Soft bigotry and indifference were what helped Jim Crow survive. Wallace was voted for by millions of poor and middle-class Southerners, who went to school, read the paper, perhaps had a black servant and treated them courteously, and then voted for Wallace. Only a tiny minority of Southerners were picketing at the schoolhouse door. Passive racism is the most common kind.
Yup. It's the passive racism that basically kneecapped the Civil Rights Movement when it tried to tackle things in Northern cities (Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, NYC, etc.).
That's actually the part of the Civil Rights Movement people tend to ignore--the Northern Theater. The South was basically a morality play; as has been mentioned, people didn't much like seeing policemen attacking protestors with dogs and firehoses or reading about the Klan klowning around and killing Northern teens and black Sunday Schoolers and was often cast as, "Let them vote and let them be your classmates."
Yet in 1964, you have black ministers frankly saying that the crisis of black housing in Northern cities was far greater than that affecting the voting rights of Southern blacks (who had higher employment and homeowner rates than their cousins across the Mason-Dixon.) The great irony is that overt monstrosity of Jim Crow was far easier to defeat (and face) than the realities of housing covenants, slums, city machines, and police-riots in Northern cities that saw the "race problem" as a strictly Southern one in an ugly case of passive neo-sectionalism.