| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement. By David Chalmers. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. viii, 207 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-7425-2310-1.)
Amid the burgeoning literature on the American civil rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) remains a weakly understood phenomenon. This particular silence seems puzzling, as that era's Klan was large and active, and it was a key player at a number of events that shaped the trajectory of contemporary race relations. To a surprising extent, historians' insight into these militant defenders of the segregationist status quo comes indirectly, through studies of civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).	1
The work of David Chalmers has long been an exception to this general trend. For several decades, his seminal Hooded Americanism (1965) has been the central source for understanding the civil rights–era Klan. Chalmers's latest book, Backfire, covers similar ground and is important in at least two respects. First, its chief concern, succinctly summarized in the book's subtitle, places the Klan squarely at the center of the struggle to end Jim Crow–style segregation. In their attempts to drive the movement "out of the streets of the South," Chalmers argues, the Klan instead "called forth a new resolution of courage and activity among the young and prompted the reluctant involvement of the Kennedy administration and the national government" (p. 3).	. . .

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