charms—as a perverse, contorted regional political subculture. “Southern politics” usually meant “white Southern politics” and African Americans were nonexistent in most discussions. Mainstream analysis of the time fretted about whether whites could ever be persuaded to accept Negro participation in governance (or how Negroes could force themselves into the democratic process); few could have foreseen the unlikely phenomenon that we now suggest as a realistic course for addressing the Southern rendition of an American dilemma.
In this chapter, we will discuss the South’s stubborn systemic racial problems and changing politics as historical prelude to our hypothetical stealth transformation.[1]
Systemic Problems of Leadership, Race, and Poverty
According to V. O. Key Jr.—a native Texan and perhaps the most insightful analyst of Southern politics at mid-twentieth century—the fundamental flaw of Southern history was a systemic failure of Southern political parties and leadership to address its conjoined problems of race and poverty. As he so famously articulated the thesis in Southern Politics in State and Nation:
When all the exceptions are considered, when all the justifications are made, and when all the invidious comparisons are drawn, those of the South and those who love the South are left with the cold, hard fact that the South as a whole has developed no system or practice of political organization and leadership adequate to cope with its problems.[2]
W. J. Cash, parallel with Key in the anthology of Southern historiography, had pitched similar, more colorful ideas about Southern politics in The Mind of the South. The North Carolinian particularly targeted the racist one-partyism of his native region:
The world knows the story of the Democratic Party in the South; how, once violence had opened the way to political action, this party became the institutionalized incarnation of the will to White Supremacy. How, indeed, it ceased to be a party in the South and became the party of the South, a kind of confraternity having in its keeping the whole corpus of Southern loyalties, and so irresistibly commanding the allegiance of faithful whites that to doubt it, to question it in any detail was ipso facto to stand branded as a renegade to race, to country, to God, and to Southern Womanhood.[3]
Key accurately stated, at the dawn of the heroic drama, a daunting challenge for Southern political leaders:
Obviously, the conversion of the South into a democracy in the sense that the mass of people vote and have a hand in their governance poses one of the most staggering tasks for statesmanship in the western world. The suffrage problems of the South can claim a closer kinship with those of India, of South Africa, or of the Dutch East Indies than with those of, say, Minnesota. Political leadership in the State of New York or California or Ohio simmers down to matters of the rankest simplicity alongside those that must be dealt with in Georgia or Mississippi or Alabama.[4]
As events would demonstrate, the systemic problems of leadership and race (overlapped and exacerbated by poverty) would inflict harsh damage throughout this region for decades to come.
An Intractable Divide Between Whites and Blacks
Even as the civil rights movement shifted into full swing, expert analysts sometimes despaired of success because of the South’s intractable segregation and dysfunctional leadership. Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, after extensively and statistically portraying both sides of the region’s populace in Negroes and the New Southern Politics, worried about the future of Southern democracy. They even referenced the possibility of a racial holocaust:
In the South today the white leader who contemplates a tentative step toward accommodating Negro demands can expect to be labeled a “nigger-lover”; the Negro who cooperates with white leaders can expect to be labeled an “Uncle Tom.” Indeed, we seriously wonder whether a viable political system in the South will be possible, granted the extreme polarization of opinion, without one race being dominated by the other.[5]
Although civil rights leaders, grassroots demonstrators, and the federal government scored effective assaults on the Southern way of life, political developments during those times clearly reflected a worsening racial situation and suggested dismal prospects for bringing blacks and whites together.
In their retrospective look at Southern politics and society of the late 1960s, Earl Black and Merle Black articulated the situation thusly:
The changing civil rights agenda, widespread white opposition to significant reforms concerning the intermediate color line, and the new black militancy had profound consequences for the major civil rights organizations . . .
Just as black Southerners were beginning to participate in electoral politics in significant numbers, prospects appeared remote for successful biracial coalitions built upon issues of central concern to blacks. In no Southern state were there enough white allies to support a winning liberal politics, much less a radical politics.[6]
Indeed, the civil rights movement played out the 1950s and 1960s as a protracted civil war between advancing blacks and retrenching whites (with most leaders taking sides with their core constituencies), rather than a successful resolution of the South’s historical dilemma; there was very little hope for meaningfully reconstructing the Southern political system.
Ironically, as the 1960s drew to a close, despite the United States government’s having weighed in with the Brown decision, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the National Guard, and federal registrars/pollwatchers, the national environment for black causes had definitely declined and there was little hope for a new brand of Southern leadership.
In a recounting of that era, Richard K. Scher systematically listed the problems of the declining movement:
The civil rights movement continued after Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It continues to this day. But after 1965, it was never quite the same again, for a number of reasons.
In the first place, it was a victim of its own success . . . Next the focus of the civil rights movement shifted . . . Vietnam and its accompanying turmoil began to take over the nation’s headlines . . . Related to these concerns was the growing white backlash . . . Finally, the civil rights movement itself became irrevocably split . . . As a result, the direction of the civil rights movement because confused, diffused, uncertain.[7]
As for the possibility of biracial leadership, Scher notes that “some former allies of the movement joined the increasingly shrill black militants, while others became disenchanted and felt that the movement neither wanted nor deserved white support. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was almost impossible to tell what civil rights leaders, and the black community—Southern and otherwise—really wanted.”[8]
Evidenced Impracticality of Biracial Politics and Progress
Despite historical reality, some white Southern leaders eagerly and openly sought to expand the heroic drama with biracial politics in the 1960s—and the results were disastrous.
Alabama provided a classic example of such ill-fated endeavor in . As we discussed in the previous chapter, Governor George Wallace was constitutionally limited to one term, so he ran his wife, Lurleen, for governor in 1966. Nine men (including two former governors, a former congressman, and a sitting attorney general) also lined up to challenge for the top job in the Heart
