of blacks who had moved north, the federal government began once again to
take an interest in the fate of black citizens.

Once again,
this meant, to white southerners, the terrifying prospect of black rage let
loose. In the 1950s reporters who went
south to report on civil rights issues heard the same line from whites again
and again: that they didn’t have any trouble with “our Negroes,” it was just
the outside agitators from the North who were causing the trouble.That
is why it was in 1962 that the Confederate flag first began flying over the
capitol in Columbia, South Carolina, and why it was then that it was revived in
other states.Once again the Yankees
were threatening to unleash black rage upon white southerners, and symbols of
resistance had to be revived.And suddenly, in the 1960s, when thecivil
rights movement reached its climax, most white southerners once again forgot
every other issue, quit the Democratic Party en masse, and became the backbone
of the Republican coalition.By the
1970s, a new rhetorical trick had emerged to conceal what was happening.Since it had become impossible openly to
defend racism or the “southern way of life” (segregation), some new buzzword
was needed around which southern whites could rally.Fundamentalist Christianity provided it, and
“Christian values” became the glue that held southern whites together.It had become unfashionable to vote in favor
of racism, but who could vote against Christianity?(This morning, Charles Blow of the New York Times noted that a couple of
Fox News commentators actually tried to spin Dylan Roof’s crime as an attack on
Christianity—even though Roof is a member of a Lutheran Church.)Dylann Rooff was inspired by