of years there were de facto alliances in some states in which Negroes voted for the same candidate as whites because he had shifted from a racist to a moderate position, even though he did not articulate an appeal for Negro votes. In recent years, the transformation has accelerated, and many white candidates have entered alliances publicly. As they perceived that the Negro vote was becoming a substantial and permanent factor, they could not remain aloof from it. More and more, competition will develop among white political forces for such a significant bloc of votes, and a monolithic white unity based on racism will no longer be possible.[12]
As King said, the purpose of his new political plan was not simply to increase African American electoral influence, but to develop “a strong voice that is heard in the smoke-filled back rooms where party debating and bargaining proceed.”[13] Furthermore, he warned, the civil rights community would have to deal with established white power structures without petty outbursts about selling-out:
Too often a genuine achievement has been falsely condemned as spurious and useless, and a victory has been turned into disheartening defeat for the less informed. Our enemies will adequately deflate our accomplishments; we need not serve them as eager volunteers.[14]
King’s emphasis on practical alliances was echoed and elaborated, with an emphasis on biracial cooperation, by sociologist Chandler Davidson in Biracial Politics: Conflict and Coalition in the Metropolitan South. Davidson, one of the most engaged and prolific patrons of black voting rights over the past half century, proposed a new “Southern Strategy” of black-white coalition as an alternative to both conventional politics and the black separatism being preached by some in the 1960s.
Davidson dismissed normal political action as the old Southern strategy, and he said the ultimate costs of black separatism outweighed the benefits. Davidson attempted to show that blacks and whites had similar societal aspirations, that such an approach would not compromise the interests of blacks, and that there was considerable foundation for a biracial, working-class movement. “If one accepts our earlier thesis, therefore, that justice for blacks remains ahead of us in the indefinite future, then the option of class-based coalition politics in the South and in the rest of the nation is the one most likely to achieve success.”[15]
While a South-wide movement may have been impractical, Davidson noted, there were examples and clear prospects for localized success in coming years.
Blacks, most of whom still favor working through “the system,” have cooperated with whites in many different situations—formal electoral politics, union organizing activities, public demonstrations, community action groups, and within educational settings. Usually only a minority of whites have been willing to cooperate. But in many situations, a minority of whites combined with a majority of blacks is sufficient to provide a decisive force for change. While there are very few political units in the South where blacks constitute a majority (102 counties out of of more than a thousand in 1970), for example), there are numerous units where a unified black population combined with 30 percent of the whites constitute an effective majority.[16]
Davidson insightfully foresaw the developing, historical necessity for biracial politics, but his recommendations, reflecting research during the late 1960s and political developments of the early 1970s, relied on questionable strategies, tactics, and agents of change. He insisted that the coalition would have to be a movement of class-based radicalism, significantly departing from elitist liberalism. He incorporated into his plan a combination of strikes, political rallies, disruption, and harassment of corporate and governmental routine, and above all, grassroots education and propaganda.[17] He included lower-income whites and organized labor as key class partners, and he specifically targeted middle and upper-class progressives—“university people, ‘whistle blowers’ within the white-collar institutions, the traditional racial liberals, the growing middle-income supporters of tenants unions, the largely middle-class feminists, and the equally middle-class peace groups, environmentalists, and other liberal-radical reformers.”[18]
What Davidson failed to envision (and what King never lived to see) was the elusive, limited, but requisite capacity of real-world politics in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Direct, radical, coalitional action in a thousand different places—even when buttressed with voting rights laws and court decrees and all the other allies of progressive change—would likely fall short unless the movement engaged a special breed of political leaders/activists with stylistic skills and substantive agendas throughout the Southern region.
In effect, King’s inspirational ideas and Davidson’s empirical notions sorely needed “practical men of action” as described— gender-insensitively—by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. We don’t want to digress needlessly, but Hoffer’s classic essay adds solid theoretical foundation for our proposition about stealth politics.
What the classification attempts to suggest is that the readying of the ground for a mass movement is done best by men whose chief claim to excellence is their skill in the use of the spoken or written word; that the hatching of an actual movement requires the temperament and the talents of the fanatic; and that the final consolidation of the movement is largely the work of practical men of action. . .[19]
It is usually an advantage to a movement, and perhaps a prerequisite for its endurance, that these roles should be played by different men succeeding each other as conditions require.[20]
We’ll skip through Hoffer’s polemic against fanaticism and focus on the language pertinent to our thesis. The part of the essay that interests us is his assertion about the role of “practical men of action,” whose appearance represents the end of the dynamic phase and the beginning of a working new order. In fact, Hoffer claimed, “only the entrance of a practical man of action can save the achievements of the movement.”[21] Men of thought, he continued, don’t work well together, but camaraderie is an easy, indispensable, unifying agent for men of action. Among their many practical motivations, according to Hoffer, these operatives are interested in furthering their own careers as well as institutionalizing the movement; their tactics, while less than revolutionary, are often functionally successful.[22] It is difficult to draw from King’s call to action, Davidson’s insistence on biracial coalitions, and Hoffer’s provocative essay any specific directives for stealth politics. However, we think that their discussions about “strategy for change,” “cooperative majorities,” and “practical men of action” provide a particularly appropriate foundation for our thesis about stealth leaders, politics, and reconstruction. Practical men and women of both races would assume critical importance in strategically and cooperatively consolidating Southern change during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
A huge, vibrant body of literature attests to the more heroic actions of celebrated persons in the movement. However, we are interested in those quiet, practical, biracial leaders who collectively played a timely and similarly vital role. Unfortunately, history records virtually nothing about their backgrounds, their attitudes, and their activities. Therefore they are our focus, and in this project we will define and document their stealthy role in the transformation of Southern politics in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Preliminary Testimony to the Reality of Stealthness
Stealthness can be viewed as having positively addressed black issues and concerns, most commonly without pronounced intent or obvious plan, and in a way that avoided
