ATTACK ON TERROR: The FBI Against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi

by Don Whitehead ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1970

Don Whitehead, author of The FBI Story and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, sets the FBI at the center of another story, the four-year underground struggle to smash the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi that was touched off in the summer of 1964 by the murder of the three civil rights workers, Chancy, Schwerner, and Goodman. Throughout the lengthy investigation of that crime and other incidents of arson, beating, and murder that followed, Whitehead's FBI plays the sensitive pivotal role in the federal government's confrontation with the local Mississippi authorities, standing up to KKK terrorism but impressing the hostile townspeople with their integrity, a stabilizing force in an explosive situation. The account commences with the launching in late June 1964 of the COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) civil rights drive to organize Mississippi's black communities and register voters, perceived by Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers of the KKK's White Knights as ""the nigger-communist invasion of Mississippi. . . the enemy's final push for victory. . . which may well determine the fate of Christian civilization for centuries to come."" In depicting the course of events leading to the triple murder, the conviction three-and-a-half years later of Imperial Wizard Bowers and six confederates (their final appeal to the Supreme Court was rebuffed in February 1970), and ""the end of the Ku Klux Klan's power-through-terror in Mississippi,"" Whitehead recreates Klan meetings, FBI conferences, and government consultations with a ""you were there"" intensity of detail. (Much of the information about Klan goings-on at the time was derived from highly-placed, conscience-stricken informants cultivated by the FBI.) At the end of the story, Whitehead indulges in a little editorializing and some facile reverse-side-of-the-coin comparisons between White Supremacy and Black Power, between ""the Negro-hating Klans of the South and the white-hating Black Panthers of the North,"" but for the most part this is a taut, effective documentary.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Funk & Wagnalls

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION