60 years ago today - Sep 1, 1965

On 17 August the society's "Major Coordinators" sent instructions to all the Birch officers in California to take "immediate action" to "expose the so-called Civil Rights Movement." On 1 September 1965, the day before [apostle Ezra Taft Benson's son] Reed Benson's letter, a follow-up letter instructed Birch Society leaders in Los Angeles County to "take advantage of the current situation" as a means of repudiating civil rights activism.

[D. Richard Pine and Charles R. Armour to "All Coordinators, Section Leaders and Chapter Leaders in California," 17 Aug. 1965, and D. Richard Pine to "Coordinators, Section Leaders and Chapter Leaders—L.A. County," 1 Sept. 1965, in Harvey B. Schechter, How To Listen to a John Birch Society Speaker, 3d. ed. rev. (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, 1967), 25-26; Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold Forster, The Radical Right: Report on the John Birch Society and Its Allies (New York: Random House, 1967), 12; Lipset and Raab, Politics of Unreason, 268. For the position of Major Coordinator, see Welch, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 152. From D.. Michael Quinn, Ezra Taft Benson and Mormon Political Conflicts, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26:2 (Summer 1992), also in Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power Salt Lake City (Signature Books, 1994), Chapter 3.]