Patterson was also a card-carrying member of the segregationist Citizens\' Council and, in his own words, had "spent many hours and driven many miles advocating the basic principles for which the Citizens\' Councils were originally organized." Few ever doubted his Jim Crow credentials.
His finesse paved the way for future tactics employing duplicity and barely yielding social change while deferring many dreams..
Patterson and others sought pragmatic answers to the dilemma of White southerners, not in the name of civil rights but to offer a more durable version of White power.
Fair, the state attorney general walked a strategic tightrope, looking to temper the ruling\'s impact without inciting the mob and without retreating any further.
Once the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Meredith v.
Still he faced a dilemma that confronted all White southerners: how to maintain an artificially elevated position for whites in southern society without resorting to violence or intimidation.
Yet even after the Supreme Court decreed that Meredith must enter the university, Patterson opposed any further desegregation and despised the federal intervention at Ole Miss.
His seeming acquiescence came at the height of the biggest crisis for Mississippi\'s racist order.
That fall Patterson stepped out of his entrenchment by defying a circle of White power brokers, but only to a point.
That is until September 1962 and the integration of the University of Mississippi by James Meredith.
Patterson was also a card-carrying member of the segregationist Citizens\' Council and, in his own words, had "spent many hours and driven many miles advocating the basic principles for which the Citizens\' Councils were originally organized." Few ever doubted his Jim Crow credentials
