of how that public struggle among heroes and villains during the 1950s and 1960s actually played into Southern politics during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The trauma of the mid-century civil rights movement has so dominated American public thinking and discourse that subsequent developments pale in comparison with emotional, time-frozen, black-and-white images from the earlier period. Furthermore and ironically, as recent presidential politics has demonstrated, historical sensitivities still constrict our ability to address the continuing racial dilemma in twenty-first century America.
Thus, few people understand that some leaders and activists quietly and biracially translated dramatic confrontation into the relative normalcy of a new political order in the post-movement South. There’s little evidence in the public record attesting to this phenomenon, and knowledgeable participants have held their silence since those early days. In this book, we document this untold story of Southern politics and history.
The Movement: A Common Vision of Heroic Racial Drama
Over the past half century, our national news institutions, journalists, academicians, activists, and other chroniclers have developed a vibrant history of the civil rights movement as a heroic drama. Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and media merchants of all stripes celebrate, popularly and profitably, the moral challenges and courageous actions of that era. The common vision of the movement is a universal morality tale of good and evil, a raw, monolithic struggle, a clash of righteous souls and racial ogres, depicted literally and figuratively in black and white.[1]
George Wallace articulated the dark side of this struggle in a defiant pledge at his Alabama gubernatorial inauguration in 1963:
In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.[2]
Alternatively, perhaps no speech in American history stirred our national emotion more so than Dr. King’s visionary remarks at the Lincoln Memorial a few months later:
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.[3]
Ever since, this stark vision of good-versus-evil has been ingrained in our minds as a psychic national monument. It also has served as permanent pressure on the South to conform to the “Great Experiment” of American democracy.
Now, fast-forwarding to the twenty-first century, we find an interesting situation. Almost half a century after Wallace’s “segregation forever” declaration and the massive resistance of the old days, social scientists increasingly portray a new and different South that reflects real racial progress. Although such claims tend toward overstatement, demographic analysis shows the region diversifying; economic research shows blacks and whites sharing in regional growth; cultural studies show Southerners converging with the rest of the country; and opinion surveys, voting returns, and policy analyses demonstrate the coming of a more normalized, moderated political system.[4]
Most strikingly, of course, substantial biracial support in the South for Barack Obama in 2008 attests to fundamental, systemic change in this region. Race and racism are still vital matters, and much remains to be done, but the South has transformed dramatically over the past half-century.
An Intriguing Issue of Incongruent Political History
Arrival of a new racial order is a time of great interest and speculation; fortunately, too, it presents an opportunity for serious retrospection on the nature and meaning of regional transformation. Such matters are of more than casual consequence for the future of Southern and national democracy.
Our aim in this book, for example, is to pursue an intriguing, consequential question about the past half-century: How did we get from the brutally contentious civil rights movement to the substantial progress of the contemporary South? This would seem an easy task. However, it does not take much time at the library or on the computer to discover that there has been little work on the causes of racial progress of the last few decades. What we can ascertain is piecemeal, oblique, and perplexing.
We find, as has been noted, flourishing statistical depictions of many aspects of the emerging new South, such as shifting social and economic patterns, moderating cultural parameters, the expanding role of African Americans, and rising Republicanism in Southern public life. We find interesting historical and legal narratives—flush with names, dates, and places. There are fascinating anecdotes touching on changed racial interactions. And, frankly, interspersed throughout are periodic reports qualifying our notion of progress, reports that testify to the continuing problem of white-versus-black in this part of the nation. But something important—a general accounting of inside, real-world operations and systemic change—is missing from the conventional story line on racial politics of the last few decades. In particular, nothing in the literature addresses—theoretically, comprehensively, and coherently—the “what” and “how” and “why” of the broad political progress that has occurred since the contested days of the heroic drama.
Obviously, the movement’s heroes deserve full credit for their moral suasion, personal sacrifices, and righteous triumphs in fighting for equal rights and racial justice during the 1950 and 1960s. However, it is highly unlikely that the movement by itself hammered the Old South into progressive submission. In many ways, the days of protest, violence, and forced desegregation were somewhat like the Civil War experience, leaving white Southerners whipped and resentful, and unleashing bad memories and fresh grievances among black Southerners. Furthermore, the ordeal afflicted all with an uncertain, distrustful future. Progressive politicians and civil rights leaders faced formidable obstacles in nurturing biracial relations and racial progress in that environment; their antagonists (including white segregationists and black separatists) were disinterested in partnerships for progress. Consequently, the triumphant heroes constantly struggled against recalcitrant villains, resistant populations, and traditional practices in the Southern states. The Second Reconstruction waned considerably during the late 1960s and early 1970s, again just as had happened with Civil War Reconstruction a century earlier. But, somehow, inexplicably, the monolithic struggle of good-versus-evil morphed into a relatively normalized political system by 2000.
In short, the stark Old South defied rational reconciliation—simply through the heroic drama—into racial progress in the contemporary period. Southern society gradually moderated, and persistent litigation kept pressure on stubborn individuals and institutions. But otherwise there has been little accounting for political developments leading to the new and different South. Thus the nagging retrospective assignment is to square this important incongruity of Southern political history over the past half-century. Or, to slightly restate our intriguing question: “What really happened between then and now?”
We suspect that a variety of theoretical, methodological, and normative factors has underlain the failure to address this aspect of Southern change. Early on, natural fixation on the movement focused scholarly eyes too subjectively and narrowly on that mystic vision of good versus evil, heroes versus villains, and blacks versus whites to consider such mundane possibilities. In ensuing years, research was probably limited to phenomena that could be readily observed, empirically measured, and graphically presented.
Whatever the reasons, we see little in the way of causal analysis for broad racial progress, and we think that we have found and can document an important missing piece of this puzzle of Southern political history.
The
