but faced with growing opposition to these policies in its own ranks. ^* The revolt against "McGovernism," which eventually led to wholesale defections and to the rise of Reagan's new right, had its origins in the events of the late sixties. The ghetto riots, the rise of black power, the collapse of nonviolent agitation for equal enforcement of the laws, and the antiwar movement—in which King came to play a leading part, against the wishes of most of his advisers—polarized the country and generated a "backlash" not only against civil rights but against liberalism in general.

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Note again the contrast with the South, where the civil rights movement achieved a notable improvement in race relations, in the face of determined opposition that for a long time seemed almost insurmountable. The combination of militant confrontation and moral self-discipline gave black people courage and self-respect, led many Southern whites to acknowledge the justice of their cause, forced the hand of national politicians like Kennedy and Johnson, and created a public consensus in favor of impartial law enforcement. By the summer of 1963, public opinion polls showed large majorities, according to Harvard Sitkoff, "in favor of laws to guarantee blacks voting rights, job opportunities, good housing, and desegregated schools and public accommodations." Under the weight of federal legislation, backed up by solid public support, segregation gave way, together with the system of disfranchisement that had kept blacks politically powerless ever since the I890s. By 1970, two-thirds of Southern blacks had registered to vote. By 1980, there were 2,500 elected black officials in the South. Mississippi, the last bastion of resistance to the new order, now had more black officeholders than any other state in the Union. Even George Wallace, as Sitkoff points out, "appointed blacks to high state positions, crowned a black homecoming queen at the very university he had once sworn to deny to black students, and in 1979 sat on the podium applauding the inaugural remarks of Birmingham's first black mayor." Only sixteen years earlier, Wallace had proclaimed the slogan of the unreconstructed South: "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" David Lewis, who dismissed the gains of the civil rights movement as largely symbolic in his biography of King, published in 1970, recanted his earlier judgment—a "judgment without benefit of perspective"—in a postscript written in 1978. "Exemplary stories about the New South—the South of Martin King and Jimmy Carter—abound. Mine recounts a twoday visit to Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1974, as guest lecturer at South Carolina State College, site of the 1968 deaths of three black students gunned down by local police during a campus protest. [With] its bi-racial prosperity and absence of racial friction, Orangeburg might have been Xenia, Ohio. Faculty and students are integrated ; and where the three students fell, a building stands, constructed with state funds and bearing a plaque commemorating their deaths. My realization of the extraordinary changes wrought by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, even in communities where fear and violence had ruled six years before, was startling."

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