right-wing John Birch Society during its active campaigns against the civil rights movement. Among myriad other actions, “Birchers” attacked Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks (and countless others) as communists. In the 1960s, the Birch Society sponsored billboards across Kansas calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court, who had ordered the desegregation of the public schools. Critics saw echoes of Bircherism in Brownback’s school legislation.
