In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Soon after—while the political demise of U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy unfolded—northern anti-Communists looked to the South as a promising new territory in which they could expand their support base and continue their cause. In response, southern segregationists embraced the assistance rendered by these Yankee collaborators, and in the years to come, southerners utilized the “northern messiahs” in executing a massive resistance to the Supreme Court’s desegregation decrees and the civil rights movement in general.