Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement

At each stage of the civil rights movement, blacks encountered stiff white resistance. J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant murdered Emmett Till in the summer following the Brown edict. White Citizens Councils, comprised of leading members of the white community, which took as their goal the defense of the "Southern way of life," sprung up in Mississippi and other states in the latter half of the 1950s. The Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a renaissance. "Progressive" southern statesmen, such as Alabama Governor Jim Folsom, watched their political bases evaporate. Moderate leaders, such as Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, shifted to the right. And reactionary politicians, who prior to Brown had enjoyed little success, such as Ross Barnett, were elected to office including the top posts in their states.

The North's reaction to the civil rights movement was more complex and ambiguous. While surveys showed that white Northerners favored the Brown decision, most initially disapproved of the tactics of nonviolent direct action. As late as the summer of 1963, one poll revealed that the majority of whites felt that the March on Washington would harm blacks more than it would help them. From 1963 through 1965 white northern support for civil rights increased precipitously. Moreover, white Northerners condemned the actions of southern white supremacists. Yet, following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, as white Northerners themselves were asked to integrate their schools and were faced with urban disorders, resistance developed that was comparable to that which the civil rights movement had faced in the South. Martin Luther King asserted that the worst hatred he ever faced was in Cicero, Illinois, an all-white workingclass suburb of Chicago. In New York and Boston, heretofore bastions of white

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