The South: At Summer's End

Last spring the rest of the U.S. settled back to watch the South suffer: if the civil rights bill failed to pass in Congress, people reasoned, frustrated Negroes certainly would step up their revolution; if it did pass, Southern whites certainly would resist every effort to test the new law. Either way, violence would spread. Yet, as it turned out at summer's end, it was the North that had been racked by riots. And — with the ignoble exceptions of Alabama and Mississippi — the South's racial summer added up to a surprising...