After more than fifty years of nearly complete deference to Southern states and noninterference in their racial affairs, Brown suggested a reversal in course. A mood of outrage and defiance swept the South, not unlike the reaction to emancipation and Reconstruction following the Civil War. Again, racial equality was being forced upon the South by the federal government, and by 1956, Southern white opposition to desegregation mushroomed into a vicious backlash. In Congress, North Carolina senator Sam Ervin Jr. drafted a racist polemic, the “Southern Manifesto,” which vowed to fight to maintain
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