key challenge back then was to deal tactically and tactfully with the mainstream conservative constituency of white voters in the Democratic Party primary—coalitional blacks were just coming of age in the normal political process, and Republicans were no more than a vocal nuisance. Then, in the 1980s, it became possible for stealth leaders to pursue moderate politics more aggressively and successfully. However, these positive, evolving developments simultaneously sowed the seeds of decline for such leadership in the 1990s. As time passed, the large, conservative, white constituency began splitting off and casting its votes elsewhere; blacks became more politically mature, independent, and assertive; and Republicans became more powerful in exposing and defeating stealthy leaders in the general election. Certainly, too, enhanced media coverage and advances in campaigning injected powerful new elements of transparency and volatility into the process, making quiet biracial maneuvering less feasible and effective.
Browder notes, for example, that things changed dramatically between his entry into the political arena in 1982 and his exit in 1996:
When I first ran for office and served in the Alabama legislature, it was relatively easy to please my majority-white constituents, keep my black friends satisfied, and hold the Republicans at bay. But in my last campaign, for the U.S. Senate, nobody was very happy. I know that I changed some over the course of my career, and there’s a big difference between the Alabama House and the U.S. Senate. But much of this was due to the new racial order that made “stealthy” politicking impossible.
The shift from old-style Southern politics to new-order Southern politics undermined a fundamental quality and asset—stealthness—of biracial politics. Thereafter, stealth leaders found their course more demanding and conflicted, and they became increasingly irrelevant in Southern politics. They had helped achieve substantial transformation stealthily, and much more remained to be done; but most of them realized, in appropriate quietness and practicality, that the future belonged to new leaders with different visions and styles in an altered environment of Southern democracy. Stealth leadership and politics were essentially over, in unremarked dissipation, as a new Southern political order signaled the end of stealth reconstruction.
To summarize this part of the theoretical discussion, we believe that the consequence of collective stealth efforts represents an important, distinct, supplementary movement of reconstructive and progressive evolution. Arguably, stealth leaders accomplished Southern change in a way and to an extent that was beyond the reach of federal officials, laws, and troops. While righteous souls and racial ogres dominate the pages of history books, the stealthy reconstructionists helped bring black voters into Southern elections, helped end racist control of the Southern political establishment, helped moderate Southern governance, and, in a roundabout way, helped nudge the South toward a real two-party system.
In offering our proposition, we realize that this thesis asks the reader to reconsider decades of unquestioned truisms about Southern politics and history. Frankly, any honest depiction of the South’s racial past—as we will attempt in the next few pages—poses formidable, legitimate questions regarding our high notions of stealth service.
Stealth Leaders and the Race Game of Southern History
In some ways, the South can claim to be the original, intellectual heart of the “Great Experiment” of American democracy. Even today, many Southerners pride themselves as America’s real and true patriots. However, from the beginning the South steered its own regional course, a distinct culture of white supremacy in an America that at least preached idealistic principles of equality. Historically, the white leaders and people of this region have engaged in a race game of perverse politics designed to provide themselves the blessings of democracy while oppressing, exploiting, and discriminating against their fellow human beings of African origin and heritage. Gaming the system for racial advantage was not the singular, continuous, consuming passion for most Southerners, but slavery warped the Southern political system from the start and race forever lurked in the background and foreground of Southern political life.
The unsavory realities of Southern politics derive from that accursed aspect of the American story. In embracing slavery, this part of the New World launched long-term, systemic developments that would confound its better nature and democratic destiny. The South pursued its dark regional interests in fateful arrangements—and perhaps implicit collusion—with national politicians eager to promote their nationalistic dreams. During the Constitutional period, there was contentious debate over slavery, but the Southern states convinced the founding fathers to accommodate the regional slave economy as part of their entry into the new nation. Slavery endured through decades of fitful argument—adamantly and morally defended on the floor of Congress by John C. Calhoun as “the peculiar institution of the South.”[26] Then, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, white Southerners negotiated an opportunistic new deal with national Democrats that excluded freed blacks from the political process as long as the South delivered total electoral support to the national party in Washington. Even after the Civil War and Reconstruction, states throughout the region continued Old South ways by legally disenfranchising blacks. As Alabama’s constitutional convention president said in 1901, “It is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this state.”[27] Regional white rule continued until the civil rights era, when the national government finally eliminated official sanction of discrimination.
Unfortunately then, throughout most of its history, the South’s leadership and “peculiar” political system have revolved around the unsavory realities of white supremacy and racial segregation. While Southern leaders historically pursued broad issues of national and local import, race usually lurked in the background and routinely intruded into conventional politics.
Within this racial context, we employ the terms “stealth leadership” and “stealth politics” to refer to individual leaders quietly performing biracial political roles for generally positive purposes, and “stealth reconstruction” is an incremental, collective, fundamental victory of civic progress over cynical politics in the broader race game of Southern history.
However, the stealth thesis and terminology can conjure mixed images of politicians and black-white relations; indeed, the very word that we use—“stealth”—evokes shadowy connotations from Southern politics, past and present. Our hypothetical version of stealth leadership is positive, but our designated stealth leaders were practical politicians who politicked in the real world. And in the real world of Southern politics, misdirected stealthness could just as well entail deception, fraud, and abuse of the public trust. And quiet, practical politics, when pursued for unvirtuous purposes, when exacerbated with financial considerations, and when enveloped in an environment of heated, ingrained societal division, could powerfully warp the electoral process and corrode responsive, responsible government.
So there’s no denying that our stealth leaders were ungracefully mired—either in deed or through association or by appearance—in the racial politics of Southern history. We generalize that most Southern leaders—white and black—have played the game of racial politics in some manner and to some degree. Our stealth leaders, awkwardly mired in that game, had to navigate a difficult, politically conflicted course during the era under study. Few ever talked about it, and it’s still not a popular subject of conversation. But the routine pursuit of power, policies, and other political goodies in this region during those times often involved racial considerations. We presume that most of the practitioners did some specific things that they would prefer history not record; that they allied with some people who did unseemly things as a matter of general practice; and that they hung around a political house of ill-repute.
The crucial difference between traditional Southern officials and our designated stealth leaders is that, routine pursuits and career interests aside, (a) traditional politicians readily and openly played the game for racial advantage within a historical environment of white supremacy and segregation, while (b) stealth politicians
