The Columbians, Inc.: A Chapter of Racial Hatred from the Post-World War II South

Abstract

IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF OCTOBER 31, 1946, SOMEONE dynamited the front porch of Goldsmith and Minnie Sibley, African Americans who had recently bought their clapboard house on Ashby Street, in a previously all-white working-class neighborhood in Atlanta's West End. The bomb, reportedly thrown from a passing automobile, demolished the Sibleys' porch, shattered their windows and front door, and roused from sleep the terrified pair and their neighbors. Everyone understood that this attack was meant to intimidate people like the Sibleys. During the postwar months Atlanta's radical racist groups had been ranting about African Americans migrating into West End neighborhoods. After the Sibley bombing, suspicion immediately fell on one upstart group, the Columbians, the leaders of which had been threatening for weeks to force black families from the West End and advocating the elimination, even the extermination, of blacks and Jews from the city, state, and nation. Columbians leaders even repeated their call to arms at a rancorous meeting later the same day of the Sibley bombing. (1) The Columbians, Incorporated, had become a legally chartered nonprofit organization in mid-August 1946. (2) Its leaders were Emory C. Burke, a railroad draftsman and self-proclaimed race warrior originally from Alabama, and Homer L. Loomis Jr., a fry cook descended from a once-wealthy New York family. This is the story of how, in the closing months of 1946, Burke and Loomis enrolled nearly five hundred dues-paying, brown-shirted Atlanta members, luring them with violent rhetoric and vicious assaults on their African American neighbors; how feature stories in national media sounded the alarm; and how a makeshift coalition of public and private agencies seemed to dismantle the Columbians. A study in the explosive collision of race, class, and gender politics in the postwar South, this examination of the Columbians also opens a window on the fascist, Christian extremist right in its early phase and at a watershed moment. Just one year after the Allies had crushed Hitler's Reich and revealed its genocidal horrors, U.S. neo-Nazis were organizing Atlanta millhands, talking a mean streak of exterminationist racial hatred, and taking it to the streets. The Columbians' virulent ideology and violent tactics have received meager attention from specialists in southern and political history. Doubtless, for an America congratulating itself after defeating genocidal fascism in 1945 (and still celebrating triumphantly through recent popular books by Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw) the Columbians have seemed a messy, embarrassing blemish. Yet there is nothing singular about the party's violent reaction to postwar integration of working-class neighborhoods. From 1945 to 1947 whites directed arson attacks, bombings, and mob violence against blacks moving into previously all-white zones in, for example, Redwood City and Fontana, California, and on Chicago's southwest side. All of these outbreaks, however, were more or less spontaneous acts of terror perpetrated mostly by near neighbors panicked about property values but without affiliations to organized hate groups. Moreover, in nearly every case these outbreaks occurred shortly after the first attacks by the Columbians. (3) The Columbians stand apart because of their overt fascism: their Nazi-style brown shirts, insignia, militancy, and apocalyptic promises of final, genocidal violence. Fascist in the sense of working toward a fully corporatized, militarized state, as group president Emory Burke's writings proclaim, the Columbians were also fascist in the much deeper ideological and sociopsychological sense of the term. As Klaus Theweleit argues, fascism is more than a governmental form or political economy; it is a wholly sexualized and racialized discourse of dominance and violence. In their fantasies of white male sovereignty, fascist regimes define themselves in flight from the feminine and the nonwhite, for these categories summarize fascist man's dread of dissolution, pollution, and hybridity. …