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It was precisely that cross-racial attraction--and Cole's languid sexuality--that so enraged the guardians of Jim Crow in postwar Dixie. By 1956, the laws and customs that had been inviolate since the Reconstruction era were suddenly threatened by Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Cole understood that when certain Southern white men "looked at me, they saw the Supreme Court and the NAACP."

The thugs who attacked Cole were members of the North Alabama White Citizens' Council, a kind of civilian auxiliary to the Ku Klux Klan--like the KKK but without the white sheets or burning crosses--what today would be called a domestic terrorist group. Its executive secretary was a charismatic race-baiter named Asa Carter. Though lunatic, Carter was not fringe. He would go on to become an advisor to and speechwriter for Alabama governor George Wallace, penning the immortal phrase Wallace bellowed at his inaugural address in 1963: "Segregation now ... segregation tomorrow ... segregation forever!"

In 1973, proving there are indeed second acts in American life, Carter left Alabama, assumed the alias of Forrest Carter, and remade himself as a successful novelist. He was the author of the source novel for Clint Eastwood's revenge western The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and the fake Indian memoir The Education of Little Tree, published in 1976, a staple of Native American studies courses until the true identity of the author was revealed in 1991. Carter's story is told in The Reconstruction of Asa Carter (2010), a fascinating documentary by Marco Ricci, Douglas Newman, and Laura Browder.

Carter was not part of the gang that assaulted Cole, but he was with them in spirit. He explained that he and his henchmen had attended the Cole concert as part of a study of the mongrel genres of "be-bop and rock and roll music." The attack, Carter shrugged, was really no big deal. "I feel this has all been played out of proportion," he told the Birmingham Post-Herald. "It's nothing more than a fellow got mad and took a swing at a Negro." The copyeditor doubtless cleaned up Carter's actual word choice.

Yet the North Alabama White Citizens' Council was not alone in opposing Cole's presence on the stage in Birmingham. The NAACP and the black press also believed the Jim Crow South was no place for a black entertainer. To comply with local segregation laws by mounting separate shows for black and white audiences or placing black and white audiences in different sections of the venue, with blacks typically relegated to the balcony, only normalized the racist protocols. Performers with biracial appeal faced a tough choice: forgo lucrative Southern gigs or bow before Jim Crow.

Cole decided that, on balance, going South was better than staying away.

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