“Communist Controlled Black Barbarism”: The Citizen’s Councils of America’s Anti-Communist Master Frame Cluster and the Renovation of White Supremacist Ideology

Abstract

Using insights from a content coding analysis of discourse from the most influential White supremacist segregationist organization of the early Cold War decades, Citizen’s Councils of America (CCA or Council), I argue that social movement organizations use a master frame cluster, a package of closely related, overlapping frames with a core master frame to adapt and update pre-existing, older ideology to contemporaneous sociopolitical currents and thereby mainstream, modernize, and streamline propaganda messaging. From its media outlets and White supremacist ideology, the Council deployed what I call its Anti-Communist Master Frame Cluster, proclaiming that unrestrained Black savagery and misguided White sympathy, including liberals, leftists, and socialists, all followed a downward slope toward communist tyranny or what the Council called, “Communist controlled Black barbarism.” Twenty-first century conservative rightwing media has inherited the CCA’s master frame cluster to discredit Black Lives Matter protests, still using anti-communist messaging, but with a “Black-on-Black” crime narrative as the main propaganda weapon against Black protest.