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While virtually every day of the adult life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has been scrutinized, there has been little attention in studies of the civil rights movement to the years following the death of Dr. King, the dispersal and collapse of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the dissemination of the movement into inchoate forms of protest and confrontation. It is true that by the end of the 1960s, the white and black volunteers who had worked in the deep South had moved on to other concerns: women's liberation, free speech, the pursuit of an alternative consciousness and above all, the war in Vietnam, which imposed vast demands on the activist energies of the counterculture. Intensified warfare in Southeast Asia made the pace of southern racial progress tedious by contrast in what is often a zero-sum equation for the nation's moral attention. Racial peace in America was still a dream deferred, but the struggle (now "the black struggle") seemed a lot less urgent in view of the daily body counts in Vietnam.
No doubt, the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Alexander vs. Holmes County was a landmark case, and deserves greater attention in civil rights scholarship. The accompanying mandates of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered immediate integration of sixteen school districts in Mississippi and effectively ended legal segregation in the South. Public school districts could no longer avoid compliance with the Brown vs. Board decision by seizing upon the phrase "all deliberate speed" as a means of deferring implementation indefinitely. Still, it was hard to keep America on the edge of its seat with discussions of a "unitary non-discriminatory school system" and the drafting of guidelines for redesigned school districts in rural jurisdictions.
To be sure, a decade of dramatic legal victories had changed forever the public face of the South. In 1970, not only were all remaining school districts finally integrated, but the Ku Klux Klan found itself persona non grata in its own playgrounds, as most of its wizards and henchmen began serving time in federal prisons. In southern towns and cities, black people could take their meals in white-owned restaurants, spend the night in motels and hotels, and borrow books from the public library. Even in Mississippi, the movement "had won significant victories" and a "degree of civility" finally arrived, as the historian John Dittmer wrote in his book, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.1 Dittmer's hopefulness is cautious, however, as the significant victories concealed the secret that little had really changed in the racial shape of daily life. Not even the University of Alabama's Bear Bryantthe head coach determined to win football games by any means necessaryhad yet shown any interest in breaking the unlegislatible color line of college sports. That would have to wait until 1971, one year after a black halfback named Sam "the Bam" Cunningham at the University of Southern California ran for 135 yards and two touchdowns against the Crimson Tide defense and humiliated Bryant on national television. The color bar was broken over the objections of George Wallace.
White racism in America did not end with the collapse of legal segregation in the South, as many northern liberals had naively hoped; but southern segregation did not really end with the collapse of segregation either, if one wanted to press the point. When Lillian Smith wrote in her 1949 memoir, Killers of a Dream, of the tutelage of every white southern child in the triangulation of race, sex, and religion, she could not have foreseen how Jim Crow's inheritance would long survive its legal demise. Perhaps the prospects were simply too unbearable to entertain. Southern school children might become teammates on the playing fields or sit next to each other in classroomsthough they would not sit next to each other in churchbut apart from dramatic moral transformations nowhere in sight, the new familiarity only called attention to the distressing fact that every bridging of the gap deepened the chasm between black and white. Somehow, too, in the course of the fourteen years since the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the two years since King's assassination, the popular impression had formed that the civil rights movement was more about rhetorical provocation, unleashed desire, and perpetual liberation than the difficult work of community building; more about high moral and sometimes highly scripted drama than legal justice and transforming the heart and soul of white people.
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