The conservatives eventually won the day. High-profile events such as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, and the 1957 deployment of federal troops to integrate Little Rock Central High School generated widespread southern white resistance. By the early 1960s, the journalist Robert Novak reported, many right-wing Republican leaders “envisioned substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming…the White Man’s Party.”
