anti-racist as a "n----- lover" in an E-mail later made public. Holt was "called on the carpet" by the station (not by Baum) but not kicked off the air.

After a 2004 exposé by the Intelligence Report showed that dozens of state and even national politicians, predominantly Republicans from Mississippi, were still speaking to the group even after they were asked to stop in 1998 by the GOP, most political pandering to the CCC ended. Unlike in prior years, the CCC's tabloid newspaper, Citizens Informer, basically stopped running mentions of elected officials speaking to council gatherings — the group had simply become too toxic for politicians to be publicly associated with it, even if some remained sympathetic to its goals. As a result, Baum began increasingly urging open racists and other unapologetic extremists to join the CCC, particularly at the semi-annual meetings of another anti-black hate group, American Renaissance.

One example of the CCC’s newly undisguised radicalism came at the CCC’s 2013 national conference in Winston-Salem, N.C. – a gathering marked with a new tide of open anti-Semitism from its participants – where Keith Alexander of the “Political Cesspool,” a racist, far-right radio program hosted by James Edwards, decried what he perceived as the inability of Americans to talk “candidly and honestly [about] race and Jewish power and influence.” Another attendee, John Shudlick, a five-time mayor of Ocean Ridge, Fla., followed that by stating that the “six million figure [the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust] was a dirty filthy lie.”

The CCC also took on new life as it turned its attention from traditional issues like busing and affirmative action to strident attacks on non-white immigration — a shift reflected clearly in the pages of the Citizens Informer. 

After meeting at the 2013 conference, one of Baum’s daughters, Renee, married prominent white nationalist Brad Griffin of the blog Occidental Dissent. The two were married in 2014. Both are extremely active as organizers and participants in League of the South demonstrations.

Baum died at the age of 74 in March of 2015 after a prolonged struggle with an undisclosed illness. The outlook for the CCC was unclear, but it appeared early on that Griffin and other younger leaders were trying to bring it back to life as the vigorous and activist organization that it had once been.