bold leadership and earthy populism were vital to important civil rights changes in the South), the wave of “New South” officials such as Georgian Jimmy Carter and Arkansan Bill Clinton (who, along with numerous state executives openly championed social change against the conservative current of their white constituents), and confrontational activists such as South Carolinian Jesse Jackson (and many others who took to the streets in their fight against racial discrimination). These leaders generally played on the stage of big issues, to a national audience, and with substantial media celebrity; their service is inappropriate for consideration because it is impossible to dissect their public/private lives in a manner meaningful to our analysis.
Finally, we exclude those Southern politicians who have famously wandered a political maze of racist politics, convenient conversions, and electoral success. Their careers are interesting and sometimes sympathetic and sincere (take the latter years of George Wallace, for example), but we are interested in leaders who fairly consistently pursued the positive politics and philosophy of stealthy biracial leadership.
The ranks of leaders within the scope of our stealth thesis include some prominent players, but we are interested mainly in their private leadership and political style away from the glare of the media, beyond the gilding reach of their public relations machinations. More specifically, we think that reconstructive action likely took place inside their political campaigns and behind closed doors of their public offices, where they employed their personalities, skills, and resources on behalf of their careers and public service, where self-interest, noble principle, and raucous exchange translated into practical politics and moderate/progressive governance.
The Tricky Essence Of Stealth Politics
Earlier, we pitched stealth leadership and politics, simply and briefly, as a calculated, constructive mixture of quietness and endeavor regarding racial challenges and changes of that period. The essence of that mixture was a representational style in which the public official projected a broadly popular and effective public image on conventional, communitarian issues, thus allowing flexibility in dealing constructively with contentious racial issues in a society historically beset with racial problems. Stealth leaders, working with allies in the new black constituency, were able to move Southern politics in relatively progressive directions of responsive service and moderate policy.
The complex and difficult work of these leaders required that they balance their progressive inclinations with the practicalities of Southern political life. Besides struggling with their own personal angst, these key officials and activists often had to deal with the demands of a stubbornly conservative white majority and an increasingly active and liberal black minority in a bitterly polarized or potentially polarizing environment.
Consequently, most of these politicians charted a centrist policy course, diverse relationships, and carefully selected activities in order to deal with their racial problems.
It is also worth noting the varying approaches among our stealth leaders. Some conducted “stealth by design,” i.e., discreet, separate activities structured so as to solicit minority support without fanning fires of resentment among the majority. For example, they sometimes invited and accompanied national black leaders to local black events; but they didn’t put out press releases or hold news conferences about these activities. Others engaged in biracial pursuits without such deftly calculated motives and plans, perhaps inadvertently, unintentionally, simply by chance—or what might be called “stealth by coincidence.” They proceeded on a quiet, practical course with moderated message; and they treated black and white in a sincere manner that mitigated their biracial politicking.
It does not make much sense, of course, to make too big a deal out of the difference between “designed stealth” and “coincidental stealth.” These are simply specific constructs that help us comprehend the broader, theoretical concept of stealth politics; it may be that this distinction is more a matter of personal self-definition than real-world consequence. Every stealth politician was an individualized combination of purposefulness and inadvertence, even without conceptualizing such stylistic considerations. The important thing is that all of these leaders were breaking with the central tradition of Southern history, and they must have understood the value of “quiet” and “practical” politics as they traveled their forward course in “de facto stealthness,” without outward pandering to either of their conflicted racial constituencies. For example, adept stealth politicians—without a lot of articulated theorizing—went to black churches on Sunday and white civic clubs throughout the week, keeping their conversations appropriate for each place; in their public demeanor, they dealt with both majority and minority issues in acceptable, communitarian manner.
As we make clear throughout, the purpose here is not to sanctify stealth leaders; they were politicians of mixed personalities, motives, and actions. Our purpose is to emphasize the difficult essence of stealth politics and the challenge of stealth leadership. Stealthy practitioners were aware that they had to craft a biracial majority for electoral victory. Then, after getting elected, they had to attempt an equally daunting assignment, pursuing moderate to progressive public service, being responsive to all citizens, without unraveling their tenuous and volatile constituency. It was a tricky assignment; that is what politics is about, whether in Selma or San Francisco. The difference back then was that Southern politicking labored under a heavy and perverse hand of black-white history.
Obviously, stealth politics defied moral posturing and dramatic public coordination, and it failed then and now to elicit interest among national media and professional scholars. But this different politicking helped incorporate and implement the usually cited forces of Southern change during the past half-century.
The Mixed Civic Nature of Stealth Reconstruction
As has been noted, this is not a thesis of public magnificence like the heroic civil rights movement.
For the most part, the new breed of Southern political leadership was interested in conventional issues such as national defense, education, agriculture, and their own careers; their stealth politics has to be understood as a civic endeavor within the primacy of broader concerns.
It would be quite a stretch to champion these leaders and their work as heroic or revolutionary—they were, after all, practical political people. There was no common soul or grand collective purpose among our politicians, just their individual political personalities and everyday operations based on a mixture of selfish and unselfish character. Few had been on the front lines or in the march for equality in their areas and states; many nurtured sentiment, but no burning passion, for the heroic drama; most did not enter public life until the 1970s, and when they did, it was not for reasons of racial justice. We’ll not claim for them a place among the icons of the civil rights movement. Instead, we characterize them simply as “stealth politicians” who, variously motivated, helped reconstruct Southern politics.
However, we do view stealthy biracial leadership and politics as a broad civic phenomenon that went beyond the personalized motives and actions of crass politicians. While some leaders contributed to this movement in individualized pursuit of individualized objectives, many others did so for philosophical and purposive reasons related to American democracy. They were as a group relatively progressive Southerners; so we prefer to envision stealth politics as an incremental, conflicted mixture—a purposeful/inadvertent, public/private, personal/interpersonal dynamic—and as an overall positive process whereby some leaders and activists really made things better in everyday life for most Southerners, who were caught in the black-white crossfire of their region’s historical dilemma.
The Inevitable Demise of Stealth Leadership
Ironically, the racial progress of the past several decades wrought the inevitable demise of stealth leadership in the South. These leaders were transformational but transient; in a way, they may have fallen victims of their own success in helping change Southern politics.
In
