January 1956

In August 1956, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover formally launches the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), initially targeting the Communist Party USA. By 1957-1960, the program has expanded to target Black civil rights organizations. Tactics include planting informants, sending forged letters to create conflicts between leaders, providing information to local police who carry out harassment arrests, contacting employers to have activists fired, and sending anonymous threatening letters. The program's exposure in 1971 reveals systematic government destruction of Black political organizing.

In January 1956, protected by double jeopardy after their acquittal, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam sell their confession to journalist William Bradford Huie for $4,000 each. The Look magazine article contains their detailed account of abducting, beating, and murdering Emmett Till. They describe Till's refusal to beg for mercy. The confession is read across America and internationally. Neither man faces any legal consequence. In 2017, historian Timothy Tyson reports that Carolyn Bryant admitted her claim that Till grabbed or threatened her was false.

In 1956, Alabama Attorney General John Patterson obtains a court order banning the NAACP from operating in Alabama on grounds that it has not registered as a foreign corporation. The ban, upheld for eight years until NAACP v. Alabama in 1964, effectively silences the organization in the state. Texas, Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina pass laws requiring membership lists to be disclosed — knowing that exposure would lead to economic retaliation and physical danger for members.

Following Brown v. Board of Education (1954), White Citizens Councils across the South fund and organize private 'segregation academies' to allow white students to exit public schools rather than integrate. Mississippi alone eventually has over 150 such academies receiving state vouchers for tuition. Public schools in some districts are defunded and closed. Many segregation academies survive today as private schools in the South, some retaining their founding exclusionary missions long after legal requirements to end it.

In 1956, Alabama Attorney General John Patterson obtains a court order banning the NAACP from operating in Alabama on grounds that it has not registered as a foreign corporation. The ban, upheld for eight years until NAACP v. Alabama in 1964, effectively silences the organization in the state. Texas, Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina pass laws requiring membership lists to be disclosed — knowing that exposure would lead to economic retaliation and physical danger for members. The coordinated legal assault on the NAACP strips Black Southerners of their primary legal advocacy organization.

Following Brown v. Board of Education (1954), White Citizens Councils across the South fund and organize private 'segregation academies' to allow white students to exit public schools rather than integrate. Mississippi alone eventually has over 150 such academies receiving state vouchers for tuition. Public schools in some districts are defunded and closed. Many segregation academies survive today as private schools in the South.

In 1956, Pittsburgh's urban renewal authority demolishes the Lower Hill District — the heart of Black Pittsburgh's cultural life, home to jazz clubs, the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper, churches, and 8,000 residents — to build the Civic Arena. Residents receive inadequate compensation and are scattered throughout the city. The arena is built without a single unit of replacement housing. The destruction is dramatized decades later by playwright August Wilson, who set his Pittsburgh Cycle plays in the Hill District.

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission recruits and pays Black informants within civil rights organizations to report on activities, membership, and plans. Informants include members of local NAACP chapters, ministers, and community figures. Declassified records reveal that the Commission sometimes provided information about civil rights workers to white supremacist groups. The practice of Black informants reporting to a segregationist state apparatus creates an atmosphere of distrust that hampers organizing and sometimes leads directly to violence against civil rights workers.

In 1956, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levison found 'In Friendship,' a New York-based organization that raises funds for Southern civil rights victims facing economic retaliation — people fired, evicted, or denied credit for registering to vote or supporting the Montgomery Boycott. The organization is an early example of Northern-Southern civil rights infrastructure and establishes relationships that lead to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. Ella Baker's organizing approach prioritizes grassroots leadership over charismatic individual leaders.