Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement.

Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement. By David Chalmers. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., c. 2003. Pp. viii, 207. $24.95, ISBN 0-7425-2310-1.)

David Chalmers's Hooded Americanism is still a standard history of the Ku Klux Klan. His 1981 revised edition traced the Invisible Empire through its fourth era, peaking with the late-1970s resurgence guided by new leaders like David Duke and marked by the murders of five anti-Klan demonstrators at a 1979 confrontation in Greensboro, North Carolina. Afterward Klan memberships once again plunged, although hard-core Klansmen soldiered into the new millennium by networking across the racist Right, forging links with Christian Identity believers, militia warriors, Nordic paganists, and neo-Nazi demagogues.

Partly written to update that story, Backfire is mainly intended to argue that Klan-sponsored beatings, lynchings, assassinations, and bombings ironically "helped" the very sixties-era civil rights movement they were designed to thwart. This is hardly a novel claim. Histories of the period--one might sample Clayborne Carson's In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass., 1995) or Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama; The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York, 2001)--have detailed how Klan violence prompted successful movement appeals for federal protection. That those appeals for help and the Department of Justice and congressional investigations they prompted led eventually to vital changes in federal civil rights law is also quite clear. So what is new here?

Not enough. Chalmers acknowledges composing the first half of his "backfire" story by digesting chapters in the 1981 Hooded Americanism. Yet this produces disconcerting effects: rough jump cuts, phrases whose antecedent references were evidently omitted, and an episodic organization with unbalanced emphases; the 1964-1965 struggles in Selma get only a five-page chapter. Many will also be put off by the book's oversimplified rhetoric and perspective, more suited to a freshman textbook: "The right to vote, which meant a seat at the table where decisions were made, was the key to other rights. Black people were not allowed to vote in many parts of the South," Chalmers tells us on one occasion (p. 61). The book's oversimplified argument disappoints also.

It is clear that Klan violence compelled Kennedy and Johnson administration officials to answer appeals from civil rights activists. Yet later events like the Greensboro massacre or 1990s prosecutions of Klan defendants for 1960s violence, treated at length in Backfire, never involved the movement per se, though they did answer and vindicate long-standing civil rights--era grievances against and critiques of white supremacy in the United States. Thus Chalmers's exposition in Backfire's second half also falls short, for the wider yet unexplored issue is how sixties Klan tactics contributed significantly to an "expanding federal power" (p. 3). Indeed, the story of how racist violence nourished federalism requires a more expansive narration, one that begins with Reconstruction-era hearings and legislation, battens upon the 1909 United States v. Shipp decision, and flourishes in the post-Brown era--but not (and here is a further irony) without nudges from private watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center. Yet Chalmers also neglects to explore a final irony: how the racist right now feeds on the very federalism it partly prompted. Consider, for example, David Duke campaigning against "all that regulation and interference from Washington" (p. 128). Such uneven, insufficient analyses make Backfire little more than an introductory survey.

Southern Methodist University 

STEVEN WEISENBURGER