In this richly detailed study, sociologist David Cunningham of Brandeis University provides a thorough look inside the modern civil rights-era KKK in North Carolina. The book is written in a lively and accessible style and is based on a solid array of archival sources and personal interviews, including with Klan leaders and members.

The paradox that makes the book interesting is that the Klan – in the form of Imperial Wizard Bobby Shelton's dominant United Klans of America (UKA) – flourished most in the relatively progressive southern state of North Carolina. In fact, during the classic civil rights period that Cunningham adheres to (1954–68), North Carolina had the largest UKA membership of any state – larger in fact than that of the rest of the southern states put together.

The answer to this puzzle (why did the Klan flourish more strongly in an Upper South State with a progressive reputation?) is that the group apparently enjoyed more success organizing in states and sections where southern whites perceived moderate accommodation to civil rights from political elites to be the largest threat to the continuing dominance of white supremacy. The author maintains that areas where more obvious and vicious hostility to the federal government and its civil rights initiatives from state and local players was not present became hotbeds for Klan organization as a weapon and vehicle to fight racial integration. As Cunningham puts it, the “pronounced moderation of North Carolina's top elected officials – in particular the unwillingness to defy federal civil rights mandates – confined harder line segregationist positions to extremist groups like the KKK, broadening the appeal of the klan” (215–16).

This had obvious political repercussions as civil rights and the federal government were firmly conflated and ensconced in the southern white mind with the Democratic national party of Lyndon Johnson, John and Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and others. Cunningham concludes bluntly that his study of the Carolina Klan is important for several reasons, one of them being that successful Klan organizing strength and activity “shaped political orientations and augured remarkable shifts in electoral politics in the 1970s, in particular the ascendance of a new and powerful wave of conservatism that heralded the South's transition to the Republican Party … [T]he group's influence endures in lasting … ways, including … reinforc[ing], consolidat[ing], and intensif[ying]” Klan views “in the voting booth” (215, 219, 223). This conclusion echoes the recent work of sociologist Rory McVeigh and earlier historical work that emphasized the importance of continuity between allegedly discrete incarnations of the Klan and the power of “neo-Kluxism” and a persistent “Ku Kluxism” ethos for southern partisan realignment to the GOP. McVeigh, as Cunningham appreciates, has recently demonstrated that Klan strength – not only in the South's rural Black Belt but also in its allegedly more progressive “Sunbelt” communities – significantly bolstered modern Republican ascendancy in North Carolina and the South generally – leading to real electoral gains for Richard Nixon, Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan, and other Republicans.

In fact, the least successful part of the book comes when Cunningham attempts to walk an ill-advised historiographical tightrope that – despite its increasing commonality, convenience, and distressingly uncritical and growing acceptance among scholars – is still profoundly misconstrued. That is the misleadingly neat and artificial dichotomy between what has been an ill-designed and overstated attempt to construct a “suburban school” on a par with or above what is now commonly derided as the “backlash theory” – or, in this study, between “Sunbelt” scholars arguing against the notion of southern exceptionalism, distinctiveness, and the primacy of racial concerns in southern political realignment to the GOP versus what Cunningham refers to as a “Southern Strategy.” Whatever the labels – Sunbelt versus Southern Strategy, suburban versus white backlash – the dichotomy is ill-formed, misleading, and more conducive to the rehabilitation strategy of the modern GOP on civil rights and race issues hatched in right-wing think tanks than to productive scholarly inquiry. Most closely associated with the work of historians Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino – and political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston – the suburban school often confuses results for causes, attempts to distinguish purely “economic” and “suburban” issues from racial ones, and, unsurprisingly, leads to frequent illogic and a tendency to oxymoron.

Cunningham's attempt to walk a tightrope between what he perceives as two equally valid camps leads him down the rabbit hole to talk about such inanities as “a color-blind discourse of home-ownership and access to quality education,” something called “color-blind racial entitlement,” and allegedly color-blind appeals to “residential and school integration” (221, 223). This is not to mention the irony of attempting to prove the efficacy of the Sunbelt position by quoting Richard Nixon (perhaps the ultimate exponent of the “Southern Strategy”) when he used rhetorical and sophistic code to appeal to southern white segregationist sentiments, proclaiming, “So-called southern issues were the same here [in North Carolina] as they are in America” (222). To his credit, Cunningham recovers enough to realize that rejecting the notion of southern exceptionalism “risks underestimating the role played by distinctly southern segregationist groups like the UKA” in buttressing “Republican responsiveness to evolving regional dynamics” (222).

Thankfully, such lapses are few in this book, and may be forgiven for Cunningham, a sociologist, more readily than for historians of the South and race relations – who should be better able to distinguish historical reality, sentiment, and ideology from mere rhetoric, code, and ex post facto and politically inspired sugar coating.