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

by David M. Chalmers

"In Backfire, the leading historian of the Ku Klux Klan brings the story of America's oldest terrorist society up-to-date. David Chalmers tells the stories of Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, David Duke, and Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and follows the forty-year struggle to punish Klan murderers through the courts of Alabama, Georgia, and the U.S. Supreme Court. In his analysis, Chalmers shows how Klan violence actually aided the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and helped revolutionize the role of the national government in the protection of civil rights." While focused on the Klan's activities in the twentieth-century, Backfire also looks beyond the abuses of the past. Through an examination of groups like the neo-Nazis, Aryan Nations, Christian Identity, and the Patriot Movement, Chalmers explores the new face of the white supremacist Right.

Genres: History

216 pages, Hardcover

First published March 25, 2003