Robert Boyd "Tut" Patterson (December 13, 1921 – September 21, 2017) was an American plantation manager and former college football star who is known for founding the first Citizens' Councils, a white supremacist organization, established in Indianola, Mississippi in 1954, in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
He was a member of Alpha Zeta agricultural fraternity as well as ROTC and the honors clubs Phi Eta Sigma, Blue Key and Omicron Delta Kappa, and was president of the school's athletic society the M-Club in his senior year.
Yet prominent citizens in civic organizations as well as in the agricultural economy such as Patterson made sure the "all deliberate speed" to unify schools in the Court's decision would be delayed indefinitely.
[10] In Sunflower County, Mississippi near Indianola, and acting on a local judge's call for organized resistance to the Brown decision, Patterson formed the state's and region's first Citizens' Council on July 11, 1955.
Nearly 100 towns-folk met that evening and decided on a plan to resist implementation of any federal judiciary rulings to integrate local Sunflower County and Indianola schools.
Citizens' Councils sprang up quickly across Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, eastern Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina.
Citizens' Councilors sought more peaceful organized resistance to integrated schooling mandated by the courts when compared to the Ku Klux Klan's tactics.
The communications tools spread virulent racial stereotypes about African Americans while selling the wonders of a segregated society as having few if any problems associated with race relations.
The Councils' media relations department and Patterson also used their communications tools such as the newspaper and Forum television program to applaud South African apartheid.
In other words, Patterson helped craft a media message to Mississippians that if schools integrated or even allowed some token desegregation, then the result would be uproar, violence, and instability that would invite federal authority to come in and rule the white people of the state in a tyrannical fashion.
In keeping with his ideas about state-federal power and the limits therein, Patterson also joined a Councils offshoot segregationist organization in the 1960s called the Federation for Constitutional Government.