The South Strikes Back

Hodding Carter III is an American journalist and politician. He is professor emeritus of public policy at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Carter worked for eighteen years as a reporter and editor for the Delta Democrat-Times of Greenville, Mississippi, owned by his father. Stephanie R. Rolph is associate professor of history at Millsaps College. She is author of Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954-1989.

It is startling how the themes, actions, and political climate Carter described in the mid to late 1950s reflect the political environment in current day Mississippi and the US. . . . The reissued work with an extensive introduction is noteworthy and recommended for academic and public libraries with an interest in the history of civil rights in Mississippi.--Joyce M. Shaw "Mississippi Libraries" Hodding Carter III dispassionately examines here the growth and structure of the white Citizens' Council. . . . He traces the movement through its role in state politics, . . . its pressures directed at the [Black community], and its effects on the white community. Though demonstrating that the Council . . . has been responsible for whatever success massive resistance toward integration has had in the South, he sees its eventual destruction in the fact that it is essentially a negative movement, dependent on the status quo. A brief, factual, calmly reasoned book.-- "Kirkus" This is one of the most depressing, yet important, books that this reviewer has read in many years; for it is an analytical account of the angry, unreconstructed revolt of conservative southerners in Mississippi against the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision of 1954. . . . Carter's book is must reading for all who would understand one of this nation's most pressing problems.-- "Oakland Tribune"