Against organized countermobilization and hostile southern white public opinion, how were local civil rights struggles capable of winning concessions? This perspective draws attention to the relative magnitude of disruption and concession costs for both targets and third parties. As the previous chapter demonstrated, the combination of high concession costs and low disruption costs for certain interests prompted them to react with fierce countermobilization. However, I suggest that, for most southern whites, the economic or political costs associated with acceding to civil rights demands were low, and therefore that Jim Crow institutions were far more vulnerable than might be assumed based on southern public opinion alone, an “imposing but hollow structure” as civil rights stalwart Bayard Rustin averred. Of course, the vast preponderance of southern whites undoubtedly preferred segregation, but relatively few derived significant benefits from segregated public accommodations, public schools, or black disfranchisement. Though intimidation and violence pervaded segregationist strongholds in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, overall countermobilization against the civil rights movement was often anemic. Although the Citizens' Council and Ku Klux Klan (KKK) beckoned white southerners to rise up in rebellion against the challenge to the southern racial order, few rallied to these clarion calls for resistance. Whites might scuffle with sit-in protesters at a lunch counter, and the imminent integration of a local public school sometimes prompted a flurry of countermobilization; however, in most localities, sustained, broad-based organization against the general civil rights thrust failed to develop.