Old Augusta Chronicle Article on Francis Bell

Francis Bell was the former state director of the South Carolina CofCC, who died of cancer in 2005. She was a mainstay in the Augusta Chronicle for years. Here is an excerpt from the November 28, 1999 edition of the Augusta Chronicle.

‘Ma Bell’ stands by her belief

By Margaret N. O’Shea
South Carolina Bureau

WINDSOR — With white hair pulled back into a bun and wisps that fall around her face, the soft-spoken, 67-year-old woman affectionately known as “Ma Bell” is hardly the picture of hate.

But as state chairwoman of the Council of Conservative Citizens, she leads a 500-member [state] organization that has acquired a national reputation as a hate group, based largely on its belief that white people are an endangered species. And beneath her calm demeanor are nerves of steel. She does not back down; she does not compromise; and she does not mince words, however politely she says them.

Her dark eyes grow steely and her jaw sets when she talks about the NAACP’s tourism boycott of South Carolina and the “political harlots” she says are selling out under the economic squeeze to bring a Confederate flag off the state’s Capitol dome. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is interested in advancing nothing but in “lining its own coffers,” she says. Groups that oppose the flag, such as the state “Chamberpot of Commerce,” she calls “pustules” erupting under pressure.

The Confederate flag is only one issue that concerns the council, and it’s not Mrs. Bell’s top priority; instead, it falls after the decline of morality, poor education and the replacement of fire-and-brimstone preaching with mealy-mouthed political correctitude in the pulpit.

High on her list is the federal government nosing where it has no call, and she says that has a lot to do with the Confederate flag.

“It’s the flag my great-grandparents fought under for states’ rights,” she said. “Not a one owned slaves, and not a one believed in slavery.”

One of Mrs. Bell’s great-grandfathers was wounded in the Civil War and was crippled for life. The other was captured at Camden and held prisoner until the war ended. Her husband’s great-grandfather died at Gettysburg. His body never came home.

To her, putting the flag in a place of honor that is not the seat of government is unacceptable.

“It is in a place of honor now,” she said. “It flies on top of a building that was shelled by Sherman’s troops. The Statehouse is a monument within itself.”

Her defense of the flag is so adamant that in October, when she heard that a professional mediator was tackling the issue, Mrs. Bell went loaded for bear. She took a copy of the state law — rarely, if ever, enforced — against desecration or mutilation of federal, state and Confederate flags.

In South Carolina it is illegal to “defy, jeer at, trample upon, or cast contempt, either by word or act, upon any such flag.”

She was incensed that she was not allowed to read the law or even participate. The mediation exercise required staying all day. She couldn’t.

Opposite sides

The boycott has focused national attention on South Carolina, the last Southern state to fly an unaltered version of the Confederate battle flag on its Capitol.

“We don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” Mrs. Bell said about that. “We ought to be proud. It’s the people who want to bring it down that ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

Because of her affiliation with the Council of Conservative Citizens, she has a hard time convincing listeners that there are no racial overtones in her defense of the flag. She disarms some national journalists expecting someone openly hateful.

To read more about the Council of Conservative Citizens, go to www.cofcc.org.
Sitting on the curb outside a Columbia Lizard’s Thicket restaurant after a Confederate flag rally she organized last month, Mrs. Bell gently encouraged one of the film crew doing a documentary on Southern heritage. He had discovered she has cancer and confided his girlfriend’s discovery of a lump.Mrs. Bell had, after all, just told him, “There’s not a hateful bone in my body.”

The hate designation came from the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, which attempts to monitor organizations it believes are grounded in bigotry.

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina’s 6th District tried last session to get Congress to denounce “the racism and bigotry espoused by the Council of Conservative Citizens,” a resolution he admits is doomed.

Mrs. Bell’s response to the hate designation is one of bewilderment.

“One year we were listed as a patriots group, and the next we were down as extremists, without doing anything different,” she said.

She also has helped circulate copies of bitter divorce records of the law center’s director, Morris Dees.

“I don’t know why everybody listens to Morris Dees,” she said. “He can’t even keep his own life in order. I don’t think he’s a good judge of character.”

She says the Congressional Black Caucus, whose chairman is Mr. Clyburn, is racist because it has no white members.

The council opposes affirmative action, school busing and immigration, and members tend to oppose interracial dating and marriage.

Her husband, George Bell, once one of four white teachers in an all-black school, is convinced that black people have achieved privilege, not the equality most wanted, and that something sinister underlies that development — a plan to destroy white people through interracial marriage. He believes the news media gloss over crimes that black people commit, especially against whites.

His wife agrees. Frances Bell, who has some Cherokee in her blood line, makes no bones about her view that these days, whites are discriminated against the most.

“I haven’t found a single thing in the council that I disagree with,” she said.

It reflects values she grew up with as the oldest of eight children in a sharecropping family in Abbeville County. She dropped out of high school to help the family and finished later at the South Carolina Opportunity School in Columbia, where she met her husband.

She married at 19 and bore four children — her daughters are both teachers, and her sons are in construction work. They have nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Mrs. Bell’s eyes sadden when she says that number — a seventh great-grandchild is dead, struck by an automobile.

No place for race

Mr. and Mrs. Bell, married since 1952, joined the Council of Conservative Citizens together nine years ago. She read a newspaper article about it around the time he received something about it by mail. They drove 90 miles to Newberry for a meeting and joined, quickly getting heavily involved, because neither believes in joining anything to be passive.

It was natural for her to be in the forefront, Mr. Bell says. The former vice present of a union local “likes a good brawl,” he said.

Two years ago, Mrs. Bell was named to the national board of a council that nationwide has 28 chapters and 15,000 members. Her one run for public office was for Aiken’s consolidated school board, as a Republican. She lost by 19 votes.

Nonstop agenda

Mrs. Bell’s agenda appears to some to be all over the map, but it is all related to the council’s beliefs. And she devotes almost all her time to it, churning out news releases and official statements with near-religious zeal. She spends Monday afternoons pasting up the week’s edition of The Edgefield Advertiser, established in 1836, for 88-year-old W.W. Mims, the editor of his family’s newspaper since 1937.

It’s a job Mrs. Bell volunteered for after retiring from The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, where she was a Linotype operator, then a proofreader and supervisor in composing, then in advertising. That’s where she acquired her nickname: “Ma Bell.” Mr. Bell worked there, too.

She sometimes writes for the Advertiser these days, as do two of the council’s most fervent members, Jim and Rebekah Sutherland of Aiken. Mrs. Sutherland, who is tireless at the computer and the fax machine, helps Mrs. Bell circulate ultra-conservative perspectives on a variety of topics ranging from genital exams by school health nurses to the status of the Panama Canal and how, in their view, Aiken school investments are tied to a crooked bank in New York. She also assists in pasting up the Edgefield newspaper.

Mr. Mims is grateful. The Bells, he said, are “wonderful friends who offered to help me because they believe in my positions.”

That appears to be how they are viewed throughout the circle they hold to, which encompasses people who think like them.

“I think what I am doing is important,” Mrs. Bell said. “I know it may be too late to change anything for my children, but I want something different for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It’s for them.”