The 1950s: The Repudiation of Hate Speech Laws
· Reason
In the middle of the night on Sunday, October 12, 1958, fifty sticks of dynamite exploded in the entryway of an Atlanta synagogue. The blast took place at the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, the oldest and most prominent synagogue in Atlanta. Its rabbi was an outspoken integrationist.
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Parts of the temple were blown apart. Not long after, staff at the news agency United Press International received a call from someone identifying himself as "General Gordon of the Confederate Underground." "We bombed a temple in Atlanta," he said. "This is the last empty building we will bomb.… Negroes and Jews are hereby declared aliens."
The bombing was one in a series of brutal assaults on Jewish and Black institutions in the South in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Segregationists targeted synagogues that promoted integration as well as recently integrated schools. The Atlanta bombing was the seventh attack on a Jewish religious building in the South since 1957. There had been bombings or attempted bombings in Charlotte, Gastonia, Miami, Nashville, Jacksonville, and Birmingham.
The temple bombing was a shocking act of terrorism, and the reaction to it was swift. President Dwight Eisenhower denounced the attack and called for immediate investigation. The FBI and Atlanta police linked the bombing to five men who belonged to white supremacist hate groups, including the National States' Rights Party (NSRP). The NSRP, an avowedly fascist organization founded in 1949, embraced virulent antisemitism and a fanatical resistance to integration, part of its platform of "saving America and the white race and the preservation of the pure blood of our forefathers." The organization was known for its Nazi-like uniforms of white shirts, black ties, and armbands with the emblem of a thunderbolt over a Confederate flag.
Before the bombing, large quantities of antisemitic "hate literature" had been circulated in Atlanta. Copies of hate publications or "hate sheets" were found near the bombed buildings. When the FBI raided the homes of the suspected bombers, they found troves of antisemitic literature and crude drawings of swastikas. One of the suspects was discovered with antisemitic pamphlets in his car. Some of the literature found at the scene of the bombing had been issued by neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who produced large quantities of "hate propaganda" at a printing plant in the basement of his headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
The bombings seemed to have a strong connection to hate speech. Despite this, there was little enthusiasm for hate speech laws, in contrast to just a decade earlier. By the early 1950s, prominent scholars who earlier advocated group defamation laws had reversed their positions. Harvard social psychologist Gordon Allport, an influential backer of the 1943 Massachusetts group libel law, observed in his 1954 treatise The Nature of Prejudice that "the remedy for prejudiced opinion is not suppression, but rather a free-flowing counteraction by unprejudiced opinion." Even David Riesman, once the foremost scholarly advocate of group defamation laws, changed his mind. In a 1951 article in Commentary magazine, he disparaged group defamation laws as a form of "censorship."
"Free and open discussion" in the "marketplace of ideas" had become the preferred liberal approach to dealing with the hate speech problem. The New York Times, defending the right of neo-Nazis to march in New York City in 1960, opined that "if the [First Amendment] … failed to cover even the most outrageous and objectionable expressions," so long as they did not produce a clear and present danger, it would "not be worth the paper it is written on." As Riesman put it, freedom of expression "in the present context of American society … is one of the greatest safeguards for Jews and all other minorities subject to prejudice." Observed a writer for Congressional Quarterly in 1958, it was "widely agreed that an aroused and determined public opinion is the main thing needed to put a quietus on fanatical deeds and words."
This stark repudiation of hate speech laws occurred despite the precipitous rise of hate groups in the 1950s. Across the South, dozens of white supremacist organizations sprang up to resist integration in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. These Klan-type organizations merged with antisemitic, fascist groups in the North to form a single, national "hate movement." Organizations with ominous names such as the American Vigilantes, the Christian Defenders, the National States' Rights Party, and the Christian Nationalist Crusade, railing against the purported "evils" of Communism, "race-mixing," and integration, spewed racist, antisemitic, and anti-Catholic tirades to millions.
America's repudiation of bigotry in the postwar years forced the "hatemongers" to camouflage their blatant approaches. Many hate groups abandoned the brash and obvious tactics that prewar fascist groups had used. Rather than staging demonstrations, protests, and picket lines generating violent responses, they adopted more subtle and modern methods. The bulk of the hatemongers' activity was now the distribution of "hate sheets"—mass-produced pamphlets, leaflets, and broadsides that they circulated in bulk, much of it by US mail.
By 1956, around two dozen hate sheets were in the business of fomenting racial and religious hatred. These publications, most of them unrequested, found their way into at least half a million homes and were read by more than two million Americans. The hate sheets were transmitted in mass quantities under such titles as "White Christians Awake" and "Jews and You." They used dramatic and fantastic tactics to link Communists, Jews, African Americans, and Catholics in purported conspiracies to defeat the "American way of life." Headlines spoke of the "Jewish-Communist Conspiracy Behind Racial Integration" and called the NAACP a "Jewish Front."
The hate groups joined together in an extensive "hate network" to circulate their literature. They exchanged text, quoted from each other's pamphlets, advertised in each other's publications, and shared membership lists. Much of the hate literature was put out by professional "hate peddlers" using modern public relations techniques, skilled copywriters, and mass mailing lists. Compared with the prewar hate literature, which typically consisted of crude mimeographed flyers, the postwar hate literature was professional, with slick paper and elaborate drawings or photographs. The hate groups aimed to win the support of respectable elements in society rather than merely the "lunatic fringe."
Most of the hate propaganda circulating in the South came from Northern cities. So-called "hate peddlers" sent wholesalers to the South soliciting bulk orders for the hate sheets. Shipments were sent to supply centers for distribution to such hate groups as the KKK, White Citizens' Councils, and the National States' Rights Party. By the mid-1950s, the production of hate literature was a multimillion-dollar industry.
Excerpted from Hate Speech: The Legal and Cultural History of an American Dilemma by Samantha Barbas, courtesy of the University of California Press. Copyright © 2026.
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