Furthermore, some whites strove to mitigate reactionary politics, and others contributed as forces of progressive change during the heated 1950s and 1960s. David Chappell has highlighted this atypical white leadership in his retrospective study of racial struggles in Montgomery, Tallahassee, Little Rock, and Albany. He wrote in Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement:
Growing up during the 1960s in what must have been a typical northern white liberal family, I had an image of the white South as one big lynch mob waiting to happen. To me Bull Connor and Sheriff Clark represented the typical, not the exceptional, Southerner. Through the mass media, northern liberals reassured themselves that vicious hatreds and prejudices were vestiges of the Old South, that Dixie remained underdeveloped in the twentieth century, clinging with recalcitrant desperation to outmoded notions. We could not see that Bull Connor represented only one end of a spectrum of Southern white opinion, that there were quieter but equally representative voices at the other end. Nor could we see the vast middle, which was uncertain which way it was being led. Seeing these complexities would make the South, which was a synonym for racial trouble, too much like our own complex reality. Ignoring them was essential to the notion that racism was somebody else’s problem.[61]
According to Chappell, black veterans of the Southern movement (including Coretta King, Charles Gomillion, Ralph Abernathy, Georgia Gilmore, Johnnie Carr, John Lewis, and Hosea Williams) told him that there were white people on their side in most Southern communities of those times. He quoted Andrew Young as saying, “If it hadn’t been for the kind of white Southerners you are talking about, the South today would look like Beirut looks today.”[62]
Of course, many of us knew all along, or at least suspected, that the early works consisted of overdrawn generalizations; now we have contemporary research and a historical picture that differ substantially from the earlier analyses. White Southerners were not nearly as monolithically and hardcore racist as the mainstream literature suggested; in the other camp, as heated confrontations subsided, some were ready to change their ways and the course of Southern history.
Subtle Dynamics of Southern Black Politics
In addition to revising our views about white Southerners of that era, we need to appreciate subtle strategic dynamics among blacks as they charted their political course toward equal rights.
As we have noted elsewhere, various national factors negatively impacted the movement, and the heroic drama declined during the late 1960s; part of that apparent decline probably was a necessary course adjustment from cosmic movement to more routine political concerns at the community level. Dr. King himself proclaimed in his final SCLC speech (1967) and book (1967) that the national civil rights movement would have to start organizing itself for political action in a thousand different places, mastering the art of political alliances, and taking part in the smoke-filled rooms where debating and bargaining proceed.
Decades later, Stanford historian and King papers editor Clayborne Carson emphasized that same point about the importance of real-world politics to the movement:
To learn from this history, however, we must begin to understand the civil rights movement not as moralistic melodrama but as politics. Southern whites were not monolithic and intransigent but divided in ways that are similar to the division among those currently in positions of privilege and power. The ways in which Southern blacks exploited those divisions for their own benefit offer profound lessons for the future.[63]
However, most historical accounts of this “down-shifting” of the civil rights movement overlook important continuities and developments among Southern blacks at the local level. J. Mills Thornton provided useful perspective in his recent study of key racial developments in Alabama, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma:
In truth, an examination of the Southern communities that generated the direct-action campaigns reveals that the presumed decline of the civil rights movement is far more an artifact of the recounting of history from a national perspective than it is an accurate portrayal of the experience of Southerners during the twentieth century’s final three decades. At the level of Southern municipalities, the struggle for civil rights continued to play itself out in numerous electoral contests for town councils, county commissions, and state legislative office and in the debates over measures in those and comparable bodies. In that sense, the death of the civil rights movement has been greatly exaggerated. While the national movement’s influence was being curtailed, at this local level the movement remained as significant as ever. It is just that, with reenfranchisement and, frequently, after court-ordered redistricting, direct action took on a less recognizable, more ordinarily American form.[64]
Apparently, Southern black activists were just as focused on local concerns as the heroic drama; and, as national emotions ebbed, they turned to more practical political pursuits in their own communities.[65]
Thus the pertinent line of inquiry, as we reconsider these aspects of Southern history, is a combination of intriguing unknowns—“who, what, where, when, how, and why”—about regional transformation in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Did a few liberal Davids heroically slay the racist Goliaths? What major battles signaled the triumph of good over evil? How do we account for significant change in Southern politics considering regional history and the still-tense environment of white-versus-black?
As in many historical quandaries, the explanatory reality perhaps was ordinary politics—somehow accommodating both white culture and black interests—rather than mythical conflict and glorious conquest (or inglorious defeat).
The Unnoted Emergence of Stealthy Leaders and Politics
New South governors, civil rights activists, federal officials, naïve liberals, right-wing segregationists, lawyers, journalists, academics, rabble-rousers, shysters, and numerous other types dominated the regional landscape of the post-civil rights period. But we think that low-profile leaders and their moderate politicking may provide an important, heretofore missing part of the broad story of Southern history.
As discussed in the previous section, we detected throughout numerous accounts of Southern community struggles (both during the civil rights movement and afterwards), an interesting developmental pattern: less heroic drama, less villainous resistance, and more conventional politics. Furthermore, our examination of numerous locales suggests that this politics worked best when pursued by quiet, practical, biracial leaders.
Thus we hypothesize that many leaders and citizens of both races, who had learned valuable lessons through the traumatic days of the 1950s and 1960s, adopted new ideas and changed their ways to accommodate racial realities. One reality, to reiterate, was a splintered, uncertain white populace. “Some white Southerners attested to liberating experiences that forever altered their racial attitudes and behavior. Others found new ways to resist racial equality. Many more clung to any sense of normalcy they could salvage, at times willfully ignorant of the tumult around them.”[66] Some were rock-throwers and liberals; but “the vast group in the middle were left out of the story.”[67] Another reality was black practicality. The real movement was “not moralistic melodrama but politics.”[68] Black politics centered on real issues in city councils, county commissions, and state legislatures; direct action in those forums and times took on a “more ordinarily American form.”[69]
Thus, an emerging Southern
