Shortly after the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, the Ku Klux Klan—determined to keep segregation as the way of life in Alabama—staged a resurgence. The strong-armed leadership of governor George C. Wallace, who defied the new civil rights laws and became the poster child for segregationists, empowered the Klan’s most violent members. An intimidating series of gruesome acts of violence threatened to roll back the advances of the nascent civil rights movement.
As Wallace’s power grew, however, blacks began fighting back in the courthouses and schoolhouses, as did young Southern lawyers including Charles “Chuck” Morgan, who became the ACLU’s Southern director; Morris Dees, who cofounded the Southern Poverty Law Center; and Bill Baxley, Alabama attorney general, who successfully prosecuted the bomber of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and legally halted some of Wallace’s agencies designed to slow down integration.
All along, journalist Wayne Greenhaw was interviewing Klan members, detectives, victims, civil rights leaders, and politicians of all stripes. In
Fighting the Devil in Dixie
, he tells this dramatic story in full for the first time—from the Klan’s kidnappings, bombings, and murders of the 1950s to Wallace’s run for a fourth term as governor in the early 1980s, in which he asked for forgiveness and won with the black vote.
is an essential document for understanding twentieth-century racial strife in the South and the struggle to end it.