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While the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s is a celebrated heroic drama, we believe there is an intriguing subplot of hushed, yet positive political endeavor in the South’s history of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
We contend that Southern politics was significantly moderated during the closing decades of the twentieth century, and that it happened through the relatively progressive but quiet, somewhat secretive, sometimes uncomfortable, oftentimes less than noble, biracial service of practical politicians and activists. We believe that this moderating trend can be discerned in the raw racial conflicts, trade-offs, alliances, and transactions of “real politics”—both out front and behind the scenes—that has underlain the Southern race game for the past half-century.
By the 1970s, as the dramatic struggle cooled, some Southern leaders—doing what politicians do best—began accommodating new racial realities into routine campaigning and governing. These leaders were not much different from other politicians in their social origins and general orientations; in most ways they reflected traditional Southern politics. They were mainly interested in national defense, agriculture, the economy, building schools, and paving roads—and their own careers. In fact, their moderation coincided rather conveniently with the pressures of black voters, civil rights activists, and court litigation.
Nevertheless, relatively free from constraints of personally heroic or personally villainous history, these officials and their new allies went about the business of incorporating black and white voters, activists, and organizations into their election campaigns, and they worked together to articulate moderate policies and provide more equitable public services to both black and white constituencies. At first slowly and cautiously, with measured success, then increasingly as the situation allowed, they quietly helped move things forward without the drama and trauma of the preceding two decades.
A significant key to Southern change, then, was “stealthness,” the quiet, practical, biracial politics practiced by many Southern white public officials and black allies during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The essence of their varied service is that they deftly attempted racial progress in a society wrought with racial tension. Or, to put it in political terms, they purposely and positively addressed black issues, without unduly antagonizing the white majority, while pursuing normal missions and careers as Southern public officials.
Most of these white politicos never considered themselves civil rights leaders, and their quiet endeavor has never been considered part of the civil rights movement; but, in individualistic practice and in alliance with key black activists, they helped implement important elements of the evolving movement’s spirit and agenda in everyday Southern life.
. . . And the Untold Story of “Stealth Reconstruction”
The civil rights movement of the 1950s–’60s challenged and crippled institutions of the Old South. However, the movement, by itself, was unable to overcome the intransigence of the “Southern way of life” during the following decades. That aspect of the assignment inevitably fell to more functional operatives and their service inside “real Southern politics.”
Thus, the heretofore untold truth is that these politicians and their friends—effectively supplementing the movement’s assault on Old South ways—helped accomplish a Southern version of systemic reconstruction with their low-profile yet constructive service from the 1970s to the 1990s. There were no ballyhooed regional summits of white elected officials and black activists, nor any public pronouncements, nor any coordinated agenda, nor any media attention, nor any subsequent documentation by academic scholars. However, the record shows that things changed significantly in those decades; substantial progress was evidenced in local schools, in city halls, in county courthouses, and in state legislatures throughout the South, and even in Washington, D.C.
Of course, this stealthy reconstruction was often under duress, and stubborn racial problems persisted. Moreover, that service proved to be a temporary transition between traditional ways and a different order of the new century. But during those few decades, these leaders comprised a racial evolution that fundamentally and positively helped to reconstruct regional elections and governance.
We do not employ serious theoretical language—terms such as “thesis,” “systemic,” and “reconstruction”—frivolously, and we acknowledge that there has always existed a smattering of isolated mavericks who pricked the traditional culture of their communities with varying styles of surreptitiousness and/or boldness. But we “theorize” that there developed in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s a special sense among many mainstream Southerners of both races that, like it or not, things had to change. Some leaders—white and black—belatedly came up with a better way of dealing with civil rights, the federal government, and their own past.
We posit that these leaders collectively and significantly contributed to the evolution of the civil rights struggle and the reconstruction of Southern politics.
A Timely and Critical Mission
Our project may strike some as a simplistic and needless exercise, particularly at this point in history. However, we think that our “Stealth Reconstruction” project is a timely and critical mission on several counts.
First, we want to recognize a reality of recent Southern political history that has escaped the attention of professional scholars and that now is disappearing into an abyss of ignorance and irrelevancy. This reality needs to be documented before aging participants and witnesses of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s cease their earthly existence.
Our focus on white Southern public officials and their practical biracial leadership during that period is an unusual approach to the study of civil rights in the South, but it will supply new information and perspective about that era. As we have noted, conventional fixation on heroic figures and dramatic aspects of the movement has ignored a significant segment of major players and political developments of the past half-century, and this avoidance has produced an incomplete picture of the fundamentally changing South. As Jason Sokol recently remarked, “The literature on the South during this era privileges the dramatic demonstrations and famous battles of the civil rights movement, often at the expense of analyzing the very realm that those struggles sought to change—Southern life, black as well as white.”[5]
Second, we want to encourage our academic associates to pursue this matter with an open, balanced, inquisitive approach. It may be time, as historian Charles Eagles argued in a survey of the literature, for exploring “new histories” of the civil rights movement, for challenging the established story, and for extending the debate in more balanced, even iconoclastic directions.[6] Historian Glenn Feldman has suggested, furthermore, that his discipline should constrain personal sentiments in future research on Southern history; “Those convictions may make good politics and good social policy, but they do not always make good history.”[7]
Third, we also agree with Richard K. Scher that our discipline—political science—needs to contribute more substantively to the literature on racial politics. In a recent review, Scher recommended that we grapple with race and assess how it impacts on Southern politics in real-world terms instead of as a cold, independent variable for statistical models; “Race is a fundamental element in American politics in exactly the same way V. O. Key saw it as fundamental to Southern politics more than fifty years ago.”[8]
Fourth, perhaps today’s political leaders and journalists might learn something from the biracial functionaries of that era. As our colleagues Lucius J. Barker, Mack Jones, and Katherine Tate observed in their analysis of contemporary racial politics:
. . . we need to know more about
