The white population of the 11 States of the Old Confederacy in 1960 was somewhere around 40 million people. One of them was Bull Connor. Most of them were not Klansmen or Klanswomen.
But you know that already.
The "civil rights movement" was led by Christian ministers and their pleadings had an overtly Christian and Biblical perspective.
But you know that already, too.
My argument is that IF the appeals of the "civil rights movement" had not had an overtly Christian outward appearance, resistance to it would not have evaporated so quickly. Which it did.
But you were referring to the nature of the opponents of the civil rights movement. I wouldn’t characterize active opponents that way. People who were neutral, acquiescent to Jim Crow as the way things had always been, but not prone to think much of it, were not opponents per se. Bull was. So were the aforementioned klansmen, of whatever percentage of the population they comprised at the time. Their biggest chapter now, I remember hearing, is in Long Island. The South has outgrown them, in part thanks to the civil disobedience movement, as amplified by TV, and in part thanks to the economic development that followed.
Let me ramble a bit off topic, because I have to get this down before I forget it. Liberals imagine that the racial paradigm remains the same as in 1960, and cannot imagine Christianity as having any positive influence anywhere. But Coleridge says “if you do not understand a man’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.” If a factory moves down to Mexico, both blacks and whites are laid off with no prospects other than rotting on the dole, so they become allies, rather than competitors for crap jobs. Thus, you have the new paradigm that liberals remain ignorant of, which animates all of their erroneous assumptions about the South and southerners and Trump. I’m onto something, I think.
Enough rambling. The fit has left me. I think we do not fundamentally disagree. I misunderstood your meaning and stand corrected.