Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump 9780674276116

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Why White Liberals Fail the nathan i. huggins lectures

Why White Liberals Fail Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump

Anthony J. Badger

h a r va r d u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s c a m b r i d g e , m a s­s a­c h u­s e t t s l o n d o n , ­e n g l a n d 2022

 Copyright © 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Jacket design by Jaya Miceli 9780674276093 (EPUB) 9780674276116 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Badger, Anthony J., author. Title: Why white liberals fail : race and southern politics from FDR to Trump / Anthony J. Badger. Other titles: Nathan I. Huggins lectures. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2022. | Series: The Nathan I. Huggins lectures | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021047198 | ISBN 9780674242340 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Liberalism—Southern States. | Conservatism—Southern States. | Whites—Southern States—Politics and government. | New Deal, 1933–1939—Southern States. | Campaign promises—Southern States. | Southern States—Politics and government—1865– | Southern States— Economic conditions—1945– | Southern States—Race relations. | Southern States—Economic policy. Classification: LCC JC574.2.U6 B33 2022 | DDC 320.510973— dc23/eng/20211129 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047198

 For Christina Benn

and the memory of Tim Benn

Contents Prologue

1

Part I. a southern new deal, 1933–1945



1. The New Deal: Southern Enthusiasm

25



2. Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

48

Part II. racial change, a long massive re­s is­tance, and liberal fatalism, 1945–1965



3. A Liberal Win­d ow of Opportunity?

4. Brown and Backlash

75 107

Part III. the rise and fall of biracial politics ­a fter 1965



5. Voting Rights, a Long Southern Strategy, and Conservative Accommodation

127



6. Thwarted Promises of a New South

142

Epilogue

179

Notes

195

Acknowl­edgments

227

Index

231 vii

Why White Liberals Fail

 Prologue In the spring of 1965, Reuben Anderson, a student at Tougaloo College, climbed onto a bus in Jackson, Mississippi. He sat in the front row in the knowledge that the two white men in the row b­ ehind him would not like it, but t­ here was nothing they could do about it. Unable to force him to move to the back of the bus, the men talked loudly, making as much use of the N-­word as pos­si­ble. Anderson relished the fact that they w ­ ere powerless to do more than talk. Eventually one of them said, “That William Winter is a liberal.” The other asked, “What is a liberal?” The answer was ­simple and stark: “A nigger lover.”1 In 1965, William Winter was state trea­surer of Mississippi, and he would become governor in 1979. Winter epitomized the changes that transformed the South from a segregated region committed to white supremacy to a booming biracial democracy. He was, ­Eudora Welty wrote to her closest friend, a good first-­rate, vigorously thoughtful and firmly spoken man. I w ­ ouldn’t be surprised if he d ­ idn’t prove himself one of the best governors in the nation. His third try. This time he beat the disgraceful redneck scoundrel who beat him before, and who has outraged every­body so, that our man this time won by a landslide.

Welty was an acute observer of her native state: many now see Winter as the most successful governor in Mississippi’s history. But he was not then, and is not now, universally admired.2 1

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Elected with the support of recently enfranchised Black voters, Winter revolutionized the provision of public education in the state, consolidating schools, depoliticizing their administration, and equalizing school funding. The young men he brought in to assist him, the “Boys of Spring” as they came to be called, like Ray Mabus and Dick Molpus, would carry forward this liberal proj­ect for the next twenty years. Winter worked closely with Black leaders. By the time he left office, Mississippi had more elected Black officials than any state in the nation. The young man on the bus, Reuben Anderson, mentored by Winter, would sit on the Mississippi Supreme Court, become president of the Mississippi Bar Association and president of the Mississippi Economic Council. In 1996, he would cochair with Winter Bill Clinton’s presidential reelection campaign in Mississippi. Yet when Winter first ran for governor in 1967, two years ­after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, he proclaimed, “I was born a segregationist, raised a segregationist. I have always defended that position and I defend it now.”3 ­Today, Mississippi is a bastion of support for Donald Trump. Only 6.4 ­percent of white voters in Leflore County, in the Mississippi Delta, voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and, almost half a ­century l­ ater, even fewer voted for Barack Obama. In 2016 and 2020, the white voters of Leflore overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump. Mississippi now has a white Republican governor, two white Republican senators, three white Republican representatives, and one lone Black Demo­cratic congressman. It is hard to imagine a greater remove from the progressive racial shift that Winter and so many moderates had envisaged. This book attempts to explain how ­those liberal hopes ­were derailed.4 In 1936, Franklin D. Roo­se­velt was optimistic about the f­uture of the South. When challenged by Socialist leader Norman Thomas 2

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about the New Deal’s failure to help the sharecroppers of the Arkansas Delta, Roo­se­velt took the time to outline some of the constraints that caged him in. To secure the passage of New Deal ­reforms, he explained, he had to work with power­ful southern conservatives in Congress, who sympathized with white planters rather than their tenants. He counseled Thomas to be patient. ­There is a “new generation of southerners” emerging in D ­ ixie, he said, and he anticipated significant changes ahead.5 Two years ­later, FDR assured audiences in Georgia that “the South was building a new school of thought—­a group principally recruited from younger men and ­women who understood that the economy of the South was vitally and inextricably linked with that of the Nation.” They aimed “to work for a wider distribution of national income, to improve the conditions of life, especially among ­those who need it most, and above all to use very honest effort to keep Amer­i­ca in the van of social and economic pro­gress.”6 FDR’s hope was echoed a de­cade ­later by the distinguished Texas-­born po­liti­cal scientist V. O. Key Jr., who identified four devices that perpetuated conservative hegemony in the South: one-­ party rule, a restricted electorate (in par­tic­ul­ar, the disfranchisement of Black southerners), the malapportionment of state legislatures (especially the overrepre­sen­ta­tion of the Black ­Belt), and racial segregation. He predicted that if ­these four roadblocks w ­ ere eliminated, the “under­lying southern liberalism ­will be mightily strengthened.” Key foresaw a vigorous democracy in which party competition for popu­lar support would bring long-­overdue benefits to the have-­nots who had lost out in a factionalized, disor­ga­nized politics. Class, he hoped, would replace race as the dominant force of southern politics. White liberals would be able to appeal to a biracial co­ali­tion of lower-­income Blacks and whites. They would complement po­ liti­cal democracy with economic democracy.7 Even as Key was completing his study, African Americans w ­ ere challenging segregated education and po­liti­cal exclusion in the 3

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courts. Northern migration had increased their po­liti­cal leverage, and the NAACP was moving systematically to dismantle the ­legal basis for “separate but equal” segregation. In southern cities, Black veterans who had served in the armed forces w ­ ere determined to exercise their constitutional rights. ­These developments offered a win­dow of opportunity for southern liberals, but they also provoked a power­ful white backlash, as we s­ hall see, even before the Brown school desegregation decision of 1954. ­After Brown, successive presidents believed ­there ­were white moderate leaders in the South who would take their communities into peaceful compliance with the law of the land without the need for heavy-­handed federal intervention. The desire to give white moderates a chance ­shaped the Supreme Court’s cautious and gradual implementation of the Brown decision. Faith in t­ hose moderates dictated John F. Kennedy’s fervent desire, in the early years of his administration, not to undermine them through coercive legislation or by mobilizing federal troops. White mobs and police vio­lence in Mississippi and Alabama ultimately convinced Kennedy that this faith was misplaced. With the passage of the 1964 and 1965 civil rights and voting rights acts—­conceived and ­shaped by Kennedy and his b ­ rother Robert and pushed through by Lyndon Johnson—­the federal government struck down two pillars of white supremacy in the South: the segregation of public accommodations and the disfranchisement of African Americans. Without the Kennedy thrust, the legislation would not have been introduced; without the legislative mastery of LBJ, quintessentially one of FDR’s new generation of southerners, the bills would not have passed. By the 1970s, pundits celebrated the rise of a New South. Where ­earlier liberal leaders had surreptitiously appealed for Black support, a remarkable group of New South governors explic­itly sought it out. They incorporated young Black leaders in their governments and 4

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drove hard to secure the economic growth that a new racial climate made pos­si­ble. In the 1980s, the success of centrist governors like Bill Clinton in Arkansas and Zell Miller in Georgia, and the politics espoused by the southern-­dominated Demo­cratic Leadership Council, seemed to herald another new era of southern liberalism. At the turn of the c­ entury, and with Obama’s election, ­there again appeared to be an opportunity for a new biracial politics. Yet time and again, ­those liberal hopes have been dashed. To some, the terse dismissal offered up by the passengers on Reuben Anderson’s bus is sufficient to explain conservative success and liberal failure in the South. Popu­lar white racism is seen by many as simply too power­ful for liberals to succeed. ­W hether through explicit appeals to white supremacy or through coded ­appeals to traditional values, the race card might seem ultimately to doom any southern white liberal to disappointment and defeat. But this view does not do justice to the reformist politicians who flourished in the 1940s, 1970s, and 1990s and offers too simplistic a view of the South. When Henry Louis Gates Jr. invited me to give the 2018 Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, I welcomed the opportunity to test ­these arguments and was ­eager to stand back and reflect on the pro­gress and setbacks of a biracial politics I had witnessed and studied for over half a ­century. ­Were the passengers on Reuben Anderson’s bus in Mississippi right? Was a southern liberal first and foremost a politician who supported the expansion and enforcement of civil rights? ­Were ­there roads not taken on the path to a conservative South where the politics of Donald Trump seemed so triumphant? I was not convinced by the explanations most readily to hand. 5

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I ­will argue that, for a long time, civil rights ­were not the most urgent concern of white southern liberals. ­There ­were, they believed, alternative paths to the improvement of the position of Black citizens in the South. And I w ­ ill argue that ­there w ­ ere liberal win­ dows of opportunity when t­ hings could have gone differently. One such moment came early on, with federal rescue of the region’s economy in the 1930s. The New Deal paved the way for the economic modernization of the South, opening up the possibility of social justice reforms to eliminate poverty and seeing the election of young policy-­oriented reformers, particularly to Congress. Another moment of opportunity came in the aftermath of World War II. In what I have called the first postwar system of biracial politics, liberal governors ­were elected who used the region’s newfound prosperity to provide their lower-­income supporters with the public ser­vices, particularly roads, electricity, and education, that conservative elites had long denied them. From the 1960s onward, a second system of biracial politics based on a greatly increased enfranchised Black electorate offered white liberals another chance to build biracial co­ali­tions to deliver progressive change. Many southern politicians aggressively sought outside investment, and ­these investors required a peaceful racial climate and a skilled workforce. Liberal governors sought to provide the educational improvements that would create a workforce to meet their requirements. They pushed through the final desegregation of schools and sought to tackle Black powerlessness by opening up government jobs and government contracts to a rapidly growing African American ­middle class. Black voters became the core ele­ment of the Demo­cratic Party’s electoral base in the region, and Black politicians became key legislative leaders. Throughout ­these moments of opportunity, liberals always faced daunting opposition. ­There was entrenched re­sis­tance from the New Deal onward. Even ­under FDR, some conservatives sought 6

Prologue

to raise the specter of a fundamental threat to established ways of life in order to defeat liberal challenges. This use of the race card became more frequent during World War II and was a key ele­ment in opposition to liberal postwar governors, culminating in the formation of the Dixiecrat Party in 1948 and the power­ful, or­ga­nized massive re­sis­tance, which aimed to eliminate dissent in the white community. Defiance of the federal government became the b ­ attle cry of a succession of “good ol’ boy segregationists,” most notably George Wallace. At the same time, some in the Republican Party saw the white segregationist vote in the South as a ­great opportunity for local party growth and presidential electoral success. The appeal to white racial conservatism, the organ­izing princi­ple of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, has been a central ele­ment of the success of the Republican Party since 1980. One ­thing that is clear from a careful observation of their rhe­toric and rec­ord is that southern white liberal politicians constantly sought to prioritize issues other than race. In the New Deal they ­were convinced, as Hugo Black put it, that “The core of the prob­lem is economic.” Solve the economic prob­lem “and the race prob­lem ­will sort itself out.” Right through to the pre­sent, when this long-­ cherished hope continues to motivate Biden’s economic team, white liberals have put their faith in education and economic growth. In the 1930s and 1940s most southern liberals w ­ ere reluctant to contemplate the end of segregation. They ­were confident that they knew what African Americans wanted, and that they could dictate the timetable of racial change. Faced with the Brown decision, which took m ­ atters out of their hands, they w ­ ere fatalistic and reluctant to campaign for meaningful compliance with the Supreme Court, for fear of further arousing existing opposition. By contrast, conservatives, concerned that popu­lar opinion was insufficiently 7

Prologue

alert to the dangers posed by the Supreme Court decisions, w ­ ere prepared to launch a righ­teous crusade to defy the court and halt desegregation. When it became clear ­under Kennedy that movement activists and the federal government would dictate the timetable of change, it was southern business leaders and pragmatic conservative politicians who mostly mediated that change. ­After the Voting Rights Act, southern white moderates did manage to build successful ­biracial co­ali­tions. ­Until the 1990s, they persuaded enough white voters to join African Americans in electoral alliances. But it was easier for whites to accept racial change and Black empowerment when the region was progressing eco­nom­ically. In the 1970s and 1980s, Black gains did not appear to come at the expense of white employment. Once many white jobs dis­appeared in the 1990s, it was much harder to persuade southern whites to accept policies aimed at improving the position of African Americans. In the long run, white moderates have been undermined by the mobilization of socially and racially conservative religious evangelicals and the economic dislocation of so many lower-­income white southerners in ­today’s global economy. Education and economic growth have been insufficient to sustain the liberal proj­ect in the face of power­ful competing forces of racial and cultural identity. At one level, my ambitions are l­imited. I am not trying to provide a comprehensive history of the modern American South. ­There ­were courageous white dissenters who prioritized the race issue, some of whom joined the Communist Party in the 1930s. Socialists or­ga­nized sharecropper u ­ nions in the Arkansas Delta, and radicals fueled the Southern Conference for ­Human Welfare. Union organizers launched successive Operation D ­ ixies that sought to ­unionize the southern working class. ­These left-­wing activists supported the Progressive Party in 1948 and provided behind-­the-­ scenes support for Black direct action protests in the 1950s. In the 8

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1960s, white students risked their lives to work in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Freedom Summer. They ­were red-­baited, lost their jobs, and ­were ostracized in their local communities. A succession of hugely impressive studies, pioneered by Pat ­Sullivan and Glenda Gilmore, have examined their courageous efforts and deep overriding commitment to racial justice. Po­liti­cally, however, ­these radicals ­were increasingly marginal, particularly ­after the start of the Cold War, when they ­were consistently red-­baited.8 My focus is on ­those white liberals from the 1930s to the pre­ sent who sought elective office in order to bring change to their region. In dif­fer­ent ways and at dif­fer­ent times, they sought to provide for racial fairness, to bring about economic modernization from the bottom up, and to mediate racial change. They ­were serious-­minded, policy-­oriented politicians whose successes and failures merit consideration. The solutions they put forward are still very much unfinished business in the South and the nation ­today. My own engagement with liberal hopes and conservative outcomes came four years a­ fter Reuben Anderson rode that bus in Jackson. In one way or another I have been examining southern white liberal politicians for over half a c­ entury, ever since I first arrived in North Carolina on ­Labor Day 1969 to carry out archival research for a doctorate on the New Deal in the South. I had two main aims at that time: to examine the New Deal in action at the local level and to understand why the New Deal had received support from southern Demo­crats, whom I presumed to be conservative and thus suspicious of federal intervention. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, I had learned from Geoffrey Elton how the Reformation u ­ nder Henry VIII had actually been carried out locally u ­ nder Thomas ­Cromwell’s watchful 9

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eye. I knew that Roo­se­velt’s New Deal was not imposed by an army of federal officials loyal only to Washington. I assumed that the disconnect between Washington’s intentions and local realities might be greater in the South than elsewhere. The bifurcated nature of the Demo­cratic Party was a source of won­der to a young British observer used to a po­liti­cal system dominated by ideologically coherent parties. I took it for granted that the British system was superior, as did many American po­liti­cal scientists, who blamed weak and inchoate parties for what the historian James MacGregor Burns called the “Deadlock of Democracy.” The ­bitter partisan rivalry and intense polarization of American politics ­today suggests we should have been careful what we wished for. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have pointed out, “Parliamentary parties and separation of powers government are a formula for willful obstruction and policy irresolution.” Both encourage the politics of extremism.9 But none of that was evident back in 1969 when, ­eager to carve out a local case study, I looked at the New Deal’s flue-­cured tobacco program in Eastern North Carolina. This would give me a chance to delve into the single most impor­tant New Deal program in the state, while also considering national policy-­making, since North Carolina produced almost all of the cigarette tobacco in the nation.10 Alongside the study of tobacco, I examined the b ­ attle between liberals and conservatives in the state. The traditional fault line in North Carolina was between agrarian insurgents in the eastern Black ­Belt and the business, banking, and manufacturing interests of the Piedmont. The latter w ­ ere invariably triumphant and produced what V. O. Key Jr. described as a “progressive plutocracy.” The Depression encouraged the insurgents, who in 1936 came very close to winning the governorship. What has been called the ugliest campaign in the state since the disfranchisement campaigns of the 1890s saw the pro–­New Deal candidate, Ralph W. McDonald, 10

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outspent and prob­ably outcounted by the po­liti­cal machine’s allies in the western part of the state.11 I soon learned I was naïve to seek to identify local politics in con­ve­nient pro—­and anti–­New Deal colors. North Carolina politicians ­were overwhelmingly in ­favor of FDR before 1936. In order to survive the liberal onslaught, the conservative candidates for governor and senator that year had to wrap themselves in the mantle of the New Deal: to be tarred with the anti–­New Deal brush would have been fatal. Interestingly, one of the liberal backers for Ralph McDonald in 1936 was A. J. Fletcher of the Capitol Broadcasting Com­pany, the pivotal mentor for Jesse Helms in the 1960s. How had Fletcher reacted to a campaign in which the ­battle for the New Deal was explic­itly championed by McDonald? When I suggested to Fletcher in 1975 that the 1936 election was fought on support for FDR’s reforms, he simply denied that the New Deal was an issue in the campaign.12 What is striking in retrospect is how I could discuss liberal southern politics without talking about race. In part, this was a reflection of my own intermittent and marginal consciousness of the issue. I was working at a campus with token integration—­only a ­couple hundred Black students in a university of over 12,000. My colleagues and fellow students w ­ ere all white. Concern about race relations in general, not in my own community, was my dominant preoccupation. Of course, I approved of the civil rights legislation and civil rights movement and was appalled by Jesse Helms’s nightly editorials on WRAL TV5 denouncing Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist. I deplored Nixon’s Southern Strategy. I read with interest about the substantial desegregation of schools in February 1970 and loftily lamented the fact that some of the greatest white flight from the public school system took place in the sections of Durham where Duke University faculty lived. In retrospect, I was myopic on the issue of race. As a teenager in Bristol, I had been unaware of the successful West Indian 11

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boycott of the city’s buses in 1963, modeled on the Montgomery bus boycott, when protesters led by youth worker Paul Stephenson sought to end the Bristol Omnibus Com­pany’s ban on employing Black ­drivers and conductors.13 I was much more aware of the protests over the Vietnam War that convulsed the North Carolina State University campus in the wake of the invasion of Cambodia in April 1970 than I was of racial disturbances across the state, most notably the clashes in the tobacco town of Oxford so memorably described by Tim Tyson. In my study of tobacco, the Black sharecroppers who farmed the land had no agency. Only gradually did I come to appreciate the insights that social history and oral history could offer by capturing the experiences of the “inarticulate many rather than the articulate few.”14 The absence of much discussion of race in North Carolina politics convinced me that race was not a major ­factor in po­liti­cal calculations in the 1930s, reflecting how ­little I understood then that ­those who cannot vote could still exert po­liti­cal influence and agency. I took at face value the rhe­toric of white politicians and focused instead on how conservative and liberal politicians reacted to New Deal economic programs—­federal microeconomic intervention in industry and agriculture; protection of ­labor rights and the regulation of wages and hours; infrastructure proj­ects, relief programs, and the establishment of a fledgling welfare state. Race only surfaced in t­hese discussions incidentally. I understood that Roo­se­velt wanted to reshape the national Demo­cratic Party as a liberal party in the long term and that this would ultimately mean eliminating southern conservatives from the party’s ranks, and considered the obstacles likely to impede his goal.15 But if I started off as a New Deal historian who happened to be studying the South, increasingly, as a result of teaching undergraduates about the civil rights movement, I became a southern historian. It was logical to won­der how white southern liberals like the 12

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North Carolinians I was so familiar with in the 1930s would fare in the postwar world. If they had been able to avoid the race issue in the 1930s, how would they tackle it ­after 1945, when they could no longer ignore race? The temporizing and apparent failure of southern liberals in the 1950s and 1960s invited scorn from Black leaders, civil rights activists, and academics. Carl Rowan described a southern moderate as anyone who had not lynched a crippled Negro grand­mother during prayer meeting hour. Lewis Killian, a southern sociologist who dissected white attitudes, suggested that a southern moderate surrendered to the mob before it even gathered. An African American minister wryly commented to Calvin Trillin that if every­body who retrospectively claimed to have been working ­behind the scenes for racial change in the South had in fact been ­doing so, it would be mighty crowded backstage.16 The most sustained criticism leveled at southern moderates focused on their lack of urgency. Martin Luther King Jr. famously lamented, First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate . . . ​ who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more con­ve­nient season.”17

More recently, white moderates have come ­under critical scrutiny once again. Ibram X. Kendi has relentlessly explored “the unwitting 13

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racism of the well-­meaning.” He has skewered assimilationist rhe­toric and “uplift suasion” and posited that anyone who is not actively working for racial equality should be considered a racist, as they benefit from an oppressive status quo. Robin DiAngelo has argued that fragile whites have found it difficult to acknowledge how much they owe to social structures that privilege the position of whites and sustain racial in­equality. She argues that “good intentions, so-­called open mindedness, belief in racial justice, and identifying as racially progressive are not sufficient.” DiAngelo then goes one step further and argues that white racial progressives not only fail to improve ­matters, they actually are the group “that cause most daily harm to Black, indigenous, and other racialized p ­ eople” 18 (italics added). For all their impatience with white moderates, Black po­liti­cal leaders ­were in ­little doubt that ­there was a difference between moderates and conservatives, between a Fritz Hollings and a Donald Russell, or a Terry Sanford and a Beverly Lake. They ­were prepared to make allowances to help the more moderate candidate win. Though civil rights activists in the 1960s became exasperated by the caution of southern moderates, in retrospect they came to acknowledge their achievements. In this book, I argue at some length for the failures of white southern liberals to accept the urgent need for desegregation and substantive racial change. But to suggest that they ­were more responsible than power­ful white conservatives for the region’s racial failings is ahistorical. At some level, the failure of white liberals might seem ­simple: the intensity of racism in the South made it impossible for moderates hoping to promote changes in the racial status quo to get elected. By this account, systemic racism ultimately doomed white efforts to promote racial pro­gress and severely l­imited their ability to deliver policy changes. Yet this explanation is both too easy and hardly sufficient. 14

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The structure of southern politics had never before been known to dictate capitulation to popu­lar opinion. From the 1890s onward, a restricted electorate had largely insulated conservative elites from popu­lar pressure. The self-­exculpatory narrative that many white southern politicians would ­later use to justify their stance in the 1950s seemed inherently doubtful. Many insisted that they did not ­really believe the racist rhe­toric they used in the 1950s, or that they had no alternative if they wanted to remain in office. As J. William Fulbright put it, the only other option was to see a segregationist like Orval Faubus in the Senate. I suspect, however, that what some of ­those politicians quietly admitted l­ater was more accurate: in retrospect, they could not believe that they had actually made ­those statements.19 As I turned my attention to the postwar dilemmas of liberal politicians, I thought the Southern Manifesto of 1956, a blast of defiance at the Supreme Court ­after the Brown decision, offered a chance to weigh up the force of constituency pressure, as it was issued at the height of massive re­sis­tance. Did a moderate stance on racial issues dictate electoral defeat? Three of the twenty-­two southern members of the House of Representatives who refused to sign the Southern Manifesto—­ Thurmond Chatham, Charles B. Deane, and Harold D. Cooley—­ were from North Carolina and I knew them from my work in the New Deal years. Chatham had been a Liberty League supporter and textile millowner. Deane was an unequivocal economic liberal, backed by or­ga­nized ­labor and a member of Moral Re-­Armament. And Cooley was the power­ful chair of the House Agriculture Committee. It was difficult to disentangle their positions on race from their subsequent fate in the primaries. Chatham faced power­ful opposition ­because of his absentee rec­ord in Congress, Deane was indeed abandoned by the electorate ­because of his racial stance, and Cooley won—­but only by race-­baiting his 15

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race-­baiting opponent. ­Later, I wrote a biography of one of the two Tennessee senators who, like Lyndon Johnson in Texas, refused to sign the Southern Manifesto: Albert Gore Sr.20 As the anniversaries of landmark moments in the path to desegregation of the 1950s and 1960s have been marked in the South, I have been asked to assess the degree of racial po­liti­cal change since then in states like North Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina, often in the presence of some of ­those who mediated change, such as Georgia governor and senator Zell Miller, New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu, and former vice president and Tennessee representative and senator Al Gore. I was conscious that I was often challenging a self-­congratulatory narrative of racial pro­gress and that I could be accused of judging politicians by anachronistic standards. I was also aware that it could be profoundly irritating for practicing politicians who had stuck their heads above the parapet to be chided for not d ­ oing more by a historian operating from the safe distance of another country. No occasion was more daunting than the one in which I was asked to assess the ­handling by South Carolina’s governors of massive re­ sis­tance and desegregation in the presence of two of ­those governors, Senator Fritz Hollings and John C. West. As a friend noted, when Senator Hollings referred to me as “the good professor,” this was hardly a term of endearment.21 I delivered the lectures that form the basis for this book in the days before the midterm elections in 2018, just as the hopes of liberal Demo­crats in Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina ­were evaporating, and substantially revised them in the fall of 2020, just as liberal hopes in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina ­were disappearing.

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As I made the final revisions to this book in the summer of 2021, Trump exhorted North Carolina Republicans to ban the teaching of critical race theory. “Republicans at ­every level should move immediately to ban critical race theory in our schools,” he said. “And we should ban it in workplaces, we should ban it in our states, and we should ban it in the federal government.” In the same speech, he endorsed Representative Ted Budd for the North Carolina senate seat that w ­ ill be vacated by Richard Burr in 2022. Burr was a conservative Republican, but he nevertheless voted to impeach Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. By contrast, Budd, in an Orwellian move, cast himself as a victim of the riot, arguing that he was not ­going to allow a violent mob to stop him from voting against the certification of the Arizona and Pennsylvania election results. Budd was an ally of North Carolina representative Mark Mea­ dows, Trump’s chief of staff and former chair of the House Freedom Caucus. A three-­term congressman who owned a gun shop and a shooting range, Budd launched his campaign with a video featuring a monster truck r­ unning over cars labeled “liberal agenda.” He was ­running for the United States Senate, he intoned, ­because it was the last line of defense if we wanted to prevent Amer­i­ca from turning into “a woke socialist wasteland.” Critical race theory, he believed, was being pushed by big tech, corporate Amer­i­ca, and Hollywood. Schools should instead “teach that this nation is special,” argued the gradu­ate of Dallas Theological Seminary. “We need to teach them that our country is blessed by God.”22 Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly are challenging new school social studies standards laid down by the state board of education. ­These standards called for teachers to discuss racism and discrimination in the nation’s past more explic­itly and to highlight the perspectives of historically marginalized groups.

17

Prologue

The Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson, who is Black, was the most vocal critic of the new standards, which he denounced as “leftist indoctrination.” He was not a victim, he insisted, “we survived and we thrived.” His objections closely paralleled ­those of Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina who presented the GOP rebuttal of President Biden’s State of the Union address. “Hear me clearly: Amer­i­ca is not a racist country” said Scott, who is also Black. “It’s backwards to fight discrimination with dif­fer­ent types of discrimination. And it’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the pre­sent.”23 Opposition to the teaching of critical race theory is not confined to the legislature. Parents attending a Wake County School Board meeting to protest a mask mandate extended their criticism to the use of critical race theory and Black Lives ­Matter murals in the classroom. The board, complained one parent, was “adhering to a Marxist po­liti­cal agenda” which aimed to turn North Carolina ­children into communists. North Carolina senator Thom Tillis announced his support for legislation denouncing the New York Times 1619 Proj­ect as “a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true princi­ples on which it was founded.” Americans, said Tillis, “do not want their tax dollars ­going ­towards promoting radical ideologies meant to divide us instead of being used to promote the princi­ples that unite our nation.”24 For a generation, historians, po­liti­cal scientists, and journalists have been talking about the ways in which racism has been hardwired into the American state. Yet ­there has been a time lag in getting that scholarship into American schools and popu­lar consciousness. Twenty years ago, I taught a course on the civil rights movement as a visiting Andrew Mellon Professor at Tulane Uni-

18

Prologue

versity. I modeled the course on the honors class I taught at Cambridge and failed to realize ­until too late in the semester that the white students did not have the knowledge of the modern racial history of their own city and region that I had assumed they would. Most of ­these college se­niors, I discovered, had never learned much about the civil rights movement ­either in school or in college. Between 2002 and 2013, I taught a summer teachers’ institute in Cambridge for the Gilder Lehrman Institute. American high school teachers counterintuitively came to ­England to study the civil rights movement. ­These teachers ­were the most rewarding students I ever taught. They included Black community activists, an alumnus of ­Little Rock Central High School, Catholic nuns who had been on the Selma to Montgomery march u ­ ntil their archbishop summoned them home, and a Mississippi teacher whose ­uncle had been part of the lynch mob that removed Mack Parker from jail in 1959. They taught me so much. The drive to make school history standards more inclusive is, in part, testimony to ­these teachers’ determination to teach about civil rights. Critical race theory is not the bogeyman it is being made out to be. It widens the study of American history and is a valuable antidote to a celebratory history that hides a nation’s faults. Such an uncritical view of the past has just been codified by the Texas legislature, which has established its own 1836 Proj­ect to promote patriotic education and increase awareness of Texas values. Patriotic education would include the pre­ sen­ta­tion of the history of the state’s founding and foundational princi­ples, examination of how Texas has grown closer to t­hose princi­ples throughout its history, and explanation of why commitment to ­those princi­ples is beneficial and justified.25

19

Prologue

To say that the United States is structurally racist is perhaps a statement of the obvious. It is also structurally cap­i­tal­ist and structurally demo­cratic. ­These structures are sometimes in tension, sometimes complementary, and nowhere more powerfully so than in the South. From the early 1800s to the 1970s, the economic, social, ­legal, and po­liti­cal structures of the South all served to perpetuate white power and Black powerlessness. The privileges that white southerners of all classes enjoyed w ­ ere unlikely to be surrendered voluntarily. Even when segregation and white supremacy appeared unchallenged, conservatives w ­ ere acutely sensitive and uneasy about perceived threats to their position. Courageous white liberals like Albert Gore, Frank Smith, and William Winter always lamented the centrality of the race issue in southern politics. They wanted to move on to the issue of economic modernization. Race was not the dominant issue for them, whereas it was for most conservatives. White liberal politicians looked forward to the economic modernization of the South and foresaw long-­term racial change. It was perhaps not surprising that they initially did not envisage the immediate abandonment of the privileges of whiteness. It was the determined re­sis­tance of white conservatives and the eventual, impatient demands of the civil rights movement that left them no alternative but to accept the need for immediate change. This book focuses on ways in which the white liberals failed to achieve the results they hoped for. That does not mean that the obstacles they faced e­ ither in the 1940s and 1950s or l­ater should be underestimated. Building successful biracial po­liti­cal co­ali­tions has never been easy in the face of determined white conservative opposition. It had been a difficult task for radical Republicans u ­ nder Reconstruction and was even more difficult for populists in the 1890s to put together sustainable electoral co­ali­tions of Black and white voters. Forming a successful biracial politics would offer similar challenges for po­liti­cal leaders ­after 1965. White southerners 20

Prologue

could more easily accept racial change when it was accompanied by undoubted economic pro­gress for both races. They could more easily accept it when they trusted the federal government. When the federal government ceased to deliver t­hose unequivocal economic benefits, trust in the federal government as an economic and social arbiter diminished. White conservatives could tap into a power­ful worldview, often informed by evangelical religion, that melded together economic and racial grievance. In trying to explain the sources of white liberal failure and conservative success, I am conscious that it is all too easy for historians at a safe distance to blame historical actors for their failures. It is not my intention to drive another nail into the coffin of white moderates. I do not blame them for failing to clear the high bar of ­today’s antiracist standards. What I am trying to do is to understand the strategies and policies that w ­ ere pursued by both white liberals and their conservative opponents over the long period of desegregation and re­sis­tance. To do this is not to absolve white leaders from responsibility for the South’s checkered path to racial change. It is to recognize, in the words of the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, herself the target of a robust culture war exchange, that we are all flawed and that we should never lack compassion.

21

Part I a southern new deal, 1933–1945

chap ter one

The New Deal Southern Enthusiasm

On the fifth of December in 1938, President Franklin D. Roo­se­velt went to Chapel Hill to receive an honorary degree from the University of North Carolina. Smarting from midterm elections in which the Republicans had made significant gains, with unemployment still high ­after the “Roo­se­velt Recession” of 1937– 1938, the president nonetheless remained defiant. Citing the late Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, he gave a ringing endorsement of liberal princi­ples. “­There’s change ­whether we ­will it or not,” he said. Wrapping himself in the activist reforming mantle of Theodore Roo­se­velt and Woodrow Wilson, he assured his audience that he was not a “consorter with communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions” who breakfasted each morning on a dish of “grilled millionaires.” Roo­se­velt recounted a recent conversation with his el­derly neighbor in Warm Springs, Georgia. The neighbor, “an old-­fashioned conservative,” said he ­didn’t understand all the newfangled goingson in Washington, but what he did know was “this section of the country, and I want to tell you that t­ here is a new spirit abroad in the land. I am not talking about the fact that t­ here is more buying power, that ­houses are painted that ­were never painted before, that 25

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

our banks are safe, that our roads and schools are better. What I am talking about is that all of our young ­people in my section of the country think that we are ­going places.”1 Roo­se­velt’s speech came at the end of nine months in which the creation of a liberal South had loomed large in his thinking. In the spring, he had commissioned a report on the South from the Temporary National Economic Council. Pulled together by southerners who ­were second-­rank officials in key New Deal agencies, the Report on Economic Conditions of the South painted a picture of a region rich in natu­ral resources yet chronically poor and undeveloped. The South was, in FDR’s estimation, the nation’s number one economic prob­lem. To implement the report’s agenda would require sympathetic members of Congress. The president used this goal of revitalizing the South to justify his attempt, in the summer of 1938, to see liberals elected in Demo­cratic primaries. Two of the most high-­profile campaigns ­were in the South, where he tried to unseat veteran senators Walter F. George of Georgia and Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina. The failure of this attempted “purge,” as it came to be known, highlighted the need for a pro–­New Deal organ­ ization in the South. The report became the foundation document for the Southern Conference for H ­ uman Welfare, an organ­ization of progressive southerners, white and Black, launched in November in Birmingham, Alabama.2 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was a congenial location for New Deal liberals. FDR told his audience he was happy to become an honorary alumnus of the university, “typifying as it does American liberal thought through American action.” He remembered visiting a quarter of a c­ entury e­ arlier at the behest of Josephus Daniels, his boss in the Wilson administration, who had wanted him to see a university “which was thinking and

26

The New Deal

acting in terms of ­today and tomorrow and not in the tradition of yesterday.”3 In the 1920s, ­under Harry Woodburn Chase, the University of North Carolina became the first southern school to be recognized as a leading research university. Its Institute for Research in Social Science, led by Howard Odum, produced unsparing analyses of the region’s poverty. The Georgia-­born Odum had pioneered the study of Black folk songs and southern religion, and he had been recruited to Chapel Hill to found one of the earliest Schools of Public Welfare. The Institute for Research in Social Science, which he founded in 1924, laid bare the racial dimensions of poverty and examined the prob­lems of l­ abor relations in North Carolina’s textile industry. In its early years, the l­abor relations studies w ­ ere controversial. As one researcher noted, it was “the conservative industrial faction” that reacted more angrily than the “conservative race faction” to the institute’s activities. From 1933 onward, many of the institute’s staff went to Washington to work for the New Deal’s relief and rural poverty agencies. Their work delivered the empirical underpinning of the Temporary National Economic Council Report.4 The university’s New Deal liberalism was embodied by its president, Frank Porter Graham, who had been an im­mensely popu­lar dean of students and professor of history at his alma mater before he was drafted to run the university in 1930. Supported by an army of devoted alumni in the state legislature, he had successfully guided the university through the cost-­cutting imperatives of the Depression and had fought off the constant efforts of David Clark, publisher of the Southern Textile Bulletin, to eliminate radicalism among the students and faculty at Chapel Hill. Graham fiercely defended the civil liberties of ­labor organizers at the time of the violent textile strikes of 1934, personally standing bail for one of his former students, socialist Alton Lawrence. He fought for freedom of speech

27

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

on campus, just as he and ­others had warded off the efforts of religious conservatives to ban the teaching of evolution in the 1920s. He defended the rights of Marxist professors to express their views as private citizens, provided they w ­ ere ­doing their jobs properly, and protected one who had dined with the African American vice presidential candidate for the Communist Party in 1936 in neighboring Durham.5 Graham’s Presbyterian faith had instilled in him a concern for the plight of African Americans, and in 1913, as secretary of the YMCA, he had initiated surveys of housing and sanitation conditions for Chapel Hill’s Black population. In 1932, he had invited Langston Hughes to speak on campus. ­Later he allowed the Soviet ambassador to speak, as well as the general secretary of the American Communist Party, Earl Browder. In 1938, Graham was elected chair of the Southern Conference for ­Human Welfare. In his address to the November conference, he proclaimed, “The black man is the primary test of American democracy and Chris­tian­ity.”6 Left-­leaning politicians in Washington who wanted to bolster support in the South for potentially controversial New Deal programs turned to Graham. As a result, he was appointed vice-­chair of the consumers’ board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933. The following year, FDR asked him to chair the Advisory Council on Economic Security, which proposed the passage of what became the Social Security Act in 1935. In 1938, FDR prevailed upon him to chair the Advisory Committee on Economic Conditions in the South, which would publicly launch the TNEC Report.7 No one could challenge Frank Graham’s liberal credentials on economic issues. He was a quin­tes­sen­tial New Dealer. But his position on race highlighted the limitations of white southern liberals in the 1930s and 1940s. 28

The New Deal

In 1938, a young African American w ­ oman, Pauli Murray, had applied to the University of North Carolina hoping to do gradu­ate work in sociology. Brought up in the Durham public school system, Murray had a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College in New York and she was working for the Works Pro­gress Administration’s Workers Education Ser­vice. Roo­se­velt’s speech extolling Chapel Hill as a bastion of liberal thought provoked her to challenge him the next day. Murray wrote to FDR on behalf of 12,000,000 of his citizens who “have to endure insults, injustices, and such degradation of spirit that you would believe impossible as a ­human being and a Christian.” She spelled out the realities of segregation and disenfranchisement. “We have to live in ghettoes everywhere,” she wrote, “not only in Warm Springs, Ga., but also in the city of Washington, the very heart of our democracy.” No won­der she and other young Negroes had to move to northern cities. The president had praised the University of North Carolina “as an institution of liberal thought” and spoken of the necessity of a change “in a body of law to meet the prob­lems of an accelerated era of civilization.” She challenged him to use his prestige to ensure that the university opened its doors to Negro students. If not, she prodded, did it mean “that every­thing you said has no meaning for us as Negroes?”8 Murray knew that the southerners on FDR’s White House staff would be unlikely to show him her letter. To attract his attention, she sent a copy to Eleanor Roo­se­velt. (Murray had met the First Lady in 1934, when Mrs. Roo­se­velt had visited Camp TERA, a residential school for unemployed ­women in upstate New York in which ­she’d been enrolled.) Eleanor Roo­se­velt wrote back that she understood Murray’s point “perfectly,” but “­great changes come slowly.” She said she shared her husband’s faith in young p ­ eople. “The South is changing,” she asserted, but then she cautioned, “­don’t push too fast.” Nevertheless the First Lady paraphrased some of 29

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

Murray’s concerns in her newspaper column, “My Day,” two days ­later.9 On December 12, 1938, the Supreme Court handed down the Gaines decision, finding that in the absence of a law school in the state of Missouri for African Americans, the state could not deny a Black resident admission to the University of Missouri Law School. Nor could it satisfy its constitutional obligations to provide “separate but equal” opportunities to its white and Black students by providing tuition for Black students to attend law school in another state. A segregated state would face a stark choice: it could e­ ither integrate its flagship universities or build new institutions that would provide a “substantially equal” education for African Americans. In light of the Gaines decision, Pauli Murray wrote in January 1939 to Frank Graham asking him to provide the leadership that FDR had asked for. Would it not be a “victory for liberal thought in the South” if the university admitted her, rather than forcing her to carry the issue to the courts? How could African Americans in the South be expected to fight the threat of fascism if they ­were treated the same as the Jews in Germany?10 Murray was certainly writing to a sympathetic recipient. ­After the war, Graham had been active in the interracial movement, serving on the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. Local branches of the CIC brought middle-­class white p ­ eople into contact, often for the first time, with middle-­class Black community leaders. Whites w ­ ere alerted to the daily humiliations suffered by their Black counter­parts and the lack of public ser­vices for their community. The Interracial Commission worked to soften the edges of segregation and to end its more egregious excesses. It sought to defuse the possibility of racial conflict in the immediate postwar years and to eliminate lynching and miscarriages of justice. It aimed to secure legislative and executive support for des30

The New Deal

perately needed improvements in health, education, and civic ser­ vices for Black communities. But whites like Graham involved in the interracial movement rarely envisaged the end of segregation. They tended to assume that “the Negro prob­lem,” as it was euphemistically called, could only be solved by gradual change, mediated by well-­meaning whites. Black journalist George Streator captured the dynamics of this paternalism in 1933, when he proclaimed that it was high time “The Colored South Speaks for Itself.” “Having formed the habit of dictating the program of Negro Education and welfare,” he argued, “­these men . . . ​are reluctant to listen to the very p ­ eople to whose training they have contributed.” Younger whites at Chapel Hill also chafed at the worthy futility this represented, denouncing meetings suffused with “the patronizing approach on the part of the whites and the ingratiating appeal from the Negroes” and showcasing the “confessional value . . . ​[of ] Negroes . . . ​bursting with a smoldering sense of injustice and the erase of conscience . . . ​which the whites get from their benevolent gestures.”11 By this time, Graham almost certainly regarded segregation as wrong. In 1936, he had told Walter White privately that it would please him greatly if the NAACP’s campaign against the inequities of segregation succeeded. (He declined White’s invitation to join the NAACP’s National Board.) He was already being criticized for his support for increasing the resources allocated to Black educational institutions in the state. When he received Pauli Murray’s letter, he was sympathetic to her appeal but concluded that, as a state official, he could not admit her u ­ ntil the state changed its laws. Where Murray feared that continued segregation would make Negroes less likely to support the war against fascists, Graham feared that precipitate action would drive whites into the hands of the fascists and set back the cause of racial pro­gress. In the long run, he believed change would have to be evolutionary: religion and 31

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

education would have to bring about gradual change. The races, he told Murray “go up or down together.”12 To Murray, Graham’s stance was a frustrating evasion. Two years ­later, the young African American historian John Hope Franklin was invited to dinner by Graham, who saw himself as trapped in the m ­ iddle between extremists on both sides. Like Murray, Franklin did not doubt Graham’s sincerity. He could see that Graham was trying to be helpful, understanding, and reasonable. The prob­lem was that “all the reasonableness, as sweet as it was, was on one side. On his side.”13 Graham was one of the most advanced liberals in the South when it came to race relations. While he thought that segregation in the long run might be indefensible, he found it difficult to contemplate a desegregated university and feared a white backlash against any attempt to impose dramatic racial change. He understood the grievances of the middle-­class Black leaders and educators he knew, with whom he enjoyed easy relations. But his faith in gradualism ultimately prevailed. To read Graham’s correspondence with James Shepard, president of the North Carolina College for Negroes (­later North Carolina Central University) is to read unremitting obsequiousness on the part of Shepard and pervasive condescension on the part of Graham. ­There was seemingly no level of flattery from Black leaders that could embarrass him. He accepted it as his due. As Charles Holden has shown in his work on academic freedom at Chapel Hill between the wars, Graham was courageous (and effective) in his defense of academic freedom, but his concern was mainly to fight off the assault of the religious fundamentalists in the 1920s and anti-­union employers in the 1930s, not segregationists. Civil liberties, for Graham, meant the defense of radicals, strikers, and ­labor ­union organizers, not the protection of advocates for racial change.14

32

The New Deal

The NAACP did not take up Murray’s case, and she abandoned her plans to gain admission to Chapel Hill. But her correspondence with Eleanor Roo­se­velt led to a friendship that lasted u ­ ntil the First Lady’s death in 1962. Murray was arrested on a ­Virginia bus in 1940 and ­later involved in CORE’s sit-­ins. She worked for the Workers Defense League and liaised with Eleanor Roo­se­velt in a vain effort to save the life of Odell Waller, a Black tenant farmer from ­Virginia accused of killing his white landlord in 1940 and executed two years ­later. Murray then went to Howard University Law School, the training ground of civil rights l­awyers, graduated top of her class, and became an influential ­legal academic, a spokesperson for ­women’s rights, and a pioneering Episcopal priest. Graham supported President Shepard, who leveraged the fallout from the Gaines decision to secure increased funding for his Black college, enabling him to add gradu­ate programs. As a member of the National War L ­ abor Board, Graham drafted a landmark ruling in the Southport Petroleum case in 1943, which eliminated race-­ based classification in employment. Still, his commitment to gradualism persisted. In 1947, he was a member of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, set up by Harry Truman. The landmark report called for federal intervention to prevent lynching, abolish poll taxes, and eliminate job discrimination. Graham issued a minority report in which he argued that the best way to end segregation was to increase the educational levels of both races and to teach all Americans, Black and white, the ideals of education and democracy.15 Eleanor Roo­se­velt became increasingly aware of the prob­lems facing African Americans in the war effort, and she continued to help Black leaders gain access to a president whose southern staff routinely discouraged civil rights advocates. Her vis­ib ­ le concern for the welfare of Black troops made her a lightning rod for southern

33

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

conservative criticism of New Deal racial policies. On her inspection tours overseas, she acquired a reputation as a celebrated humanitarian. She was less popu­lar at home. A Mississippi ­woman informed Mrs. Roo­se­velt in 1943: “I am sure that if a poll ­were taken to find out the most hated person in our state, you would run Hitler a close race.”16 A year e­ arlier, when the First Lady had visited Salisbury, North Carolina, the local organizers had been embarrassed to find that no prominent white w ­ oman would offer to put her up for the night. As a journalist noted, “no ‘nice’ home would receive her.” A local correspondent opined that Mrs. Roo­se­velt, “rather than embarrass her colored friends, insulted the w ­ hole state.” On a visit to the South for the Office of War Information, f­ uture New Deal historian Arthur Schlesinger was shocked when a southern gentlewoman informed him that “Every­one in the South hates Mrs. Roo­se­velt.”17 The differing journeys of Frank Graham, Pauli Murray, and ­Eleanor Roo­se­velt illustrate the economic and social changes the New Deal wrought in the South, the hopes of white southern liberals for economic and po­liti­cal democracy, the rising expectations of African Americans, and the precisely circumscribed response to ­those rising expectations on the part of the white liberals. I used to argue that the New Deal left the basic structure of the South unchanged. In 1930, the South was a poor, rural, one-­crop society where too many ­people chased too ­little farm income. In 1940, the South was still a poor, rural one-­crop society where too many ­people chased too ­little farm income. In 1930, the South was the bastion of the open shop. In 1940, it was still an anti-­union stronghold. In 1930, the South was rigidly segregated and Blacks ­were eco­nom­ically and po­liti­cally powerless. In 1940, they ­were still eco­nom­ically dependent, po­liti­cally impotent, and rigidly segre34

The New Deal

gated. When Roo­se­velt came into office, southern politics ­were dominated by a conservative alliance of county seat elites, planters, and industrialists, largely immune to popu­lar pressure ­because of their economic dominance and the restricted nature of the electorate. In 1940, t­hose same po­liti­cal players still controlled the South. As V. O. Key Jr. noted, the have-­nots continued to lose out in the region’s disor­ga­nized politics.18 Still, one had to acknowledge the changes Roo­se­velt cata­logued in his speech at Chapel Hill. The New Deal had rescued the region’s farmers. Through its relief and public works programs it had prevented the complete collapse of the local education system and presided over a welfare revolution in the region, enabling the rural poor and the unemployed to survive when impoverished local governments could do l­ ittle to help. In per capita terms, the South did not fare as well when it came to federal spending as other regions, but the money on offer arguably had a greater impact. The region and its state governments w ­ ere so poor that federal spending u ­ nder the New Deal made up the highest percentage of all government spending of any region. The New Deal operated very much as a “holding operation,” I argued, that enabled a surplus population to survive ­until the opportunities of World War II freed it to move off the land and into cities. Billions of dollars ­were pumped into the southern economy in defense plants and military facilities, which kick-­started the South into self-­sustaining economic growth.19 Carbon Hill in Walker County, Alabama, perfectly illustrates ­these positive contributions—­but also the limitations of New Deal interventions in the South. The heart of Carbon Hill was ripped out when the local coal mines ceased production, and the New Deal gave the community a “heart transplant.” By 1937, $182,000 in federal funds for local work relief and infrastructural proj­ects, matched by $105,000 raised by local sponsors, had funded sewer, sidewalk, and street improvements, constructed a new high school, and 35

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

provided work relief for hundreds of local residents. A. E. Williams, owner of Carbon Hill’s Ford dealership and president of the local Kiwanis Club, remarked, “In aiding the needy p ­ eople we have accomplished permanent improvements with it. . . . ​I ­can’t conceive what the p ­ eople would have done, b ­ ecause we ­couldn’t have fed them. ­There would just about have been a revolution h ­ ere without WPA.” But the revival of Carbon Hill was temporary ­because the mines never reopened. In many ways, the community continues to strug­gle ­today. Its current population of just over 2,000 is smaller than in the 1930s, and traffic on Interstate 22 rushes past, ignoring the thirty churches that the community supports. If this is a picture of l­imited change, it is nonetheless significant. I have come to see the logic of Gavin Wright’s argument that the New Deal was indispensable to the modernization of the South. World War II investment in the South simply could not have occurred without it. In South Carolina, the Public Works Administration, as Jack Irby Hayes concluded, “literally changed the face of the Palmetto State. Its vis­i­ble legacy a half-­century ­later included hundreds of low-­cost housing units to replace urban slums, miles of modern highways, a host of schools, court­houses, hospitals, post offices, and administrative buildings, a thriving shipyard, a number of new sewage and ­water systems, and two huge hydroelectric proj­ects.”20 Highway mileage doubled in the South between 1930 and 1945, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) brought a power revolution to the entire region that no private utilities would have provided, modernizing farm life. Without abundant power and w ­ ater, industry would not have relocated to the South. Investment in urban infrastructure was also provided by the federal government— the sort of investment that had been made in northern cities a generation e­ arlier by private capital. Rapid urban development could not have taken place in Atlanta, for instance, without the replace36

The New Deal

ment of its antiquated sewage system. It is difficult to see the possibilities of middle-­class migration to the South without the improvements in public health, disease eradication, and the declines in infant mortality that correlated, county by county, with New Deal spending.21 Beyond this, the state parks which New Deal investment helped build ­were but one facet of the bolstering of the long-­term appeal of the region to tourists. Fred Bateman and his colleagues have identified this public capital investment as the “Big Push” which fundamentally reshaped the southern economy, suggesting that the improvements brought about by the infusion of public capital “helped create the conditions that allowed the region to break ­free from its low-­income, low-­productivity trap and embark on its rapid postwar industrialization.” It was perhaps understandable that Chattanooga journalist and public power advocate George F. Milton Jr. should confidently tell the readers of the Yale Review in 1939 that “during the last de­cade the South prob­ably has under­gone more fundamental change than any other section of the country.”22 How did southern politicians respond to ­these changes, which challenged traditional notions of fiscal conservatism and states’ rights? The structure of southern politics appeared to handicap programmatic New Deal liberalism, with its emphasis on government policy. Patronage politics dominated the region, and in the absence of meaningful party organ­ization, “friends and neighbors” politics prevailed. Elites at the local level—­the bankers, newspapermen, merchants, and planters—­controlled the court­house and the county seat. Candidates for congressional seats and state offices aimed to put together loose alliances of county organ­izations. In some states, individual powerbrokers established networks that 37

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

resembled a po­liti­cal machine—­Boss Crump in Tennessee, Harry Byrd’s organ­ization in ­V irginia, the Old Regulars and l­ater the supporters of Huey Long in New Orleans and Louisiana, the Barnwell ring in South Carolina. More often ­there ­were more informal organ­izations representing established economic interests, like the industrialists and business interests of the Piedmont in North Carolina underpinning the “Shelby Dynasty,” or the alliance of Big Mules in Birmingham and the Black B ­ elt planters dominating Alabama. Sometimes, the po­liti­cal divides w ­ ere clearly delineated and ­there ­were two factions, as in Louisiana, resembling a two-­party system. More often allegiances w ­ ere fluid and disorganized—­and generally functioned at the expense of the less well-­off.23 Among the have-­nots, African Americans ­were almost entirely disenfranchised by poll taxes, literacy tests, and hostile registrars. In eight states this disenfranchisement went further as primary elections ­were restricted only to white voters. But lower-­income whites ­were also barred from voting by the poll tax and registration requirements, just as the architects of the disfranchisement mea­sures of the 1890s had intended. As a result, ­those who ­were most likely to benefit from New Deal social welfare and economic reforms ­were the least likely to vote.24 Lister Hill summed up the dilemmas that the restricted electorate posed for white liberals. When he was elected to the Senate in 1938, less than 10 ­percent of the voting age population in Alabama voted. When ­Virginia Durr, his old friend from Montgomery and a founding member of the Southern Conference, approached him about abolishing the poll tax, Hill explained, “If you guarantee this ­thing ­will pass, I’ll vote for it ­because the kind of ­people that ­will be voting a­ fter the poll tax is off, t­ hey’ll be the kind of p ­ eople that ­will be voting for me. But ­unless you guarantee it’s ­going to pass the House and the Senate I ­can’t do it.”25 38

The New Deal

Many of the broad divides in state politics pitted lower-­income whites of the hill country against the establishment figures of the Black B ­ elt and the Delta. ­These lower-­income voters w ­ ere sometimes roused by demagogues who played on their suspicion of farm and business elites. A ­ fter all, as Devin Caughey has pointed out, the restricted electorate was not that restrictive: turnout in the South in primary elections was not much lower than it is ­today in percentage terms. Colorful demagogues mounting intense personal campaigns that stirred up lower-­income whites could sometimes win office throughout the 1920s and 1930s. But once elected, they rarely delivered what they had promised. Most turned out to be in­ effec­tive or corrupt or racist—­and sometimes all three. The lack of party organ­ization meant that ­these populist victories tended to be personal: they rarely saw their supporters elected to state legislatures at the same time. Established conservative forces could easily see off their challenges, with the notable exception of Huey Long, who established a power­ful organ­ization based on ruthless and systematic use of patronage, the threat of vio­lence—­and a popu­lar appeal cemented by his ability to deliver the roads and schools he had promised.26 An ­adopted son of Georgia by virtue of his rehabilitation home in Warm Springs, Roo­se­velt had an easy, bantering relationship with white southern politicians, and by and large, white southerners enthusiastically welcomed the federal largesse the New Deal delivered. FDR had cultivated southern leaders, particularly Cordell Hull of Tennessee, in the 1920s as he sought to move the Demo­ cratic Party in a more progressive direction, and in 1932 he was the candidate of the southern and western wings of the party. When his nomination was about to be blocked in Chicago in 1932, it was the offer of the vice presidency to Texas congressman John Nance 39

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

Garner, and Garner’s willingness to release his own del­e­ga­tions, that broke the deadlock. Denied control of the presidency for more than a de­cade, southern congressmen ­were anxious to get patronage and to establish a rec­ord. They chaired most of the major committees. John Sparkman of Alabama was scarcely exaggerating when he recalled that that practically e­ very New Deal mea­sure that was enacted into law was “sponsored by a Southerner and never could have been passed without the support of Southerners.”27 Some white southern politicians embraced the New Deal ­because their constituents w ­ ere so desperate for assistance they demanded that their representatives support the president. As Herman Talmadge, ­future militant segregationist and son of arch–­New Deal opponent Eugene Talmadge, recalled, “I ­don’t imagine you could have found a white man in Georgia that would have publicly admitted in 1932 that he was against Roo­se­velt.” Reactionary Mississippi congressman William Colmer, whose successor was Trent Lott, said of the 1934 election: At that time Roo­se­velt was possibly at the zenith of his ­career. ­People all over the country worshipped him, and I must confess that I was something of an admirer myself at the time, b ­ ecause we had to do something. I tied myself to Mr. Roo­se­velt. I recall I got out a chart, which I distributed, showing all the federal funds that had come out of the relief of ­people in my congressional district. I was bragging about all the federal funds that I had gotten for the district. . . . ​We started priming the pump, and we kept priming it in good years as well as bad years.

Kenneth Bindas interviewed 500 rural southerners, all born before 1920. Their response was “nearly universal adoration of Roo­se­velt and the New Deal.”28 40

The New Deal

Such was FDR’s popularity in 1936 that to be cast as lukewarm to the New Deal was the death knell for a southern politician. In North Carolina that year, a pro–­New Deal candidate, Ralph W. McDonald, challenged the Shelby Dynasty’s favored candidate, corporation l­ awyer Clyde Hoey. O. Max Gardner, former governor, textile millowner, and Washington lobbyist, watched with alarm and hurried back to Raleigh to take charge of the campaign: Clyde Hoey had not been in the campaign ten days ­until I realized that he could not win by devoting his efforts to a defense of the Ehringhaus administration [the out­going government] alone. I knew he had to liberalize his platform and extend his reach. McDonald was about to put us in the position in the public mind of being diluted in our devotion to Roo­se­velt. If he could have gotten this philosophy to stick we would have suffered a landslide in June as [Republican presidential candidate] Landon suffered in November.’29

In the Senate race that same year, incumbent Josiah Bailey had one of the most conservative voting rec­ords in the Senate. He had voted against federal relief spending and the Agricultural Adjustment Act in the Hundred Days and routinely said he could not support popu­lar New Deal legislation ­because of his oath to uphold the Constitution. He certainly took himself very seriously. As one critic said, he strutted even when sitting down. He chose the “hard way,” he claimed, just as Jesus Christ, Robert E. Lee, Moses, and Christopher Columbus had done. But he also knew that the New Deal was im­mensely popu­lar among his constituents, notably the tobacco farmers of eastern North Carolina, who had been rescued by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.30 41

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

Between 1934 and 1936, Bailey contented himself with voting for crippling amendments to New Deal mea­sures while regularly issuing statements full of personal praise for the president to pacify his constituents. He wrote fawning letters to FDR assuring him of the success of the New Deal and of his personal support. He worked hard to secure an invitation to second the president’s nomination at the National Convention in Philadelphia, where he gave what his nemesis Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, described as a “sugarcoating speech.” As Daniels told me, “Boy, did he make a fulsome speech about the ­great and good president.”31 One of the reasons why white southern politicians, normally conservative and anti–­federal government, could be so enthusiastic about the New Deal was that it appeared to leave segregation untouched. The New Deal did not challenge Black disfranchisement, although liberals did push an anti–­poll tax bill through the House at the start of the war. Roo­se­velt refused to make federal antilynching legislation a “must” piece of legislation. The Federal Housing Administration, established in 1934, effectively instituted housing segregation throughout the country. The local operation of New Deal programs, e­ ither by state government agencies or by local federal officials, routinely operated on a segregated basis. African Americans found it harder to get on the relief rolls than whites and ­were paid less both on relief and in federal works programs. The way jobs ­were classified u ­ nder the National Recovery Administration, and the regional wage differentials that ­were allowed, directly penalized the overwhelmingly Black unskilled workers in southern industries. Agricultural laborers and domestic servants, disproportionately Black, ­were excluded from the Social Security Act and from the Wages and Hours legislation. When urban lib42

The New Deal

erals in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration reinterpreted the cotton contract in 1935 to prevent tenant farmers from being displaced ­because of crop reduction, Henry Wallace and Chester Davis responded to the planter outcry by rescinding the order and purging most of the ­lawyers responsible for the opinion.32 As Alger Hiss, who survived the purge, pointed out to me, most of the ­lawyers who ­were dismissed went on to work in other parts of the New Deal. Victor Rotnem, prominent among them, was appointed the first head of the newly established Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department in 1939. Discrimination and exclusion ­were primarily racially motivated, but white tenant farmers and sharecroppers, whose numbers had been increasing, ­were also hit by the interpretation of the crop control contract. The ­whole thrust for social security came from national reformers whose prime concern was the male industrial worker. The federal-­state operation of unemployment insurance and categorical assistance programs to aid, for example, dependent c­ hildren, in the Social Security Act (which led to lower benefits in southern states than in the north) was the chosen preference of northern policy experts, not southerners on the key congressional committees. The exclusion of agricultural workers and domestic servants came likewise not from southern congressmen, but from the Trea­sury’s contention that it would be impossible to administer a program that included them. Three-­quarters of the ­people excluded ­were white.33 The lack of a threat to the racial status quo enabled conservatives like Senator Pat Harrison of Mississippi to champion federal aid to education, something l­ ater Mississippi politicians would not countenance. Harrison’s colleague William Colmer, so hostile ­later to federal government intervention, argued for a purely federal system of social security. Both believed a poor state like Mississippi could not afford to participate in programs that required matching money from the state. And both acknowledged that Mississippi’s 43

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

resources ­were inadequate to meet the welfare and educational needs of its ­people. Neither worried that strings would be attached to social security legislation that might threaten the combination of laws and local practices buttressing segregation.34 Some of the most notorious racists in the South w ­ ere ardent New Deal supporters. Theodore “The Man” Bilbo, champion of the hill country whites of Mississippi and b ­ itter e­nemy of the Delta planters, had an almost perfect New Deal voting rec­ord in the Senate ­after he was elected in 1934. As late as 1943, he was assuring national Demo­cratic leaders like Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania that “we whipped ‘the hell’ out of the leading anti-­Roosevelt, anti–New Deal candidate, including all the corporations” in the Mississippi gubernatorial election. The most enthusiastic supporter of the TVA and rural electrification was John Rankin, congressman from Tupelo, Mississippi, a vicious white supremacist and anti-Semite.35 Hugo Black of Alabama was one of the most aggressively pro– New Deal senators. Conservatives w ­ ere aghast when he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937. He would go on to be a staunch defender of civil liberties on the Court and part of the majority that would systematically destroy the institutions of white supremacy in the South, but in the 1920s he had been part of a pro-­ Klan faction in Alabama led by Bibb Graves. As a young l­awyer, he built his ­career on opposing monopolies and representing workers in personal injury suits against large corporations. He joined the Klan as the path to po­liti­cal success in Jefferson County. A member of the Birmingham Civitan Club, he l­ater said, “I would have joined any group if it helped get me votes.” For Black, the Klan represented precisely the plain ­people that his friend Klan leader Hiram Evans celebrated; ­these ­were the men he represented in court.

44

The New Deal

Black quietly resigned from the Klan shortly ­after he announced his candidacy for the US Senate in 1926, but his membership had not been perfunctory. He marched in Klan parades and gave at least one rip-­roaring speech dressed in full regalia. Two of his closest friends ­were Klansmen. The ­Grand Dragon of the Alabama Klan was his campaign man­ag­er, and he spoke at Klavern meetings. The crowds that heard him in the local court­house squares turned up ­because they knew he was the candidate of the Klan. Klan voters made up the vast majority of his support.36 Similarly in Georgia, ­Grand Titan of the Georgia Klan Eurith D. Rivers went on to become the successful New Deal candidate for governor in 1936, succeeding vicious racist anti–­New Dealer Eugene Talmadge. Robert Ramspeck, congressman from Atlanta, supporter of New Deal Wages and Hours legislation, House majority whip in World War II, and ­future vice president of Eastern Airlines, had also been a Klan member. And as late as 1941, Josephus Daniels, Roo­se­velt’s mentor as secretary of the navy u ­ nder Wilson and the owner of the fervently pro–­New Deal News and Observer, recalled with unapologetic pride his role in the violent white supremacy campaign in North Carolina in 1898 that recaptured the state for the Demo­crats, a campaign intensified by the Wilmington massacre. The most he conceded in his memoirs was that the newspaper had been “too cruel” “in its flagellations.”37 Southern governors and state legislators, whose local fiefdoms ­were more entrenched, could afford to be less responsive to change than southern congressmen. ­There ­were few “­little New Deals” in the South, even if state politicians ­were elected on a pro–­New Deal ticket. Eurith Rivers in Georgia telephoned a po­liti­cal ally the day ­after his election as governor in 1936 to ask for help. “I got elected ­because I said I was ­going to provide for old age pensions and a lot

45

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

of other welfare programs,” he said, “but I d ­ on’t know a t­ hing about it. How about fixing me up a welfare program?”38 Most southern governors cooperated with varying degrees of enthusiasm with New Deal programs that relied so heavi­ly on state agencies to administer them. They fought hard to get their po­liti­cal appointees to run the project-­and the patronage-­rich Works Pro­ gress Administration in their states. ­There ­were modestly pro–­New Deal governors in Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, and even ­Virginia, but ­there was a time lag in the po­liti­cal impact of the New Deal at the state level. In Mississippi, it was not ­until 1939 that the state had sufficiently healthy finances to invest in public education in a major way ­under Paul Johnson Sr. In Georgia, when Ellis Arnall was elected in 1942, he benefited from the favorable financial position of the state to enact a ten-­point reform program. As in Mississippi, much centered on education and, in Georgia’s case, the establishment of a teachers’ pension fund. But Arnall also abolished the poll tax, lowered the voting age, reformed the prison system, and modernized the state government, securing constitutional checks on the power of governors and installing a merit system for state employees. He led the successful fight against freight rate discrimination at a time when reduced transport costs w ­ ere a precondition for industrial growth in the South.39 Still, the general pattern of state politics was much the same in the South as it was for most states across the nation. New Deal spending enabled state governments to get their own Depression-­ ravaged finances in order, rather than stimulating new initiatives. Retrenchment and regressive taxation—­notably sales taxes—­was the standard response. As in the nation as a ­whole, southern state governments increasingly looked to sales taxes as a source of revenue. Taxpayers Leagues, concerned particularly about the burden of property taxes during the Depression, exerted greater pressure

46

The New Deal

in many states for economy in government rather than greater spending.40 White southern enthusiasm for the New Deal reflected the sheer scale of the economic emergency facing the region. Politicians responded to the demands of their white constituents for relief and the new sources of largesse and spending the federal government offered. The loyalty to both FDR and the New Deal would be tested once the economic emergency abated and African Americans responded to both the New Deal and a world war.

47

chap ter two

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

White southern enthusiasm for much of the New Deal was partly predicated on the assumption that Roo­se­velt’s administration would, in practice, do ­little to upset traditional patterns of race relations in the South. But African Americans saw the possibilities in the 1930s, especially ­after the start of World War II, of a new racial order. Conservative whites, always sensitive to real or ­imagined threats to white supremacy, could see the warning signs from the late 1930s onward. It has become customary to talk of a long civil rights movement. But eco­nom­ically and po­liti­cally powerless African Americans had few levers to pull in the 1930s to secure redress for their grievances. As one rural ­woman recalled, “­Wasn’t nothing you could do about it, you ­couldn’t say nothing.” Another put it more bluntly: “If they had talked out like . . . ​the young do now, somebody was ­going to get hung.”1 For all the president’s apparent indifference to civil rights, many African Americans in the South came to see Roo­se­velt as their hero. Ruby Barlow remembered that whites commiserated with her when FDR died, saying, “Y’all’s president is dead.” New Deal programs may have been discriminatory, but the assistance on offer surpassed what cash-­strapped state governments had been able to 48

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

provide for Blacks in the Depression, and what the federal government had been willing to do in the past.2 Civil rights had not been an issue for national po­liti­cal leaders in the 1920s, and they did not loom large in liberal discourse. But the Communist Party had started challenging Amer­ic­ a’s claim to be a bastion of freedom, and Communist involvement in the Scottsboro case in 1931 raised the bar for the NAACP. It was time for the organ­ization, as Charles Houston exhorted, “to go home to the South.” His Howard-­trained l­egal vanguard fanned out across the region in an effort to persuade locals to form NAACP branches, register to vote, and initiate teacher salary equalization suits.3 Some southern Black leaders had real hope for the ­future. They had seen the federal government intervene to transform the region’s economy. Perhaps it could also intervene to change the region’s race relations. Although that might have seemed a distant prospect, ­there w ­ ere now additional levers for Black leaders to pull. In the 1934 election, African Americans in northern cities had switched away from their historic loyalty to the Republican Party and flocked to the Demo­cratic Party in gratitude for the assistance given to the urban poor, administered in a relatively nondiscriminatory way. This gave some po­liti­cal muscle to the new national civil rights co­ali­ tion, which came together for the first time in the 1930s, consisting of New Deal liberals, or­ga­nized ­labor, radicals, and the NAACP. The New Deal might not have passed civil rights legislation, but its racially inclusive Federal Art Proj­ect and war­time media programs showed, as one scholar has put it, that the Roo­se­velt administration was the first to “recognize publicly that African Americans mattered as citizens.”4 That which Black leaders hoped for, southern white conservatives feared. If ­there was a long civil rights movement, ­there was also a long massive re­sis­tance movement that can be traced back to the 1930s, a strategy designed to preempt the possibility of national 49

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

interference in segregation and white supremacy. Before the 1930s, conservative white southerners could assume that the federal government would not intervene in the region’s race relations. From the 1930s on, they could not be so sure.5 From the start t­ here had been southern critics of the New Deal. In the Senate, t­ hese anti–­New Deal votes mostly reflected a belief in ­limited government, free-­market economics, and a balanced bud­get and primarily criticized the New Deal on economic grounds. But some industrialists from the Southern States Industrial Council set their sights on the efforts of the National Recovery Administration to maintain standardized wage levels, pointing to the danger that white workers might have to work alongside African Americans who would be getting the same wages. ­These industrialists ­were happy to bankroll racist critics of the New Deal like Eugene Talmadge and Gerald  L.  K. Smith, who had no qualms about fueling the jealousies and indignation of poor whites against any assistance to Blacks.6 Classic southern demagogues w ­ ere soon whipping up racial fears. Huey Long was a notable exception, though his racial moderation has been exaggerated. Still, he eschewed racist appeals in his attacks on Roo­se­velt, preferring to focus on bailouts to bankers and industrialists and the failure to redistribute wealth to his poor constituents. Long largely avoided race-­baiting in his campaigns and routinely claimed that both Blacks and whites benefited from his programs. He criticized New Deal crop control programs ­because they harmed Black tenant farmers, and attacked the federal-­state operation of social security ­because he feared that local control would exclude Black workers from the programs. But t­ here is no evidence that Black families benefited much from Long’s educational and public works programs. When he abolished the poll tax, it gave an additional 200,000 whites access to the vote, but

50

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

only 500 Blacks, who, in any case, could not vote in the white primaries. Huey Long was not above racially smearing his opponents, but his racial rhe­toric was small change and never the core of his campaigns.7 Eugene Talmadge suffered no such inhibitions. His power base lay in the galluses-­wearing farmers of Georgia, who wielded disproportionate power thanks to the county unit system, which gave small rural counties greater weight in statewide elections than the state’s heavi­ly populated cities. Talmadge claimed he never wanted to win a county that had a streetcar line. He tapped into rural resentment of city folks, particularly Atlanta urbanites, and fanned their raw racism. He was also unremitting in his scorn for the crippled president and his Negro-­loving wife. Talmadge raged against supposed racial favoritism and race-­mixing by New Deal agencies and complained that New Deal relief programs paid African Americans higher wages than Georgia planters could afford, offering them over a dollar a day and thus luring them away from picking cotton at fifty cents a day. ­Later, he would attempt to purge the University of Georgia of faculty who ­were communists, “foreigners” (by which he meant non-­Georgians), and subscribers to racial equality. For all his championing of poor farmers, his agrarian crusade was bankrolled by right-­wing industrialists from both North and South.8 Mainstream southern politicians condemned Talmadge not ­because they w ­ ere ­eager for racial change, but b ­ ecause they thought he was conjuring up threats to the racial status quo that simply did not exist. In 1936, white southern support for FDR trumped any racial fears. Both Senators Richard Russell of Georgia and James Byrnes of South Carolina triumphed over white supremacy challengers (in Russell’s case, Talmadge himself ) and professed their undying support of the New Deal. James Byrnes’s opponents did

51

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

not mince their words in spelling out the apocalyptic f­ uture promised by their foes: they mailed postcards claiming that “A Vote for Roo­se­velt and Byrnes ­will mean the day is coming close when dirty, evil-­smelling Negroes w ­ ill be ­going to church with you, your ­sister, your wife, or your ­mother. Buses, trains, ­hotels, picture shows, bathing beaches w ­ ill all see Negroes rubbing shoulders with you.” Race-­baiting was of l­imited appeal: Byrnes won with the largest majority in the history of South Carolina’s Demo­ cratic primaries.9 But three developments gave southern conservatives pause and encouraged them to link economic and racial concerns. First, the shift to the Demo­cratic Party of Black voters in northern cities meant that northern Demo­crats might now start pandering to this new constituency. Second, the abolition in 1936 of the rule that required that a successful candidate for the Demo­cratic presidential nomination obtain a two-­thirds majority at the Demo­cratic National Convention meant that the South would no longer have a veto over the nomination. And third, it was increasingly becoming clear that New Deal mea­sures ­were likely to remain in place for the long term. For many middle-­class southerners, by 1936 the economic emergency of the Depression was over—­agricultural and industrial recovery had come, and the danger of a revolt by have-­ nots seemed to have passed. Was it not time to start phasing out federal support?10 Southern congressmen began to voice concerns that certain New Deal programs—­the Fair ­Labor Standards Act, the Housing Act, even relief spending programs—­were geared to northern constituencies and meant to help or­ga­nized ­labor, the urban poor, ethnic minorities, and African Americans. At the local level, county seat elites in the South worried that the New Deal programs threatened traditional patterns of patronage and de­pen­dency. Rural poverty programs might mean that tenants and sharecroppers would 52

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

no longer depend on landlords for credit. L ­ abor legislation lessened the bonds of de­pen­dency between employer and worker. Josiah Bailey of North Carolina captured t­ hese concerns in his Conservative Manifesto, drafted in 1937, which became the touchstone of the bipartisan co­ali­tion of southern Demo­crats and Republicans that would stymie extensions of the New Deal for a quarter of a c­ entury. Safely reelected the previous year on a pro–­New Deal ticket, Bailey had privately indicated that he would fight any expansion of the New Deal. He reasoned that Roo­se­velt, in his second term, would have left office by the time he next had to face the electorate, so he no longer had to appease the president.11 Bailey passionately deplored FDR’s attempt to liberalize the Supreme Court by “packing the court” with extra judges and he joined a bipartisan strategy group that aimed to block it. No one more stridently attacked sit-­down strikes or continued spending on relief. He particularly targeted Harry Hopkins for his brazen attempts to use relief spending to influence elections (an ironic charge, given the way the WPA had been used on Bailey’s behalf in his last election). Bailey’s volte-­face was too much for Jonathan Daniels, the editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, who printed, day ­after day, on the editorial page Bailey’s speech nominating FDR in 1936, a move Daniels proudly likened to “Chinese ­water torture.”12 The Conservative Manifesto proposed classic fiscally conservative, low tax, states’ rights policies, which it claimed would unlock the private investment that would get the country out of the “Roo­ se­velt Recession.” Unemployment rates had recently soared a­ fter FDR had attempted to rein in spending and balance the bud­get. Business confidence depended on the strict maintenance of the sanctity of property and the rights of capital. High capital gains taxes and undistributed profits taxes, the Manifesto argued, deterred private investment. Government competition with private enterprise also inhibited growth. The Manifesto was a forthright 53

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

statement of the free-­market business opposition to the New Deal that would continue to be a cornerstone of modern Republican conservatism.13 The Conservative Manifesto did not directly address race, but Bailey had powerfully ingrained race-­based fears. He and Car­ter Glass of ­V irginia ­were concerned that Supreme Court reform would result in a raft of new decisions striking down the ­legal basis for segregation. The New Deal had left the racial status quo intact, but Bailey and Glass feared that a Roo­se­velt Court would undermine white supremacy and segregation. It seemed an improbable fear at the time, but Roo­se­velt did appoint the judges who upheld the civil rights decisions that ultimately produced the Brown decision of 1954. In 1941, the Justice Department filed its first amicus curia brief on behalf of an African American plaintiff. The brief, in support of a suit against segregation in interstate transportation, turned out to be the first of many pro–­civil rights briefs.14 With the shift of northern Black voters away from the Republican Party, southern Demo­crats worried that their northern counter­ parts would now compete for the votes of African Americans in northern cities and they would find themselves in a minority. The passage of the Fair L ­ abor Standards Act, establishing minimum wages and maximum hours, and the passage in the House of an antilynching bill the following year confirmed their worst fears. When Roo­se­velt attempted to purge conservative southern senators in the 1938 Demo­cratic primaries, they fought back. Conservative candidates raised the specter of Reconstruction and explic­itly brought up race, assisted by southerners who had seemed to be Roo­se­velt loyalists. Walter George, whose campaign in Georgia was secretly masterminded by the former North Carolina governor O. Max Gardner, invoked the horrors of Radical Reconstruction. Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina, secretly assisted by Roo­se­velt’s legislative leader Jimmy Byrnes, invoked the memory of the Red Shirts who had restored white rule in South 54

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

Carolina in the 1890s. On the day before the election, Smith proudly wore a red shirt. He could not have been more explicit if he had worn a white hood and Klan regalia.15 Roo­se­velt’s inability to unseat Smith and George did not mean that the president was unpop­u­lar in the South. To secure a po­liti­cal realignment on ideological grounds required long-­term, consistent intervention. ­Because FDR had worked with power­ful southerners in Congress to secure his initial New Deal legislation, he had inadvertently strengthened their position through the distribution of patronage and the allocation of proj­ects. Aspiring pro–­New Deal challengers ­were frustrated. As two New Dealers in North Carolina complained to James Farley, FDR’s campaign man­ag­er, postmaster general, and chair of the Demo­cratic National Committee, “With a few exceptions ­those who control and direct the Party machinery are ­either outright against the president or very indifferent ­toward his election . . . ​yet the New Deal is continuously recognizing known anti–­New Dealers as its spokesmen in the State.” By 1938, it was difficult to find candidates who ­were both unequivocally pro–­New Deal and had local support, name recognition, and an organ­ization ­behind them.16 By 1940, the lines ­were clearly drawn between southern conservatives and southern liberals on the one hand, and southern conservatives and the national Demo­crats on the other. By now, the two factions ­were divided by economic and racial differences. New Deal reforms threatened the conservative model of economic modernization for the South, which hinged on attracting low-­wage industries to the region. And it was increasingly clear that New Dealers would also threaten the racial status quo. The long massive re­sis­tance had begun. When Roo­se­velt told socialist leader Norman Thomas that he should be patient, t­here was a new generation of southerners 55

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

coming along, he was partly thinking of the young men he saw around him in Washington: Clark Foreman at the Temporary National Economic Committee; Clifford Durr at the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; Brooks Hays, Beanie Baldwin, and ­Will Alexander at the Farm Security Administration; Frank Porter Graham on the National Recovery Administration and Social Security Advisory Boards; Lyndon Johnson at the National Youth Administration; Aubrey Williams at the Works Pro­gress Administration; and ­women like Harriet Elliott and Ellen Woodward, key figures in consumer protection and work relief. New Deal relief agencies had been the first to uncover the full dimensions of rural poverty. It was the southerners in the federal agencies in Washington and social scientists at Chapel Hill who had pulled the data together for the report on the South that had convinced the president that tackling southern poverty should be one of his principal economic goals. The report had inspired the attempted purge and triggered the formation of the Southern Conference for H ­ uman Welfare. H ­ ere was a modernization strategy from the bottom up. The key was the creation of mass purchasing power through rural poverty programs and tenancy legislation, minimum wage legislation, extended welfare benefits, and the protection of trade u ­ nion organizers. Economic democracy would have to go hand in hand with po­liti­cal democracy: abolishing the poll tax would enfranchise southern have-­nots, and it was hoped that ­these new lower-­income voters would support New Deal–­style policy initiatives.17 ­Women played a key role in the New Deal relief agencies in the South. It is sometimes assumed that in a region where traditional notions of white womanhood ­were most deep-­rooted and where opposition to ­women’s suffrage had been most entrenched, ­women failed to take advantage of the vote, and remained in essentially domestic roles. Yet ­women’s suffrage added a million votes to a re56

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

stricted electorate in the 1920s and successfully lobbied for the creation of departments of public welfare. The transformation of welfare provision in the South ­under the New Deal owed a huge amount to ­women reformers. The only two ­women directors of the Relief Administration in the country w ­ ere in the South—­North Carolina and Georgia. In both cases they fought a hard ­battle to insist on the on the nonpartisan administration of relief in the face of patronage-­hungry male Demo­cratic politicians. They ­were backed by Mississippi’s Ellen Woodward in Washington. It was ­women who led the campaign against lynching. It was ­women like ­Virginia Durr and Martha Ragland who led the campaign against the poll tax. It was North Carolinians Harriet Elliott and Gladys Tillett who became significant figures in national Demo­cratic Party politics. It was Lucy Randolph Mason who led the ­battle for the National Consumers’ League to raise l­abor standards in the South and then worked for the CIO to bring industrial u ­ nionism to the South. Progressive ­women ­were at the heart of any New Deal strategy to modernize the region from the bottom up.18 Beyond the young, idealistic men and ­women staffing his New Deal agencies, Roo­se­velt could also look to a new generation of congressmen elected in the 1930s. They came from the hill country—­ Lyndon Johnson and Lindley Beckworth ­were from rural Texas, Albert Gore from the mountains of Tennessee, John Sparkman from north Alabama, Clyde Ellis in northern Arkansas—­and all ­were passionate about the TVA, public power, and rural electrification. ­Others came from southern cities—­Albert Thomas from Houston, Estes Kefauver from Chattanooga, Luther Patrick from Birmingham, and Percy Priest from Nashville. ­These urbanites favored New Deal infrastructure proj­ects and welfare programs and ­were relatively close to or­ga­nized ­labor. None of them came from the Black B ­ elt. They w ­ ere young TVA liberals: they had faith that the federal government could effectively transform the South, just 57

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

as the Tennessee Valley Authority had transformed a river valley. Unlike their elders, they w ­ ere issue-­oriented, rather than patronage-­ oriented politicians. They espoused a “common man” appeal to seek the support of lower-­income voters. Instead of relying on the court­house gangs, they campaigned tirelessly at isolated crossroads, and not just in the county seats.19 In 1938, Albert Gore ran for an open seat in M ­ iddle Tennessee against five candidates who had already held local offices. He crisscrossed his district—no mean task as it was one of the largest congressional districts east of the Mississippi. All the candidates proclaimed their loyalty to the New Deal. How could he distinguish himself in that group? Gore recognized that if he wanted to attract crowds, pack the rural schools, and get 2,000 at the meetings in the county seats, he needed more than his speaking ability—­ though he was known for speaking “loudly and forcefully,” as one listener recalled. He needed to provide some sort of entertainment. So he paid a group of youngsters who played the guitar and banjo to sing at meetings, and he joined them on the fiddle. Gore played an acceptable fiddle, learned at hoedowns in Possum Hollow where he grew up. Larry Richards, whose f­ather was superintendent of schools in Woodbury, in Cannon County, remembered that Gore would “go around to all the ­little country stores and what­ever and get out his fiddle and play it.” When he was due in Woodbury, the word would get out through the county newspaper, and “He would stand on the court­house steps and make a speech and ­there would be several hundred p ­ eople who would gather round the court­house yard and hear him.” In pre-­television days, many of ­those who lived out of town did not even have a radio ­because they d ­ idn’t have electricity. Gore’s “­little road show” was “a source of entertainment,” and it brought out the p ­ eople of Woodbury. Crowds when he spoke on Saturdays ranged from 2,000 to

58

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

4,000. In one week, he made thirty-­four speeches to an estimated 20,000 listeners.20 The strategy of circumventing the county seat elites and carry­ing his case to the ­people had also been pursued by Lyndon Johnson in 1937, overturning the “leisurely pace normal in Texas elections.” When Gore was crisscrossing his district in Tennessee, Lindley Beckworth was reaching e­ very voter in his Texas district by making ten speeches a day. He was funded by a $1,000 note signed by twenty-­five of his townsfolk. His headquarters was a room in his ­father’s ­house with no telephone. He had no money for newspaper advertisements and could only afford hand-­painted signs, so he used two cars with crude public address systems: one borrowed and one bought on installment. Gore and Beckworth w ­ ere foreshadowing the campaign style of ­later candidates who had neither name recognition nor well-­financed campaigns, like Jim Folsom in Alabama in 1946 and Estes Kefauver in Tennessee in 1948. ­Later, candidates would walk 1,000 miles across their states to attract attention and better connect with the electorate—­like Lawton Chiles in Florida in 1970, and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee in 1978.21 But it was a mea­sure of rural parochialism that the most distinctive issue Gore campaigned on was not the New Deal but immigration. Gore attacked aliens, “the seven to nine million foreigners in the United States” who ­were “being supported by the American taxpayer.” They w ­ ere not schooled in democracy, he warned, and ­were “possessed of vari­ous concepts of government to which they attempt to convert Amer­i­ca.” They ­were taking jobs that should have gone to American citizens: “We already have too much unemployment,” he cried out “—­too many traitors to Americanism.” ­After his first campaign speech, immigration was identified by reporters as his strongest point. In his early days in Congress, Gore

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A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

would go on to praise the “splendid work” of the Dies Un-­American Activities Committee, lament the fact that American taxpayers supported “thousands of foreigners on the WPA rolls,” and ask why should “alien enemies, dope peddlers, prostitutes, criminals, ­etc., be turned ­free to further promote debauchery and subversiveness.” He made his name in Congress attacking spending on public housing, supporting the Dies Committee, and opposing any moves to relax immigration controls to offer citizenship or refuge to t­ hose who had served in the allied armies in World War I. Back in his district, he celebrated Tennessee’s Anglo-­Saxon stock, which he claimed was 99.5 ­percent native-­born and which he believed would “offset the unfortunate infiltration of inferior foreign blood in other regions.” You might think you ­were listening to Donald Trump.22 Yet this racial chauvinism did not stop Gore from becoming one of the most liberal congressmen from the South over the next thirty years. He was part of a southern voting bloc that Ira Katznelson has identified as more committed to progressive taxation, welfare provision, business regulation, infrastructure spending, and public power than any congressmen in any other part of the country. The southerners supported the national Demo­cratic Party’s “social demo­cratic agenda with a level of enthusiasm appropriate to a poor region with a heritage of opposition to big business and a history of support for regulation and re­distribution.”23 One of the first Gallup polls, conducted in 1937, asked white southerners: if they had to choose between a conservative party and a liberal party, which would they prefer? Sixty-­seven ­percent chose the liberal party: the highest figure for liberal support of any region in the country. We also know from ­those polls that a majority of white southerners supported Supreme Court reform and minimum wage legislation. LBJ’s success in the primaries in 1937 seemed to confirm popu­lar support for Court reform. He had campaigned as a fervent supporter of FDR’s proposal. Lister Hill’s and Claude 60

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

Peppers’s primary successes in Alabama and Florida seemed to suggest that t­here was popu­lar support for the Fair L ­ abor Standards Act, the minimum wage legislation first sponsored by Hill’s pre­ de­ces­sor, Hugo Black. Both Hill and Pepper indicated they would support the bill.24 But by the end of the de­cade, ­labor issues w ­ ere beginning to trou­ble southern congressmen. In 1935, southern congressmen had voted with surprising equanimity for the Wagner Act, which guaranteed the right of collective bargaining and outlawed a host of anti-­union practices. Union organ­ization seemed at that time mainly to be a northern phenomenon, as the textile general strike of 1934 had been soundly defeated. But sit-­down strikes in 1937 alarmed some who deplored what they saw as the infringement of private property rights to which the government had turned a blind eye. ­Others believed that the minimum wage / maximum hours legislation of 1938 threatened the competitiveness of the low-­wage South and may have been an entering wedge for Black workers to receive the same wages as white workers. The newly formed Congress of Industrial Organ­izations (CIO), with its commitment to racial equality, seemed far more threatening than the conservative craft ­unions of the American Federation of ­Labor. Significant numbers of southern congressmen voted to investigate the sit-­down strikes and the National ­Labor Relations Board and voted against the Fair ­Labor Standards Act. If southern liberals did not share the hysterical fear of u ­ nions that southern industrialists and some of their more conservative congressional colleagues manifested, they nevertheless tended to share a small-­ town suspicion of outside ­labor organizers.25 As for race, most southern voters simply thought that economic issues ­were more impor­tant. ­There ­were few Black farmers in the Tennessee hill country. Albert Gore’s mentor, cir­cuit judge Clint Beesley in Smith County, thought that the South had been wrong 61

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

on the Civil War: it was wrong to fight for planters and slavery. In the cities, congressmen viewed the small number of African Americans voting in local elections with equanimity and enjoyed nonthreatening relations with college presidents, high school principals, and members of the small Black ­middle class.26 Most southern liberal politicians believed that the economic mea­sures they supported would yield improvement for both ordinary whites and Blacks. What they did not envisage was any change in racial segregation. In this, they ­were no dif­fer­ent from most southern progressives. As Morton Sosna and John Kneebone have shown, liberal journalists and academics w ­ ere committed to the view that racial changes would best come slowly. They believed they knew what African Americans wanted, which is to say the continuation of segregation, and ­were convinced that outside intervention from the federal government in racial m ­ atters would be counterproductive. It was on the goodwill of whites like t­ hese, especially in the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, that African American educators and community leaders had to rely for the redress of their grievances and protection of appropriations targeted by cost-­cutting state legislatures during the Depression.27 ­Those who stayed in the South during the 1930s tended to remain fixed in this mindset. For all the clear-­eyed analy­sis of Black poverty by his institute, Howard Odum was dead set against desegregating gradu­ate education in the aftermath of the Gaines decision. He was convinced that it was dangerous to upset what he called the “folkways” of the region. The liberals who moved to Washington ­were much more likely to embrace racial change. When men like ­W ill Alexander, Aubrey Williams, and Clifford Durr took their new perspective back to the South a­ fter leaving the administration, they found themselves virtual outcasts at home.28

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Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

On the far left, ­labor ­union organizers, radical New Dealers, the NAACP, and the Communists saw local interracial organ­izing in the workplace and at the ballot box as the key to racial change, but ­these dissenters mostly had to leave the South to develop their ideas. Many whites involved in ­these organ­izations—­the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Commonwealth College, the Highlander Folk School, and the Southern Conference for H ­ uman Welfare—­ would resurface in the 1960s to assist in the civil rights movement. But they scarcely impacted southern politicians at the state level or in Congress in the 1930s. ­Virginia Durr summed up the mindset of ­these radicals. While liberal politicians privileged economic change to change the South, she reflected, her circle of reformers was convinced that “The only way to change the South was to change the race question.”29 Late in life, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reflected that disagreements over American intervention in World War II provoked “the most savage po­liti­cal debate in my lifetime.” That may have been true of Mas­ sa­chu­setts, but it was certainly not true of the South, where that debate simply did not take place. In the white community, support for Britain and the Allies crossed the ideological divides, and some of the most conservative critics of the president ­were the keenest to get into a “shooting war.” But southern conservatives had very dif­fer­ent hopes than liberals of how the war would shape the region.30 Morton Sosna has provocatively argued that World War II may have had a greater impact on the South than the Civil War. The po­liti­cal clout of southerners on the Armed Ser­vices Committees of the House and Senate, combined with a propitious climate and abundance of cheap l­abor, ensured that the South benefited

63

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

disproportionately from military spending. It was alleged that when Roo­se­velt asked Senate Appropriations Committee chair Kenneth McKellar to hide the appropriation that would fund the secret atomic development program, the Tennessee senator replied that he would be happy to oblige, but added, “Just where in Tennessee would the new fa­cil­i­ty be located?” The answer was Oak Ridge.31 By the end of the war, almost two-­thirds of the army and navy bases ­were located in the South. The barren terrain, the available land, and the po­liti­cal clout of southern congressmen made areas like Eastern North Carolina attractive for training camps. Almost a quarter of the new manufacturing plants for the defense effort ­were built in the South. Initially defense contracts went to established northern and western firms, but the surplus l­abor force and military concern to decentralize operations gave the South its opportunities. Aircraft firms like McDonnell, Vultee, and Bell set up plants in the South, and the US Maritime Commission built five of its eleven shipyards ­there. In 1939, Andrew Higgins operated a small shallow-­draught boat com­pany of 400 workers in New Orleans. By 1944, he employed 20,000 workers building Liberty ships and planes.32 The war launched the South into self-­sustaining economic growth by creating mass consumer purchasing power for the first time in the region. The 1938 report on economic conditions in the South had said that “the purchasing power of the southern ­people does not provide an adequate market for its own industries nor an attractive market for t­hose of the rest of the country.” Just over ten years l­ater, the National Planning Association survey concluded that “the major force attracting plants to the South in recent years has been the growing volume of expenditures of both final consumers and industry. As the market becomes large enough to sup-

64

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

port an economic sized plant, a new plant can be established to capitalize on the advantage of nearness to the market.”33 ­These changes should not be exaggerated. The South lagged ­behind other regions in securing prime defense contracts. Most of the federal money it received came in the form of spending on personnel, not on manufacturing contracts, and while spending continued into the 1950s thanks to the Korean War, some production, particularly in shipyards, dis­appeared as quickly as it had arrived. While federal spending on military facilities and the defense industry continued with the Cold War, supplemented by spending on the space program, some communities became completely dependent on one firm, like Lockheed in Marietta or Ingalls in Pascagoula, making them vulnerable to ­later downturns. It was traditional industries, not new ones, that grew most during the war. Established urban centers saw most of the population growth, not the smaller towns.34 The creation of new urban jobs encouraged rural farm workers, Black and white, to leave the land and move to both southern and northern cities. High cotton prices gave planters the capital to mechanize, and the l­abor shortage gave them the incentive to do so. First they brought tractors, then cotton harvesters. During the war, the gigantic Delta Pine and Land Corporation started to pull down the tenant shacks on its Mississippi plantations. Urban consumers provided the market that would justify the diversification of southern farms into dairy production and chicken farming. Rural electrification eliminated the drudgery of much of farm life, but it also enabled further mechanization. Eventually chickens would replace cotton as the number one source of farm income in Mississippi. This pro­cess started in World War II.35 But that would all come ­later. During the war, as cotton boomed, so did the textile industry thanks to government demand for

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A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

military uniforms. Southern textile workers secured eight pay raises during the war. In percentage terms, their pay r­ ose more than that of any other group of mass production workers. Millowners started selling off their mill villages, and newly prosperous workers ­were fi­nally in a position to buy their own homes. New industries moved South, attracted by the cheap power and w ­ ater resources made pos­ si­ble by the TVA. Vanderbilt po­liti­cal scientist H. C. Nixon heralded TVA’s prime role in bringing “high-­class industrial plants to the South.” Forty-­one ­percent of the nation’s synthetic rubber capacity was in Texas. Steel also moved to southeast Texas. As industries moved, so trade ­unions recognized both the need and the opportunity to seek a foothold in a hitherto staunchly anti-­union stronghold. War­time prosperity enabled southern states to participate fully for the first time in the matching funds programs of the new welfare state. Southern states could afford to increase their spending on unemployment insurance and the categorical assistance programs for the el­derly and for dependent c­ hildren u ­ nder 36 Social Security. How did ­these developments affect racial change? Historians have long emphasized the Double V campaign waged by African American veterans and racial leaders back home, calling for victory over fascism overseas and over fascism at home. Madison Jones, field secretary for the NAACP, reported from the South that African Americans had “change[d] almost instantly from a fundamentally defensive attitude to one of offense.”37 The war gave Black leaders the leverage they lacked in the 1930s. Manpower shortages enabled them to make participation in the war effort conditional on concessions by the federal government. Faced with a threatened march on Washington in 1941 instigated by ­union leader A. Philip Randolph, Roo­se­velt signed Executive 66

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

Order 8802, promising to end discrimination (but not segregation) in hiring in the military and defense factories. African Americans joined the NAACP in southern cites and registered to vote. Then the NAACP won its ­battle to end the white primary with the Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision of 1944. Northern migration during the war years strengthened the po­liti­cal leverage that Black voters could exercise over the national Demo­cratic Party. African Americans who served in the military might be frustrated by the racist abuse they received, but ser­vice in the North and overseas raised their expectations of what a nonsegregated world might be like. The army also taught them, as Robert F. Williams would ­later point out, how to use arms.38 Southern white liberals argued that neutralizing domestic fascists and protecting African Americans was crucial to the full mobilization of resources to defeat Hitler. But they ­were shocked to discover that “what the Negro wants,” as educators Mary McLeod Bethune and Gordon Blaine Hancock made clear in an explosive book of that title, was the end of segregation. William Terry Couch, the publisher of the University of North Carolina Press, who had conceived of the volume as a liberal contribution to improved race relations, had courage as a publisher, but he was appalled by the essays that African American scholar Rayford Logan had solicited. As the ­Virginia newspaperman Virginius Dabney warned him, the Negro had changed as a result of the war. White reviewers for the UNC Press, including Howard Odum, convinced Couch that the race leaders who had penned t­ hese essays did not reflect ­people’s true beliefs. Faced by the threat of ­legal action if the UNC Press did not publish, Couch fi­nally released the volume, but he wrote a tortured introduction in which he sought to explain what, to his mind, Negroes ­really wanted. Couch, like Odum, was convinced that demands for immediate and drastic change would only harden white re­sis­tance.39 67

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

Just as the long civil rights movement was matched by a long massive re­sis­tance, so the Double V campaign was matched by a white supremacist counterpart. No one was more militant in getting Amer­i­ca into war than southern conservatives. But they argued that the purpose of defeating Hitler overseas was to defend democracy for whites at home. Democracy at home meant the right to preserve segregation. As Alabama newspaper editor John T ­ emple Graves put it, this was a war for states’ rights, “for the right of individual lands not to be invaded by outsiders, to be dictated to or aggressed against.”40 Conservatives now saw threats to segregation at ­every turn. ­These damaged the war effort, they argued. The Fair Employment Practices Committee designed to implement FDR’s executive order was a par­tic­u­lar demon. The FEPC, led by southern moderates, in fact bent over backward to avoid coercive intervention in the southern workplace and to assuage the sensitivities of white workers. Its first chair, Louisville newspaperman Mark Ethridge, explic­itly ruled out any attempt to end segregation. But southern conservatives ­were afraid that it would undermine white workers and upend traditional southern racial practices.41 Conservatives deplored the be­hav­ior of Black troops from the North in the overcrowded towns near the southern military bases. They disparaged their fighting skills, while bemoaning the fact that whites ­were drafted from the farms, leaving African Americans at home. They w ­ ere appalled at the drive to eliminate the poll tax and the prospect of a federally regulated Soldiers’ Vote. They w ­ ere alert to any breakdown of segregation in the military and attacked or­ga­nized ­labor for its war­time militancy. The abolition of New Deal agencies like the WPA and the passage of restrictive ­labor legislation that foreshadowed the passage of the Taft-­Hartley Act ­after the war ­were all justified as part of what was, in effect, a white Double V campaign. Whereas African Americans saw reform as 68

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

essential to defeat Hitler, conservatives saw reform as a hindrance to that outcome.42 In the end, it was the push to u ­ nionize ­labor that moved the center of gravity among southern congressmen to the right. In the 1930s, the threat of trade ­unions appeared distant. ­W hether it was on the New Orleans docks or in the Birmingham steel mills and packing ­houses, determined re­sis­tance from the captains of industry saw the threat off. But this was not so s­ imple during the war. A tight l­abor market, the need for continuous production to meet the war­time demand, and the protection of the federal government made ­union gains pos­si­ble. As one textile ­union or­ga­nizer said, “It has been in the last four years a relatively s­ imple ­matter to or­ga­nize plants and to get them u ­ nder contract . . . ​­there c­ an’t be much wrong with a ­union like that.”43 ­Labor could sometimes flex its muscles and defeat long-­standing conservative enemies. In 1944, rubber workers helped Albert Rains defeat Joe Starnes, a vocal member of the House Un-­American Activities Committee from Gadsden, Alabama. Two years l­ater, textile workers in Georgia enabled Henderson Lanham to defeat Malcolm Tarver, the power­ful chair of the agricultural subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, a fierce anti-­communist and opponent of or­ga­nized l­abor. But t­hese victories came at a price.44 War­time strikes, which disrupted defense production, moved popu­lar opinion to the right according to opinion polls in the South. Conservative politicians seized on the chance to portray strikers as unpatriotic, and rural congressmen tended to agree. Southern congressmen overwhelmingly supported the Smith-­Connally War ­Labor Disputes Act in 1943, sponsored by ­Virginia representative Howard Smith and Texas senator Tom Connally. John Lewis and 69

A Southern New Deal, 1933–1945

his willingness to bring coal miners out on strike aroused ­bitter hostility from Boss Crump in Memphis on the right and Albert Gore on the left.45 As the CIO, with its commitment to biracial ­unions, targeted the South, the race issue and the ­labor issue became entwined. Southern liberal politicians suddenly found themselves compelled to champion their segregationist credentials if they ­didn’t want to be branded as communists. When Ellis Arnall challenged Eugene Talmadge in Georgia, Arnall’s progressive platform was counterbalanced by his proclaimed devotion to white supremacy. “If a Negro ever tried to get in a white school on the section where I live,” he vowed, “the sun would not set on his head.”46 In 1944, Claude Pepper, staunch defender of left-­wing ­causes and the leader of the forces against the poll tax, proudly told his constituents in Florida: “My legislative attitude is distinctly liberal and progressive. I see the government as the means of actually giving the citizens opportunity, personal security, health, safety, and well-­ being.” But he also pronounced that “The South ­will allow nothing to impair white supremacy.” He defended his decision to speak at a Black church in Los Angeles by assuring his constituents, “I said nothing indicating that I believe in social equality b ­ ecause, of course, I do not. ” He attacked the Supreme Court decision outlawing the white primary.47 Across the border in Alabama, Lister Hill’s devotion to federal solutions to the rural need for telephones, cheap power, and hospitals was unrivaled. He would be a leader in the fight for federal funding of medical research. He remained committed to t­ hose positions through a Senate ­career that lasted to 1968. He was a quin­ tes­sen­tial southern New Dealer. From 1941, he exercised national po­liti­cal leadership as Senate majority whip for the Demo­crats. But his opponent in 1944, James Simpson, the candidate of the power­ful industrialists, the Big Mules of Birmingham, circulated hate sheets 70

Liberal Hopes and Conservative Fears

insisting to whites that Hill had promised their jobs—­and their ­daughters—to Blacks. Hill drew the lesson from this tightly contested fight in 1944 that he should give up his position as majority leader in the Senate lest his links to the national party compromise his local reputation as a believer in segregation. He voted against civil rights for the remainder of his po­liti­cal ­career.48 The New Deal and World War II opened up possibilities of economic and racial change, when civil rights for the first time became part of the national liberal agenda. Still, white southern liberals clung to their belief that economic change would solve the region’s prob­ lems. Any racial change would have to be gradual and could not fundamentally challenge segregation. Refusing to listen to the rising demands of Black leaders or accept the meaning of successive Supreme Court decisions, white liberals both inside and outside politics believed that more equal but still separate systems of education, transportation, and accommodation ­were what African Americans wanted. Federal intervention would be counterproductive, they reasoned—­the white South needed to solve its own prob­lems. World War II challenged some of ­those certainties, but that was as nothing to the challenge the postwar years would bring, when the very building blocks of the white southern liberal creed w ­ ere demolished. The demand, as the NAACP and countless student protesters soon made clear, would be for immediate, not gradual, racial change. Southern white liberals would find it impossible to control the pace of change, and their constituents began to question their long-­ standing commitment to the national Demo­cratic Party. It was becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy both local and national ambitions.

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Part II racial change, a long massive re­sis­tance, and liberal fatalism, 1945–1965

chapter three

A Liberal Win­dow of Opportunity?

The rabid racism of staunch New Dealer Theodore “The Man” Bilbo was unleashed during the war. The f­ uture of the white race, he thundered, had been put in mortal peril by African American troops and by federal attempts to interfere on behalf of Blacks in both the workplace and the military. When Bilbo ran for reelection in 1946, he was supported by the Delta planters who had previously despised him. By then, their perception of the racial threat matched his own. The result, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, was “the first big year of the Negro Issue and Bilbo was unbeatable.”1 Mississippi whites faced the prospect of courageous young Black men who had served in the military like Medgar and Charles Evers attempting to vote on their return. Bilbo told his audiences in his campaign, “The best time to keep a nigger away from a white primary in Mississippi was to see him the night before.” He urged “­every red-­blooded Anglo-­Saxon man in Mississippi to resort to any means to keep hundreds of Negroes from the polls in the primary. And if you ­don’t know what that means,” he intimated, “you are just not up to your persuasive mea­sures.”2 The brazen nature of this invitation to beat up or lynch potential Black voters aroused the United States Senate, now controlled 75

Racial Change, 1945–1965

by Republicans, to consider the legitimacy of Bilbo’s election. A remarkable del­e­ga­tion of Blacks from Mississippi was prepared to go to Washington to give evidence at the hearings of the Elections Subcommittee on the intimidation they had faced. The Senate was also exploring charges that Bilbo had corruptly received gifts from a defense contractor.3 What would happen if Bilbo ­were unseated by the Senate? Cir­ cuit court judge John Stennis from Kemper, Mississippi, went to see Governor Fielding Wright to find out who would be appointed in Bilbo’s place. Wright told Stennis that if Bilbo w ­ ere to be unseated for corruption, he would name Stennis, but if he ­were to be unseated for his disenfranchisement of Blacks, the governor would just reappoint him.4 Bilbo’s death from cancer in August of 1947 settled this dilemma. Stennis, who had made passionate speeches supporting the United Nations, ran for the open seat and eschewed the racial rabble-­ rousing of his five opponents in the special election. He explained: “I asked my ­father what I should say about the race prob­lem. He said, “Nothing”—­and that is just what I am ­doing.” Stennis won. He would go on to serve in the Senate for the next forty years and play a key role in the southerners’ anti–­civil rights strategy.5 In 1948, Mississippians elected the youn­gest legislature in the state’s history, full of veterans from World War II “who went to Jackson to make the world a better place.” One of ­those veterans, Frank E. Smith, Stennis’s legislative assistant, went on to Congress in 1950, the only white liberal elected to Congress from the Black ­Belt South in the postwar years.6 That same year, newspaperman Hodding Car­ter, the editor of the Delta Demo­crat Times in Greenville, Mississippi, and a fervent critic of Bilbo’s race-­baiting rhe­toric, explained the South to audiences in the North. Car­ter was one of a tiny number of Mississippi newspaper editors who ­were racial moderates. He had already 76

A Liberal Win­dow of Opportunity?

won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorials on racial and economic intolerance, for which Bilbo had denounced him, saying: “No red-­ blooded Southerner worthy of the name would accept a pulverizer prize given by a bunch of nigger-­loving Yankeefied Communists for editorials advocating mongrelization of the race.”7 In analyzing the South for a national audience, Car­ter sought to explain the region’s fixation with the threat of “social equality.” He explained that what a white southerner was r­ eally afraid of was the possibility of sexual equality between white and Black. A white southerner’s fear was not likely to be modified by “new laws or the repeal of old ones,” he explained. “Any abrupt Federal effort to end segregation as it is practiced in the South ­today would not only be foredoomed to failure,” he warned, “but would also dangerously impair the recent progressive adjustment between the races.”8 What could be hoped for was “a more rapid amelioration of the discriminatory aspects of the white-­Negro relationship.” He was encouraged by the fact that “discrimination is diminishing in direction, scope and intensity throughout the South, partly ­because of national pressures and the new militancy of the Negro and partly ­because of an awakening Southern conscience.”9 Like many white moderates, Car­ter was certain that Blacks themselves did not want the end of segregation. He cited Savannah, Georgia, as an example of what African Americans could hope for as citizens of a more enlightened South. Savannah was not paradise, but “it offers proof that separation and subjugation need not go hand in hand.” African Americans voted freely. A rapidly expanding Black m ­ iddle and business class thrived professionally. ­There w ­ ere African American policemen and mail carriers. “Parks, schools and playgrounds w ­ ere more nearly equal than anywhere ­else in the South.”10 This was the classic exposition of the white southern liberal position. In short, t­ here had to be some changes in race relations, 77

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but ­these changes should focus on improving the conditions for Black families and workers, not mixing the races. Liberals w ­ ere convinced they knew what African Americans wanted, and that was to maintain segregation. Federal intervention would be counterproductive. Ten years ­later, Car­ter’s son Hodding Car­ter III was writing a very dif­fer­ent book. The South Strikes Back chronicles the rise of the White Citizens’ Council, a statewide group determined to impose conformity to white supremacy. Car­ter asserted the council “stands virtually unquestioned in its dominance of the white community in Mississippi.” Walter Sillers Jr., then the most power­ful figure in the Mississippi legislature, claimed that the councils represented “the greatest forces we have in this b ­ attle to save the white race from amalgamation, mongrelization and destruction.”11 In his effort to capture the pervasive dominance of ­these reactionary groups, and the pall it cast on p ­ eople’s ability to speak their mind, Car­ter cited the beleaguered position of Hazel Brannon Smith, a fervent supporter of the Dixiecrats, whose editorials protesting police brutality in Holmes County led to a Citizens’ Council boycott of her newspaper and the establishment of a rival paper designed to put her out of business. “­Today,” she wrote, “we live in fear in Holmes County and in Mississippi. It hangs like a dark cloud over us, dominating ­every facet of public and private life. . . . ​ None speaks freely without fear of being misunderstood. Almost ­every man and ­woman is afraid to try to do anything to promote good ­will and harmony between the races . . . ​afraid he or she w ­ ill be taken as a mixer or an integrationist or worse.”12 Car­ter looked back to the immediate postwar years and reflected that this was “in many ways a halcyon period for the exponents of gradualism in the h ­ andling of the South’s racial prob­lems.” This is a judgment that would ­later be echoed by that fine journalist and historian John Egerton. In retrospect, Egerton came to see 78

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how favorable conditions had been for substantive social change in the four or five years right ­after World War II. “It appears to have been the last and best time—­perhaps the only time—­when the South might have moved boldly and decisively to heal itself voluntarily.”13 Was ­there a postwar win­dow of opportunity, as Car­ter and Egerton thought? If so, what went wrong? The easy answer is that the Brown decision was responsible for derailing the hopes of gradual assimilation. The 1954 Supreme Court decision appeared to be every­thing that southern moderates did not want: an outside body mandating immediate racial change, and elimination of segregation in the very forum that southern families most cherished, the school. The decision produced the backlash of outrage that racial moderates had always warned of. According to historian Michael Klarman, the backlash swept aside liberal and racially moderate politicians. It halted “incipient amelioration of Jim Crow practices that had been occurring in much of the South in the late 1940s and early 1950s.”14 This view is part of a wider move to question the importance of the Brown decision. Was the decision ­really more impor­tant in securing racial change in the South than the long-­term social and economic development of the region? If the mea­sure of change was the a­ ctual desegregation of the schools, the Brown decision was less impor­tant than ­later executive action and legislation. Some have argued that education was the wrong target for the civil rights movement, as separate schooling was the area white southerners would defend most passionately. Activists should have concentrated on economic issues and voting rights, which would not have aroused white passions so strongly. And it is true that ­there was a class-­ based civil rights movement of left-­leaning trade ­unions ­after the war, focused on ­those two issues. A union-­based social movement, 79

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according to this interpretation, would have been a better model than the church-­based civil rights movement of Dr. King.15 I believe that t­ here ­were liberal possibilities in the late 1940s, but the liberals did not pre­sent a coherent way forward for gradual racial change. This left the door open for more impassioned white supremacists, who believed their families and values ­were ­under assault, to shape the public narrative. It is impor­tant to realize that ­there was a white backlash in the South before the Brown decision—­ moderate politicians did not dominate southern politics, even then— suggesting that voting rights and workers’ rights ­were not ­really “safer” or “softer” targets.16 In what I have called the first postwar system of biracial politics, ­there w ­ ere openings for liberals. For the first time in the twentieth ­century, African Americans could use a modest degree of electoral leverage to try to secure redress for their grievances. The years immediately ­after the war saw a small but slowly growing Black electorate thanks to war­time NAACP registration drives and the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision in Smith v. Allwright outlawing the white primary. By 1952, 20 ­percent of voting-­age African Americans in the South ­were registered to vote. (The figures vary substantially, from 25 ­percent in an Upper South state like Tennessee to less than 4 ­percent in Deep South Mississippi.) For liberals elected to statewide office, the Black vote was a vital, if not large, part of any electoral co­ali­tion. “The niggers and ­labor had a heyday,” was Boss Crump’s reaction in 1948, when his candidates for both governor and senator ­were defeated in Tennessee. At the city level, the Black electorate could influence the balance of power between competing white factions. Crump had always allowed African Americans to vote in Memphis provided they voted for his candidates locally and padded 80

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majorities for ­those he endorsed statewide. In return, he gave them a mea­sure of police protection and better city ser­vices.17 As more and more Blacks in southern cities began to register and vote, they ­were able to cautiously flex their po­liti­cal muscle. In Memphis, Black leaders cast their lot with white reformers, and three Black-­majority precincts defied Crump and voted for Estes Kefauver for the US Senate in 1948. In Montgomery, Black voters in 1953 helped elect Dave Birmingham to the city commission, who sought to improve ser­vices and open dialogue between the commission and Black leaders. In Mobile, Joseph Langan actively solicited Black support in his race for the state legislature in 1946. His work with NAACP leader John LeFlore to protect voting rights and equalize teachers’ salaries helped him secure Black votes, which he publicly acknowledged in his successful 1953 campaign for the city commission. In New Orleans, deLesseps Morrison capitalized on the registration efforts of the newly energized NAACP in his ­battle against the Old Regulars city machine. In return, he developed a middle-­class African American suburb, built low-­cost public housing, and provided new swimming pools and parks for Black neighborhoods.18 In Nashville, African Americans helped elect Ben West as mayor in 1951. Ten years l­ater, he would lead the city’s businessmen to accept the demands of sit-in demonstrators. As in the cities of North Carolina’s Piedmont region, efforts to dilute the effect of newly enfranchised Black voters in Nashville led to the creation of Black-­ majority districts, which elected African American councilors. In Atlanta, Mayor William Hartsfield remembered that when he became mayor, “you could always tell where the Negro sections started. Lights ­stopped, streets, sidewalks ­stopped.” Col­o­nel A. T. Walden or­ga­nized Black voters in the city to support Hartsfield in return for improvements in t­hese day-­to-­day ser­vices that meant so much. More than 138,000 African Americans registered to vote 81

Racial Change, 1945–1965

in Georgia in 1946, nearly seven times the estimated 20,000 who registered in 1940. It was in Georgia’s cities—­notably Atlanta, Savannah, Columbus, and Augusta—­that Black registration soared.19 A special election in February 1946 to fill the vacant congressional seat of Robert Ramspeck took place without the white primary or the county unit rule, which gave small counties equal weight with large urban districts. African Americans seized this opportunity to vote, and 963 of the 1,039 registered voters in the most heavi­ly Black precinct of Atlanta voted for reformer Helen Douglas Mankin. In the end, Mankin won by fewer than 800 votes. She was an ally of reform governor Ellis Arnall and had the backing of the Congress of Industrial Organ­izations (CIO). In the Georgia General Assembly, she had pushed through a bill to abolish the state poll tax and tried to get the legislature to ratify the Child ­Labor Amendment.20 Just as the war had increased expectations in Black communities, so it had opened the minds of many white GIs. As William Winter recalled, training Black troops in Alabama brought home to him “how unreal was the world in which I had grown up.” When the troops confronted segregation in Anniston, it “both­ered a lot of us, who ­were southerners, that ­there was this barrier, this artificial barrier that somebody had arbitrarily placed on us.” When ­future South Carolina governor Fritz Hollings heard the arguments before the Supreme Court in the Brown case, the one that resonated with him was made by African American l­ awyer George E. C. Hayes. “He said, as black soldiers we went to the war to fight on the front lines in Eu­rope, and when we come home we have to sit on the back of the bus.” That was his epiphany, Hollings recalled. “I had been with the 9th Anti-­Artillery Aircraft in Tunisia and Africa for a month. And then I was in Italy and Germany and crossed over to what is now Kosovo. So I served. I knew exactly what he was talking about. And I said this is wrong.”21 82

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­ uture governor John West, a classmate of Hollings at the CitF adel, argued that young men who served in the military, like Hollings and himself, spent “four years in a public ser­vice of a very special but very demanding kind . . . ​on a mission that was an unselfish mission in terms of you w ­ eren’t working for yourself [but] for a bigger cause, a cause that transcended any selfish motives.” This experience of public ser­vice s­ haped their postwar politics.22 Many returning GIs ­were determined to challenge the older leaders who w ­ ere so entrenched in cliques in the county seats. ­There ­were GI revolts across the South. As Stuart Long recalled, in Texas, “the kids came home with the feeling, ‘By Golly, w ­ e’ve saved democracy. Now let’s make it work at home.’ ” ­There ­were eighty-­five or ninety veterans in the newly elected Texas House, imbued, Long said, with “youthful idealism, which is another name for liberalism.” In Tennessee, veterans or­ga­nized across the state. In Rutherford County, John Bragg remembered, “When the war was over, the next election we had a very strong Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion. And in e­ very office ­there was a veteran ­running and we just cleaned out the court­house. ­There ­wasn’t a civilian left. It was all soldiers ­running the country.”23 Clifford Davis from Memphis, who was Boss Crump’s placeman in Congress, saw the writing on the wall. He wrote to his neighboring representative, Tom Murray, who represented the notorious Fayette and Haywood counties, which violently suppressed Black voting: I think you and I must recognize that ­these students coming out of the colleges—­many men who have returned from the war—­have more flexible ideas about a lot of ­things than your generation and mine. I do not care enough about this office to go off in the deep end on a lot of this stuff, but I believe a change ­here and ­there may be helpful, 83

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and certainly ­will not destroy our ideals and re­spect for the fundamentals of government.

This evolving view did not lead to a dramatic change on Davis’s part. It had even less impact on Murray. He and his ­brother ­were part of the leaders of the po­liti­cal gang in their western Tennessee counties who w ­ ere prepared to take extreme coercive mea­sures to prevent Blacks voting.24 Ser­vice overseas had given many southern veterans, Black and white, the chance to see their home region as o­ thers saw it. In Georgia, a returning soldier said the war had given him “an opportunity to see Georgia from the outside. I had the humiliation of being constantly reminded that my state was one of the most backward in the nation, and we Georgians w ­ ere often called the electors of dictators and demagogues for governors.” He was one of 300,000 returning veterans who could vote in Georgia in 1946.25 The GI revolts w ­ ere campaigns, as often as not, against local corruption. Southern ­women enthusiastically joined t­hese anticorruption crusades, e­ ager to challenge local party bosses. ­Women ­were particularly prominent in deLesseps Morrison’s campaign for mayor of New Orleans, marching through the streets with buckets to signal that they intended to clean up the mess. ­Those who had worked in the war effort did not simply return to traditional domestic roles. The League of ­Women Voters drew on the New Deal network of the 1930s to educate southern ­women about the challenges facing the postwar South.26 In Tennessee, Estes Kefauver turned to Martha Ragland of the League of ­Women Voters to spearhead his campaign against the machine rule of Boss Crump in 1948. He was the first candidate in the South to appoint ­women as campaign man­ag­ers in ­every county. 84

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Likewise Gladys Tillett, who had been a key figure in the ­Women’s Division of the Demo­cratic National Committee in the 1930s, then a vice-­chair of the DNC and an observer and delegate to the United Nations, returned to North Carolina to marshal support among ­women for the Senate campaign of Frank Porter Graham. She was convinced that “­Women ­will win this Election” for Graham. ­Women w ­ ere the mainstay of interracial church groups across the South. ­Later, when their husbands worked to overthrow Brown and threatened to close schools rather than comply with the Supreme Court, ­women would be the driving force ­behind the campaigns to keep the public schools open.27 Or­ga­nized ­labor was more actively engaged in southern politics between 1944 and 1951 than at any other time in the region’s history. Unions w ­ ere buoyed by their success in negotiating contracts and wage gains during the war, when employers ­were anxious to maintain full and uninterrupted production. The CIO Po­liti­cal ­Action Committee (CIOPAC) launched Operation ­Dixie to capitalize on that success, hoping to or­ga­nize the region, traditionally a bastion of the open shop, where industries w ­ ere seeking to relocate. Left-­led ­unions in the CIO or­ga­nized workers on an interracial basis in cities like Memphis and Winston-­Salem. For the CIOPAC, po­liti­cal rights and economic gains went together. To succeed at the workplace, u ­ nions needed sympathetic local elected officials—­governors who would not use the National Guard to break strikes and legislators who would prevent the enactment of right-­to-­work laws.28 Candidates who appealed to ­these groups got elected in the 1940s and early 1950s, as a succession of southern politicians put together an electoral co­ali­tion of lower-­income whites and African Americans. In Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee, William Fulbright, John Sparkman, Estes Kefauver, and Albert Gore went from the House to the Senate. Carl Elliott, and Robert Jones helped 85

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make the Alabama congressional del­e­ga­tion comfortably the most liberal in the South. George Smathers in Florida defeated a conservative incumbent to win the congressional seat for Miami and the Florida Keys. While the Republicans campaigned for tax cuts, Demo­cratic southern congressional chairs of the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee fought to continue a tax regime that would sustain a New Deal welfare state. For many southerners at this time, the TVA remained a model of successful federal infrastructure investment to alleviate poverty. Lister Hill of Alabama saw federal intervention not just as a way of providing cheap power and rural electrification for his constituents but also hospital construction and health ser­vices, housing, libraries, and telephones in rural areas.29 What was even more striking, given the structural conservatism of state politics, was the election of four progressive governors: Jim Folsom in Alabama in 1946, and Sid McMath in Arkansas, Kerr Scott in North Carolina, and Earl Long in Louisiana in 1948. All four fought vigorous personal campaigns excoriating the entrenched interests in their states. In a more prosperous South, they could afford to promise their poorer constituents the ser­vices that had so long been denied them by conservative, ­limited government elites, and whose absence the Depression had painfully exposed. They built roads, linking their farm supporters to markets (McMath built more roads than all previous administrations in Arkansas put together). They invested in education, building schools, bolstering school lunch programs, and increasing teachers’ salaries. They championed cheap electric power and rural electrification cooperatives.30 ­Future North Carolina governor Terry Sanford recalled that Kerr Scott would ask his rural audiences how many would like a telephone. Almost every­body would put a hand up. How many did 86

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not have electricity? Half would raise their hand again. But cheap power d ­ idn’t just appeal to poor farmers. It was the key to attracting industry to the South, and ­these governors also invested in ­water resource development, equally essential to attracting industry.31 Roads may seem unexciting, but Sid McMath was ten years old before he had ever seen a paved road. Jim Hunt, who l­ater served four terms as governor of North Carolina, recalled the time in 1950 when graders paved NC42, the road that ran past his parents’ farm. “When you lived on a dirt road, as I did,” he recalled, “prob­ably the biggest ­thing that could happen in your life is to get a paved road. I remember p ­ eople used to get stuck in the m ­ iddle of the dirt road, the mud was so bad. The dust in the summer when every­ thing was dry, you c­ ouldn’t keep the washing out on the lines. We ­didn’t have dryers in t­hose days. Country p ­ eople would just give their right arm to have their roads paved. I stood up at the end of the driveway and watched the road-­paving machines come along and pave my country road. It just hit me—if you work in politics you can do wonderful ­things to help ­people—­tangible t­ hings that ­people ­really need and want.”32 ­These populist, progressive governors saw the federal government not as the prob­lem but as the solution to the region’s prob­lem, and they fought hard to be responsive to the needs of their constituents. They supported federal aid to education, federal development of ­water resources, and hospital construction. They also looked beyond the traditional po­liti­cal classes and appointed ­women who supported their campaigns to state boards and to state judgeships. In 1949, Kerr Scott appointed his Rockingham County campaign man­ag­er, Susie Marshall Sharp, to be the first w ­ oman superior court judge in North Carolina, when ­women had only been allowed to serve on juries in the state three years ­earlier. Sharp would go on to be chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.33 87

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The governors w ­ ere not just following a “business progressivism” strategy: they sought to modernize their states from the bottom up. They increased pensions and unemployment compensation and refused to use the National Guard to break strikes. This strategy put them on a collision course with state bankers, the power­ful private utilities, and industrialists.34 The structures of southern state politics made it difficult for t­ hese progressive governors to effect a permanent liberal upsurge. A disor­ga­nized politics meant that personal victories ­were not necessarily accompanied by the election of like-­minded politicians at the state level, so conservative interests could still dominate state legislatures. If the liberals tried to build up their own po­liti­cal organ­izations, they ­were charged with corruption or accused of heavy-­handed tactics, particularly in the state highway commissions in Arkansas and North Carolina. Earl Long owed his popularity to his ­brother Huey Long and the backing of the Long organ­ization, but even he was unable to transfer his own popularity to his appointed successors. All four governors w ­ ere followed by conservatives in the governors’ mansions, though Folsom’s son did follow his f­ather many years ­later in becoming governor of Alabama in 1993. Most of ­these governors had personal weaknesses that ultimately brought them down. Long’s m ­ ental collapse and affair with a French Quarter stripper ­were matched by Folsom’s drinking and womanizing. The British ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, described how he was greeted at the governor’s mansion by a barefoot aide who explained that it was customary to go barefoot in the presence of the governor of Alabama. Inverchapel dutifully took off his shoes and socks and made polite conversation, waiting for Folsom’s arrival. He heard a bellow as Folsom tumbled down the stairs trying to put his shoes and socks on, shouting, “Where’s this goddamn limey? Let’s get him fed and out of h ­ ere.” Over dinner, Folsom 88

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leaned back in his chair and upset the w ­ hole ­table—­tipping food all over his startled guest. When asked what he thought of Folsom, the British ambassador diplomatically replied, “The governor is one of the most in­ter­est­ing men I have ever met.”35 It was perhaps no coincidence that some of Earl Long’s and Jim Folsom’s most high-­profile personal collapses occurred in times of racial crisis. When opponents w ­ ere trying to purge African Americans from the Louisiana voter rolls in 1959, Long addressed the state legislature for an hour and a half on live tele­vi­sion, swigging whiskey from a Coke ­bottle as he did so. His tirade cast doubt on the parentage of segregationist opponents and drilled down on the hy­poc­risy of restricting the right to vote of ­those on whose ­labor they depended. Long’s ­family strapped him down in the governor’s mansion before committing him to a ­mental hospital in Texas. In 1956, when Autherine Lucy sought to enroll u ­ nder court order at the University of Alabama, Folsom was on a three-­day drinking binge in a hunting lodge with no telephone. By the time he rang his office on Monday from a pay phone in the local grocery store, the crisis was over. A violent white mob had won, and Lucy had been prevented from attending the university.36 Where did ­these progressive governors stand on race? By and large they protected the rights of African Americans to vote. Famously, in his last act in office, Earl Long handed over voting rec­ ords to the US Commission on Civil Rights. As he told the executive secretary, “­You’re ­here to help niggers vote. And I’m for you ­because ­they’re my niggers and I want their votes. Now w ­ e’re never g­ oing to talk about my helping you, but I’m g­ oing to get my state registrar to give you the rec­ords you need, and a­ fter you talk to him, you remember you never saw me.”37 Under­lying this ac­cep­tance of the Black vote was a Jacksonian sense of fairness based on a recognition, in Earl Long’s crude 89

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formulation, that “niggers is h ­ uman beings.” Neither Folsom nor Long could stomach the way in which plantation elites grew rich on Black l­abor then denied ­those men and ­women basic ­human rights. They acknowledged the real­ity that separate but equal did not ­really mean equal at all. Folsom, in par­tic­u­lar, understood that African Americans had ­little chance of a fair trial in a court system so heavi­ly tilted to white interests—­judges, l­awyers, and jurors. He increased spending on Black institutions, notably schools, and appointed the first African Americans to a state board—­the state board of education. He also maintained open lines of communication with Black leaders.38 Long and Folsom both warned of the futility of defying the Supreme Court, particularly a­ fter the Brown decision in 1954. It was not 1861, they said, and now “the feds have the nuclear bomb.” Their state universities quietly admitted African Americans to gradu­ate schools on their watch. Long supervised the desegregation of the Louisiana State University campus at New Orleans and the integration of New Orleans buses. Folsom tried to convince his constituents early on that Black rights and the well-­being of the white poor could go hand in hand. In his Christmas message on December 25, 1949, he said, “As long as the Negroes are held down by deprivation and lack of opportunity, the other poor p ­ eople ­will be held down alongside them.” He observed, by contrast, that in the neighboring state of Georgia, “Gene Talmadge . . . ​got elected in 1946. I got elected cooking turnip greens and he got elected on the race issue. . . . ​just raisin’ hell about the race question. Negro, Negro, Negro, and I never mentioned the ­thing. And I shook hands with the Negro.”39 During the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott, Folsom advised Martin Luther King Jr. to aim for the full-­scale desegregation of the buses, rather than the separate but equal, first come–­first served remedy that the boycott leaders initially fought for. Kerr Scott ap90

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pointed the most advanced racial liberal in the state, University of North Carolina president Frank Graham, to the Senate in 1949 ­after the sudden death of J. Melville Broughton Jr. Scott worked hard to increase state appropriations for Black schools and appointed the first African American to the state board of education, ­These governors opposed the Dixiecrats and developed close ties to Harry Truman. But they developed no substantive plan for racial change that might have preempted federal intervention.40 Federal court decisions w ­ ere slowly chipping away at the defenses of separate but equal. In 1948, Truman endorsed the recommendations of his Presidential Committee on Civil Rights that called for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), protection of Black voting, federal action on lynching, abolition of the poll tax, and beefed-up civil right structures in the Justice Department. In the summer of 1948, he issued executive ­orders desegregating the military and ending discrimination in federal employment, Two allies of Sid McMath in Arkansas—­ Congressmen James Trimble and Brooks Hays—­produced a plan that attempted to head off confrontation with the federal government. They called for a regional compromise. Their plan proposed that the federal government back off its demands for immediate racial change, in return for which the South would put its own h ­ ouse in order, bolster Black education, and clean up law enforcement. But this plan got no traction and elicited ­little support ­either in the South or the North. Conservatives saw no reason to compromise: they preferred defiance of the type that the Dixiecrat revolt in 1948 represented. Liberals feared confronting the issue head-on. Southern liberals may have believed in the necessity of gradual racial change, but they did ­little in the run-up to the Brown decision to lay out a strategy for achieving it. They contented themselves instead with tinkering around the edges to improve teachers’ 91

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pay and build roads and schools and parks, and focused primarily on their long-­range aspirations for economic change. As Frank Smith argued in Mississippi, “Large-­scale economic pro­gress was the only ave­nue likely to lead to a solution of the race prob­lem in Mississippi.” Such pro­gress would soften the edges of white prejudice, southern liberals reasoned. A modernized South would require a mobile, educated workforce that would ultimately be incompatible with segregation.41 One reason for this failure of vision was that white liberal politicians ­were largely shielded from the impatience of their African American constituents. They tended to hear from racial diplomats—­ Black college presidents, for example—­who told them what they wanted to hear. Few campaigned directly in Black neighborhoods; most relied on intermediaries to deliver them African American votes. Jim Folsom relied on his chauffeur. Kerr Scott on a funeral director in Winston-­Salem and the janitor at East Carolina University. In oral history interviews, Sid McMath could not even remember the names of the Black leaders he dealt with. It was a rare southern politician who actually campaigned in Black churches or reached out to the Black community. Congressman Hale Boggs in New Orleans was an exception. He knew that he had to have African American support and white working-­c lass voters to compensate for the loss of the upper-­income support he had counted on before redistricting. In Miami, Dante Fascell recalled that he was the first politician to campaign for the Black vote in daylight.42 As a result, while ­these liberal politicians ­were all too aware of the passions of their white constituents, they ­were largely ignorant of the impatience of their African American voters. The po­liti­cal momentum, in the years before Brown, lay with the segregationists. Hodding Car­ter III, as he traced the subsequent rise of the Citizens’ Councils, perfectly summed up this moderate in­effec­tive­ 92

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ness: “The one group which might best have used this temporary lull was the most inactive, the most ­silent body of all. . . . ​Suddenly, when a need arose for some kind of middle-­ground action t­here was none.”43 And yet ­there was some pro­gress in the years before Brown. The optimistic picture that Hodding Car­ter drew of “an incipient amelioration of race relations” in Savannah was undoubtedly accurate. But Savannah and Mobile ­were coastal cities with a softer history of race relations than the Piedmont or Black ­Belt communities. As late as 1960, Atlanta reporter Douglas Kiker noted that Savannah displayed the discrimination and double standards of the Old South without the overwhelming bitterness and tendency t­ oward vio­lence associated with the Deep South.44 By 1950, biracial committees set up immediately a­ fter the war in city ­after city across the South to improve ser­vices in Black communities had ceased to function. Many southern cities had appointed Black policemen in the postwar years, but they ­were usually confined to Black sections of town and did not have the power to arrest whites. Even in Savannah, the gains of the 1940s came to an abrupt halt, despite the resilience of its NAACP branch. As Stephen Tuck has pointed out, racial vio­lence ­after 1948 was unrestrained and unchecked. It was a reaction to Black activism when Ellis Arnall was governor during the war, NAACP growth and litigation, and Black determination to vote in 1946 ­after the white primary was abolished.45 In progressive cities like Greensboro and ­Little Rock, Black employment opportunities simply did not exist for college gradu­ ates. In ­Little Rock, the public libraries quietly desegregated, but public facilities scarcely improved. The new park for African Americans was built “out of the city on an insect-­infested mountain.” 93

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Nashville was not a hard town, said an outstanding African American basketball coach, Cornelius Ridley. But by the 1950s, as historian Don Doyle has noted, “the races in Nashville had never been more segregated.” Jimmy Davy, who covered sports for The Tennessean, agreed. “You never thought about it,” he reflected. “It’s just how it was. . . . ​You d ­ idn’t ­really know the other side, how they felt or anything.” But in the Deep South even that degree of change was not on the horizon before Brown. As for Atlanta, while Mayor Hartsfield and other city leaders celebrated “the city too busy to hate,” Whitney Young’s assessment for the Urban League was that for African Americans this enlightened image only held true b ­ ecause Atlanta was comparing itself to Mississippi.46 The most coherent strategy for racial change to emerge in the years leading up to Brown was a conservative one. In Mississippi and South Carolina, po­liti­cal leaders embarked on a massive school equalization drive as a way of forestalling the demands for desegregation. Governor Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina sent his most trusted l­awyer, Bob Figg, down to Clarendon County in 1951, where African American tenant farmers, led by Harry Briggs, had courageously challenged the segregation of the local schools and ­were working with the NAACP to take the school board to court. Figg phoned the governor from Summerton, the county seat, to tell him that t­ here was no way the state could defend segregation in court with the traditional claim of separate but equal. The Black schools ­were appalling. A young legislator in the South Carolina House of Representatives, Fritz Hollings, had already been shown the abject state of Black schools by the superintendent of education in Charleston, and he and some younger rebels in the House had worked up proposals for a sales tax to be devoted to equalizing Black facilities. Out­going governor Strom Thurmond would not support the tax, but Jimmy Byrnes, the incoming governor, took it up as the cornerstone of his legislative program and persuaded the 94

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general assembly to levy a 3 ­percent sales tax to pay for a massive school-­building campaign in Black communities.47 Byrnes hoped that this promise of equalization would satisfy the federal courts—­and initially, it did. In Briggs v. Elliott, the federal district court ruled against the plaintiffs and gave the state time to make good on its promise to equalize facilities. L ­ ater, Byrnes hoped that the commitment to equalization would satisfy the Supreme Court, and he recruited the legendary l­awyer John W. Davis to argue the southern case.48 Mississippi embarked on the same path—­Governor Hugh White called the legislature into special session in the fall of 1953 to enact an ambitious school equalization program. Unlike South Carolina, Mississippi lawmakers w ­ ere not willing to discuss how they might actually raise the money to improve facilities for Black schools. It seemed very likely that taxpayers would balk at the costs involved. When the Mississippi advocates of equalization went to Alabama to discuss their plan, Alabama leaders ­were frank: they simply did not have the money to build the new schools that would be necessary, and they doubted white voters would authorize the spending for Black education.49 What ­these moves in South Carolina and Mississippi confirm is that moderates ­were not in control of the region’s politics before Brown. At e­ very point, conservatives contested their position, more often than not successfully. For ­every liberal espousing a “common man” appeal, ­there w ­ ere successful race-­baiting campaigns like the one Theodore Bilbo ran in 1946 or Herman Talmadge conducted in his runs for governor of Georgia in 1946 and 1948. For ­every returning veteran who advocated racial change, ­there ­were ­those who espoused a “definition of pro­gress that was quintessentially a white one.” Veterans, w ­ omen, ­labor, newly enfranchised white 95

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voters could provide support for liberal candidates, but they w ­ ere as likely to support conservatives who w ­ ere determined to resist racial change.50 ­There was no doubt that Herman Talmadge and Strom Thurmond, in neighboring South Carolina, instituted progressive ­reforms: modernizing government, education, and infrastructure. They ­were war heroes—­Talmadge had been a lieutenant commander of the navy in the Pacific, and Thurmond had parachuted ­behind e­ nemy lines on the eve of D-­Day. They maintained that they had fought to defend democracy and for them, democracy meant states’ rights and white supremacy. The choice, said Talmadge, was “­whether or not we ­will fight to preserve our southern traditions and heritage as we fought on ships at sea or as we fought on foreign soil.”51 Thurmond wanted to spur the business and industrial pro­gress that would keep the most ambitious of the 20,000 returning veterans in the state. He received national praise for his prompt action in investigating the lynching of Willie Earle, but he was determined to keep the edifice of white supremacy intact and would translate that drive at the state level into a regional campaign as the Dixiecrat presidential candidate in 1948. Thurmond and his Dixiecrat ­running mate, Fielding Wright of Mississippi, capitalized on the southern hostility to Truman’s civil rights proposals and his nomination as the Demo­cratic presidential candidate in 1948. Their States’ Rights Party captured four Deep South states in the general election—­Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana—­states where the supporters of states’ rights controlled the party machinery and made the Thurmond-­ Wright ticket the official Demo­cratic ticket on the ballots.52 For ­every ­woman who participated in an interracial church group, ­there ­were two conservative ­women mobilized to defend

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their homes and schools. In the public sphere, ­women played a prominent role in support groups for the Dixiecrats and for vocal segregationist groups like the ­Mothers’ League for Central High, in ­Little Rock, and the ­Women for Constitutional Government, in Mississippi. In North Carolina, crusading liberal columnist Nell ­Battle Lewis had made her reputation defending unpop­ul­ ar ­causes—­the civil liberties of strikers, the elimination of abuses in the prison system, the unfair system of capital punishment, the cause of world government. But in 1950 she lent her unequaled campaigning skills to the young publicist Jesse Helms in the racist campaign against Frank Graham.53 As Elizabeth McRae and Rebecca Bruckmann have shown, it was “often white w ­ omen who ­shaped and sustained white supremacist politics.” While they w ­ ere prominent in the southern schools crises of the 1950s, white southern w ­ omen also played an impor­ tant part in the long massive re­sis­tance and w ­ ere key players in a growing national network of conservative activist ­women. The responsibilities of motherhood, which gave them legitimacy in the po­liti­cal sphere, meant that their voices ­were particularly acute in the area of public education. ­These views transcended class lines—­ from the elite ladies of Charleston and Jackson, Mississippi, to the raucous working-­class ­mothers of ­Little Rock and New Orleans.54 Or­ga­nized ­labor found itself defeated time and again in the South by red-­baiting drives against local strikes, by state right-­to-­ work laws which prevented ­unions from making ­union membership a condition of employment, and by the reluctance of southern workers to risk their newfound affluence by striking or joining ­unions. In his history of the l­abor movement, Tim Minchin showed that textile workers never solved the “­free rider” prob­lem. Why should non-­union workers strike to secure u ­ nion recognition when their employers matched the wages of u ­ nionized plants? Why

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would they choose to risk their ability to keep up the mortgage and credit payments they now made as home-­owning consumers? As for race, textile workers across the South all too often confirmed Bryant Simon’s assessment that South Carolina millhands had become “a reactionary po­liti­cal force” susceptible to crude racist appeals as early as 1938.55 When the Mississippi legislature met in 1948, filled with returning World War II veterans, they ­were immediately challenged by Governor Fielding Wright to devote their resources to denouncing President Truman’s civil rights proposals and supporting a third-­party challenge to the national Demo­crats. As soon as John Stennis got to the Senate, he became the lynchpin of the legalistic efforts to thwart the courts and the federal government, a campaign that would last for thirty years. The elegant Stennis and the crude Senator Eastland could not have differed more in style, but when it came to their civil rights policy they walked in lockstep. Southerners in Congress may still have voted for tax, regulatory, and welfare aspects of a New Deal / Fair Deal social demo­cratic agenda, but race and ­labor w ­ ere driving them increasingly rightward.56 Truman’s proposal for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee to eliminate discrimination in the workplace was a par­ tic­u­lar flashpoint. Senator Richard Russell thundered that it was “the most sickening manifestation of the trend that is now in effect to force social equality and miscegenation of the white and black races on the South.” Not to be outdone, Representative William Colmer of Mississippi suggested that “Hitler in his heyday put nothing through in Germany more vicious than this.” Other opponents of the FEPC conjured up the specter of the Gestapo and concentration camps for Americans. Even liberal Albert Gore complained of the “naked and ugly” “despotic infringement upon the liberty of the w ­ hole ­people.”57

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The threat of the FEPC was matched in t­ hese lawmakers’ minds by the threat of trade ­unions. To combat the CIO and its po­liti­cal influence, ten southern states passed right-­to-­work laws between 1943 and 1954. Radical, left-­leaning ­unions that allied with African American voters could be seen as challenging the very fabric of white supremacy. The rural and small-­town South was particularly suspicious of ­union activities, and southern congressmen became a key ele­ment of the conservative co­ali­tion that built on war­time legislation to curtail l­ abor rights ­after the war. The Taft-­Hartley Act of 1947 aimed to redress the balance of the New Deal Wagner Act by imposing conditions and restrictions on u ­ nions, not just employers. It would not have passed Congress or overridden Truman’s veto if southern representatives and senators had not overwhelmingly voted for it. The twin issues of race and ­labor ­were now increasingly distinguishing southern Demo­crats from their northern counter­parts. The shift in congressional voting be­hav­ior also reflected white southern public opinion. White southerners, who had told Gallop in 1937 that they would support a liberal party rather than a conservative one, overwhelmingly indicated in 1948 that they would support conservative politicians. Seldom had such a fundamental shift in public opinion come so quickly.58 The polarizing issues of race and ­labor and the backlash before Brown ­were brought sharply into focus in two Senate primaries in 1950 that saw the defeat of the two southern senators most associated with the New Deal. Both Claude Pepper and Frank Graham ­were vulnerable in the McCarthy era for their ­earlier po­liti­cal associations. Historians who stress the racial possibilities of the postwar years are anxious to point out the importance not of race

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but of anti-­communism in their defeats. Historians of Mc­ Carthyism conversely are anxious to focus on race b ­ ecause it supports their thesis that anti-­communism was driven by elites, not popu­lar sentiment.59 The evidence is mixed in Pepper’s case. As Cold War tensions increased, it was easy for George Smathers to draw attention to “The Red Rec­ord of Senator Claude Pepper.” A ­ fter all, Pepper had paid a visit to Stalin in 1941 and praised the Soviet Union, and he was associated with Henry Wallace’s attempts to soften the anti-­ Russian trend of Truman’s foreign policy. When Smathers had been elected to Congress as a returning veteran in 1946, he had wrapped himself in the mantle of the New Deal social welfare achievements in order to unseat a conservative incumbent. Four years l­ater, he set himself against the extension of the New Deal. This was not simply the shift to the center on economic issues that so many southern congressmen had made. Smathers stressed the dangers state intervention posed to the ­whole free-­enterprise system. The choice, he said bluntly, lay between “the good road of opportunity and freedom” and the “dark road of communism and socialism.” For some of Smathers’s backers, like Ed Ball, who oversaw the DuPont Corporation’s landholdings in Florida, the main issue was ­labor reform.60 The new ele­ment in the power­ful conservative thrust in Florida was the mobilization of the state’s doctors and health care professionals in a meticulously or­ga­nized, very well-­funded propaganda campaign against what was branded as “socialized medicine.” As part of his Fair Deal agenda first put forth in his State of the Union address in 1948, Truman proposed to extend the social insurance provisions of the Social Security system to health care. Truman’s proposals for national health insurance stirred up ­these professional groups as no other issue had done. Smathers was only too willing to take up the cudgels against his former mentor Claude Pepper, 100

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who as far back as 1928, as a young state legislator, had told then-­ Governor Franklin Roo­se­velt that he wanted the Demo­cratic Party “genuinely to become the Liberal Party of the Nation.” Pepper was a fervent supporter of the social demo­cratic goals of the New Deal, and health insurance was the logical extension of ­those goals. Truman never forgave Pepper for his attempt to sabotage his presidential candidacy in 1948. Pepper and some other New Dealers had desperately tried in early 1948 to find an alternative to Truman, whom they believed would be defeated. But despite their personal enmity, Pepper was an enthusiastic advocate of Truman’s Fair Deal.61 Smathers did not miss an opportunity to link Pepper to communist organ­izations or to remind voters that he had been the Senate sponsor of legislation to abolish the poll tax in 1941. Anti-­ statism and anti-­communism ­were difficult to disentangle. Wallace’s Progressive Party, the target of red-­baiting, was inextricably linked to civil rights advocacy in the South, particularly the right to vote, and it had ties to unabashedly left-­wing groups. Pepper’s candidacy, Smathers warned ominously, had received “the official nod from Moscow.” The communists ­were b ­ ehind challenges to the racial status quo. He argued that the FEPC was “borrowed lock, stock, and barrel from the 1936 published platform of the Communist Party.” It was “a vicious wedge with which the reds could pry us loose from certain rights that we, as Americans, hold sacred.” Smathers’s charge sheet against Pepper contained a photo­graph of Pepper with Paul Robeson, “The Negro Red.” Smathers did particularly well in the rural northern panhandle, near the Alabama border.62 If race was only one of the electoral issues in Florida that made Pepper vulnerable it became the central issue in North Carolina, where news of his defeat came right at the moment when Frank Graham’s challenger was debating ­whether to seek a runoff ­after 101

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losing the first primary. Graham was widely respected in North Carolina for his national reputation as a public intellectual, an educator, and a transformative leader of the university, But Kerr Scott had appointed him to the Senate b ­ ecause he was a liberal. As Scott told one audience, “You ­haven’t got a better liberal in Amer­i­ca than the senator y­ ou’ve got.” For years, Graham had been a target of red-­baiting for his membership in popular-­front organ­ izations. Naïve about fund­rais­ing and reluctant to get down to the dirty business of campaign organ­ization, Graham was always liable to face well-­funded opposition when he came up for election in his own right. His main opponent, Willis Smith, a conservative ­lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association, was not short of power com­pany and textile money for his campaign.63 Jonathan Daniels and Kerr Scott tried in vain to get the young publicist Jesse Helms to run Graham’s media campaign, but Helms tearfully replied that he was committed to Smith. Smith himself expected that Graham’s communist and socialist links would be the issues that worked with the North Carolina electorate. Instead, he found that race was crucial. Graham disavowed federal intervention in race relations and maintained that “only religion and education could lead to permanent changes in race relations.” But his racial moderation and his role on the President’s Committee on Civil Rights meant, as one journalist predicted, that t­here would be “a lot of whispering and street corner gabbing about socialism, communism, and niggers.” Despite crude fake postcards sent to white voters from the NAACP asking voters to vote for Graham, and despite accusations that he had appointed “a nigger to West Point,” Graham seemed to have dealt with the race issue successfully in the first primary. He was only 5,634 votes short of an overall majority.64 Smith was so far ­behind that he was reluctant to demand a runoff. But when the Supreme Court handed down landmark de102

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cisions in Oklahoma and Texas requiring the provision of genuinely equal gradu­ate education for African Americans, Jesse Helms mobilized a crowd of supporters to parade by Smith’s h ­ ouse in ­Raleigh demanding than he run. Smith fi­nally agreed to run again, and his campaign exhorted, “WHITE ­PEOPLE WAKE UP” to the threat of integration posed by their senator. “Frank Graham ­favors mingling of the races,” the campaign blared. Fake photo­ graphs of Black soldiers dancing with white ­women flooded rural Eastern North Carolina, and a region that was traditionally a bastion of New Deal rural liberalism in the state deserted Graham. ­These voters who had been so enthusiastic for the benefits activist government had brought them in the 1930s, and had so enthusiastically supported Kerr Scott, not only deserted Frank Graham, they would go on to support George Wallace in his presidential bids in 1968 and 1972 and Jesse Helms throughout his Senate ­career. Racial backlash, not anti-­communism, was clearly the most impor­tant explanation of Graham’s defeat. As a North Carolina newspaper editor sadly predicted, “The evil genii of race prejudice are out of the ­bottle. The chances are that we ­will not get them back in the ­bottle in NC for a long time.”65 To argue for the preeminence of the race issue in t­hese campaigns is not to ignore the force of anti-­communism and Cold War politics. Anti-­communism had been the routine small change of some southern politicians since the 1930s; in the immediate postwar years it fed into the rhe­toric of opposition to the FEPC; it certainly was a tool in the hands of employers anxious to destroy incipient trade ­unionism; it was never far away from the rhe­toric of segregationist Mississippi politicians. Red-­baiting certainly contributed to the downfall of the radical left and the ostracism of prominent dissenters as Cold War tensions mounted in the late 1940s. But t­ here was a dif­fer­ent timeline to anti-­communism in the South to that of the rest of the nation. As Michael Heale has shown 103

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in his study of ­little HUACs—­state committees investigating subversive activities—­these committees in the South w ­ ere the product of the massive re­sis­tance years when the excesses of anti-­communism in the rest of the country w ­ ere subsiding. Their activities would gather momentum, not diminish, as the civil rights movement flourished and, as with the Speaker Ban Law in North Carolina and the State Sovereignty Commission in Mississippi, reach their zenith in the 1960s.66 ­ ere is no doubt to my mind that ­there was a racial backlash in Th the South before the Brown decision, and it was not just about the possibility of school desegregation. In Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi, ­there had been a reign of terror at the end of the war directed at African Americans who tried to vote. When Gene Talmadge made his last bid for governor of Georgia in 1946, he based his campaign on the need to restore the white primary in order to save segregation, and he openly used the Klan to get out the white vote. Black voting, he warned, would lead to Black judges, jailers, and sheriffs ordering white men and ­women around. “Once firmly entrenched as voters, the Harlem-­Moscow-­Zootsuiters with the aid of local White Quislings ­will strike the death-­blow to our segregation laws,” he warned. He and his allies effectively purged an estimated 15,000 to 25,000 from the voter rolls before the election.67 Talmadge told Black voters to stay away from the polls since ­there would be no one to protect them. Black churches ­were bombed, crosses burned, and Black and Jewish neighborhoods in Atlanta shot up by the Columbians—­a right-­wing group made up of veterans and former members of the Bund. Maceo Snipes, a Black veteran of the Pacific War, was the only African American to vote in Taylor County. He was shot dead a week ­later. Campaigning in Walton County a day a­ fter the arrest of a Black 104

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suspect a­ fter the stabbing of a white man, Gene Talmadge allegedly spoke to the victim’s ­brother and promised to “take care of the Negro.” Three weeks l­ater the suspect, his wife, and another sharecropper ­couple ­were killed by a lynch mob that ­stopped their landlord’s car on the way back from jail. Talmadge boasted a­ fter his victory that “no Negro ­will vote in Georgia in the next four years.”68 That same year, Alabama voters attempted to circumvent the white primary decision by passing the Boswell amendment, which effectively empowered local registrars to turn down Black voting applicants. The amendment was declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court in 1949, but by then community relations in cities like Birmingham had deteriorated significantly. Birmingham became known as Bombingham ­after African American homes ­were bombed to deter residents from moving into white areas. It was telling that in a state with two liberal senators, a liberal governor, and the most liberal congressional del­eg­ a­tion in the South, the state party machinery was firmly in the hands of the Dixiecrats in 1948.69 Southern conservatives freely offered that it was the prospect of Blacks voting that r­eally alarmed them. John Stennis in Mississippi said quite clearly that he feared Black voters. In Alabama, the key figure in the Citizens’ Council, large planter Sam Engelhardt, frankly admitted that Black voting posed more of a threat to him than school desegregation. What would happen to his land and wealth if African Americans voted and Black tax assessors targeted his property, he asked? This suggests that it is by no means clear the NAACP would have provoked less backlash if it had focused on voting and jobs rather than schools.70 The South in ­these years ­after World War II undoubtedly offered white liberal politicians real opportunities. Governors like Scott and 105

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McMath ­were able to secure major improvements in public ser­ vices and infrastructure for their Black and white constituents. Senators like LBJ, John Sparkman, Lister Hill, and Estes Kefauver ­were able to support tax and welfare policies, as well as infrastructure proj­ects that promised to modernize the South’s economy. But conservatives w ­ ere at least as successful during this period and could block more sustained liberal change. White liberals could deliver increased spending on Black institutions and promise a fairer segregated society. But they did not develop a policy for more substantial racial change. ­There was already a backlash against even modest Black demands and ­limited po­liti­cal participation. In the absence of a clear and appealing alternative, the Brown decision would strengthen the conservative position.

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chap ter four

Brown and Backlash

The B rown decision did not immediately sweep liberals and moderates aside. Jim Folsom was elected to a second term in 1954, and his most successful session of the Alabama legislature was in 1955. Earl Long was elected to another term in 1955. Kerr Scott avenged Frank Graham’s defeat by winning a Senate seat in 1954, only days ­after the Brown decision. But the Brown decision did expose the weakness of southern liberal politicians and the bankruptcy of their policy strategies on race. The key to understanding the dynamics of the Brown decision and its impact on southern politics is to recognize that both conservatives and liberals believed white public opinion supported the other side. Segregationists believed that too many white southerners ­were wavering in their commitment and resigned to accepting the inevitability of desegregation. Liberals believed the opposite—­that all too many white southerners ­were implacable in their defense of segregation. The difference was that conservatives w ­ ere prepared to mount a righ­teous crusade to stir up white sentiment and coerce wavering southerners into line, while liberals and moderates w ­ ere not prepared to take their case to the p ­ eople for fear of awaking racist sentiment. They might espouse gradual change, but they w ­ ere not prepared to campaign for gradualism at the time. They ­were fatalistic, as if silence meant that desegregation would somehow slip in without anybody noticing it. They never campaigned for, or offered, 107

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a coherent strategy for racial change other than trying to prevent the complete abolition of the public school system envisaged by some advocates of massive re­sis­tance, and supporting token desegregation if and when federal courts eventually ordered it. With one side prepared to mount a massive crusade while the other said nothing, ­there was no contest. In the immediate aftermath of Brown, the initial segregationist response was to attempt to sign up Black leaders to support the equalization strategy and to indicate their preference for the continuation of segregated schools. State leaders ­were astonished, and felt betrayed, when t­ hese leaders indicated instead that they wanted the desegregation decision implemented. In Mississippi, Governor Hugh White called a biracial statewide meeting to discuss equalization as a response to Brown, but only one out of ninety Black leaders endorsed the plan for equalization within segregation. Governor White, as he himself put it, was “stunned.” “I have believed that the vast majority of Negroes would go along,” he said. “Now I am definitely of the opinion you ­can’t put faith in any of them on this proposition.’1 The second response was to establish commissions that would recommend how to ­handle the ramifications of Brown. In state ­after state, t­hese commissions ­were given confidence by the ­Supreme Court’s second decision of 1955 outlining the terms of implementation. Desegregation should take place “with all deliberate speed.” But the Court refused to lay out a timetable and left the monitoring to federal district judges. ­Those judges had divided loyalties. As federal appointees, they needed to uphold the law, but they ­were well aware of the wishes of their white neighbors to sustain the racial status quo.

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Conservative po­liti­cal leaders ­were convinced that Klan-­type vio­lence would be counterproductive. Instead, respectable community leaders or­ga­nized Citizens’ Councils to make the case for segregation. They claimed to eschew vio­lence, but ­there was a narrow line between the economic intimidation of likely Black plaintiffs—­ publicity, evictions, the withdrawal of credit—­and physical coercion. What the councils w ­ ere determined to do was eliminate dissent in the white community—­that is, where the bulk of the propaganda and economic and social pressure was directed. In states like Mississippi and Alabama, this coercion of white dissenters was brutally effective. As John Stennis candidly admitted to Mississippi governor James P. Coleman, “We s­ hall just have to use some common sense coercion, which in the final analy­sis is what we have been ­doing all the time anyway.”2 The dispute among segregationist leaders was about the best way to maintain maximum segregation. Some advocated s­ imple defiance. ­Others, like Governor James P. Coleman of Mississippi, ­argued for “smart segregation” and made the case for establishing a thicket of ­legal defenses that would make school desegregation impractical for the foreseeable ­future. In the winter of 1956, state legislatures across the South passed a barrage of anti-­desegregation laws—­most of which envisaged a sleight of hand whereby pupils would be assigned to schools on the basis of every­thing but race—­ which would, in fact, preserve the dual school system. Where disagreement arose was over how far the re­sis­tance should go. Should the state mandate local school boards to close their schools rather than desegregate? Should the state contemplate the abolition of the public school system? Absolute defiance of the Supreme Court was the practical consequence at the local level of Citizens’ Council activism in the Black B ­ elts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.

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Vio­lence and economic intimidation directed at Black parents deterred them from even petitioning local school boards. Parents who had signed petitions ­were “persuaded” to withdraw their signatures. If ­there was no mechanism to force the local school board, then the cases would not even reach the federal courts. Po­liti­cal leaders complemented this local defiance by campaigning on platforms of preventing school desegregation at all costs. George Timmerman in South Carolina, Orval Faubus in Arkansas, J. Lindsay Almond in ­V irginia, John Patterson in Alabama, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, and Ernest Vandiver in Georgia all promised that no school desegregation would take place on their watch. ­These candidates sought to ensure that they could not be outflanked on the right. George Wallace discovered that fact of po­ liti­cal life in Alabama in 1958, when he lamented, ­after his defeat by John Patterson, that he had been “outnigguhed by John Patterson” and he vowed to never “be outnigguhed again.”3 In the smart segregationist camp w ­ ere the advocates of token compliance. Governors like Luther Hodges in North Carolina, Leroy Collins in Florida, and Frank Clement in Tennessee strove to keep the public schools open, though, as in North Carolina, the referendum on the school desegregation plans allowed (but did not mandate) local communities to close their schools if ordered by the courts to desegregate. The goal of token compliance was to maximize school segregation without defying the courts. Where the courts ordered desegregation in a handful of urban communities, a small number of African Americans in North Carolina and Tennessee should be allowed to go to white schools. This concession would allow absolute segregation to be maintained in the rural part of the South and in Black-­majority areas.4 To complement local state action, southern senators drafted the Southern Manifesto in 1956, which denounced the Brown decision and promised to defy it by all lawful means. As William Fulbright’s 110

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aides pointed out to him, even a­ fter it was modified to allay some moderate fears, the Manifesto said outright “stop,” not “delay.” It aimed to bring any doubtful southern senators into line and to warn off the North and the Supreme Court from further mea­sures to implement Brown. The Citizens’ Council propaganda and the Manifesto to a large extent attained their goals. All but three southern senators and all but a handful of southern representatives signed the Manifesto. The be­hav­ior of the Court over the next few years, its reluctance to take up school desegregation cases except in the most flagrant defiance of local court decisions, testified to the impact of the Manifesto. Southern senators put a barrage of anti–­Supreme Court legislative proposals before Congress ­after 1956, restricting, for example, the appellate rights of the Court.5 As for southern liberal politicians, most, like Lister Hill and John Sparkman, ran for cover, hastening to join the Citizens’ Councils and to sign the Manifesto. They became, in Hodding Car­ter’s words, closet moderates.6 ­Those who held out w ­ ere rather disingenuous in their arguments. Most avoided commenting on the Brown decision wherever pos­ si­ble. They argued that it was the law of the land but indicated that, to their relief, it was a state and local ­matter, not a ­matter for Congress. When they w ­ ere forced to take a stand, ­either about proposals to close the schools or on the Manifesto, they contended that it was a ­matter best sorted out by men and ­women of goodwill at the local level. Lyndon Johnson, Albert Gore, and Estes Kefauver, who refused to sign the Manifesto and ­were heralded for their po­liti­cal courage, failed to contemplate what would happen if local men and w ­ omen of goodwill ­were unwilling to comply with 7 the courts. William Winter, in 1956, summed up his strategy to confront massive re­sis­tance in Mississippi: “The least said about the prob­lem, the better off every­one concerned ­will be.” Surely t­ here ­were more 111

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impor­tant issues, he said a few years l­ ater, “It just makes me sick to contemplate how much time and energy and attention is consumed on the race question b ­ ecause of the emotional and frenzied efforts on both sides, with the result that our attentions tend to be diverted ­here in this most critical era of history when it is evident that the survival of civilization is at stake.”8 Did white liberals have to be so fatalistic? Was ­there a liberal road not taken that would have avoided the mob vio­lence and the ­wholesale circumvention of the law? ­There was certainly no easy alternative to massive re­sis­tance. It is difficult to exaggerate the change that the South was potentially being asked to make. School segregation had been the norm as long as ­there had been a public school system in the South. Some white southerners might understand that eventually it would have to go, but that was very dif­ fer­ent from envisaging its speedy demise. Whites ­were reluctant to give up their access to the schools of their choice, their control of ­these schools, and their parental power. Was it simply unrealistic and po­liti­cally suicidal to expect moderates to mount an effective campaign to comply with the Court? When massive re­sis­tance was fi­nally ended, it was b ­ ecause the courts and the federal government made it clear that desegregation would be enforced and was inevitable. Would judicial and presidential leadership determined to proj­ect this inevitability e­ arlier have made a difference? Certainly, conservative leaders worried that southern whites might be persuaded to accept such an outcome and therefore did their best to convince them that the demand for change could be resisted. It is pos­si­ble to imagine Eisenhower, with his enormous popularity in the South as a military hero, making it clear from the start that the South would have to comply with Brown. It is true, of 112

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course, that when he fi­nally moved to enforce the law and quell mob vio­lence in L ­ ittle Rock in 1957, he stimulated, rather than dampened, southern re­sis­tance. But Eisenhower originally had im­ mense prestige in the South, particularly among southern businessmen. A southern leader like Jimmy Byrnes, a former justice of the Supreme Court with international experience as secretary of state, might have been expected to work with Eisenhower to take a statesmanlike lead from the start. When they did not, it was more difficult for liberals in the South to argue that the white South had no choice but to comply with the Court. For too long, it looked as if desegregation could be delayed in­def­initely. When I asked Frank Smith, the Mississippi congressman, if ­there was a realistic alternative in 1954 to massive re­sis­tance, he told me that he had hoped that the governor might call a meeting of business leaders and newspaper editors from across the state to build up community support for compliance. But, in fact, Governor White had called up just such a meeting and t­here had been no appetite for such a policy ­either by the governor, the press, or the businessmen.9 It may be that the South had to exhaust its defiance and discover the futility of re­sis­tance before change could be accepted. As one Mississippi politician observed a­ fter James Meredith was admitted to the University of Mississippi ­under court order, enforced by federal marshals and federal troops, “We found that we w ­ ere 10 trying to fight a cannon with a peashooter.”

The irrelevance of the moderates in the face of massive re­sis­tance was highlighted by the ­great racial confrontations in ­Little Rock in 1957 and at Ole Miss in 1962, where white mobs, spurred on by local politicians, sought to prevent court-­ordered desegregation 113

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from taking place. First Eisenhower, then Kennedy sent in troops as a last resort to enforce the court decisions. Elizabeth Jacoway, who grew up in L ­ ittle Rock and whose ­mother’s cousin was the school superintendent, has written a wonderful, sensitive, nuanced account of the ­Little Rock crisis. When she started work on it, the real question she asked was “Where ­were the businessmen?” How, she asked, “did my ­daddy and his friends—­who ­were in influential positions at that point—­how did they let this happen in their city?” The school board in the apparently progressive city in a state that had already seen token compliance in the north was seemingly anxious to comply with Brown. The board and the business leadership worked hard, however, to limit severely the number of Black ­children who would integrate Central High School. Then they waited to build a new suburban high school to fulfill the needs of white middle-­class ­children. As in New Orleans three years ­later, the board allowed the burden of desegregation to fall on white working-­class parents. They made no effort to build up community sentiment among the white parents at Central High to accept desegregation. It was as if school desegregation would occur without anybody knowing about it.11 As Sid McMath acknowledged, he and other L ­ ittle Rock leaders failed to realize ­until too late that Governor Orval Faubus had embarked on a collision course with the federal government and was determined to use the National Guard to prevent the court-­ordered desegregation of Central High. For his part, Faubus felt abandoned by the ­Little Rock leaders: if they ­were not prepared to mobilize support for compliance, why should he? Faubus claimed to be a prisoner of popu­lar white re­sis­tance to integration. In fact, he worked to create that resistance—­then claimed to be trapped by that same public opinion which he himself had created. He trans-

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lated this winning po­liti­cal equation into an unpre­ce­dented six terms as governor of Arkansas.12 McMath’s contribution to the ­Little Rock crisis was a futile attempt to get Senator Fulbright to issue a statement urging citizens to obey the law. McMath also made a last-­minute plea to Vice President Nixon to use federal marshals, not troops, to enforce the decision. As for the business community, it made almost no effort in the year Central High was open to support the beleaguered teachers who w ­ ere trying to make integration work. Only when Faubus closed the schools for the academic year 1958–1959 and outside investment in L ­ ittle Rock dried up did the business community mobilize to support the school board in reopening the school. It ­wasn’t ­until then that the chamber of commerce sent spokesmen around the South warning businesses of the cost of mob vio­lence and school closures and the danger of following ­Little Rock’s path of defiance.13 What is notable about the business leadership in t­ hese years was the strength of their conviction that they could have economic growth while maintaining segregation. It was striking how much disorder they would tolerate before deciding the cost was too ­great. As the Ole Miss crisis developed in 1962, it was only right at the end, when it was clear that Governor Barnett and the federal government ­were headed ­toward a violent confrontation, that business leaders gathered in Jackson in a vain effort to persuade the governor to back down. In Alabama, it was only the vio­lence of Bull Connor’s police treatment of the Freedom Riders in 1961 that prompted the business community to mobilize to change the city government. Even then, it could not prevent Connor’s disastrous decision in 1963 to use police dogs and firehoses to disperse protesters. Business leaders ­were appalled that the violent response dominated the national news.14

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White southern politicians often expressed contradictory recollections about what they said and did in the 1950s. Sometimes they said they did not mean it when they talked about the danger of race war and manned the barricades—­they ­were only ­going through the motions to satisfy their constituents. At other times the same politicians expressed disbelief that they had actually said ­those ­things back then. It was every­body’s fault except their own: demagogues, the Brown decision, the courts, the federal government, African Americans pushing for too much too quickly. Linked to this self-­exculpatory account is a self-­congratulatory tendency, especially in states like South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee, whose leaders prided themselves on avoiding the vio­lence that wracked Mississippi and Alabama.15 White moderates persuaded themselves that they had ­little alternative, if they wanted to survive po­liti­cally, but to support some form of defiance. If they ­were defeated, it would simply pave the way for extremists. And ­there ­were enough defeated liberals to serve as a salutary warning. But one has to ask if leaders like Lister Hill, John Sparkman, and Carl Elliott in Alabama ­were ­really so vulnerable in the 1950s. Sparkman never faced a serious ­battle for reelection in his entire c­ areer. In 1956 Hill faced opposition only from a retired rear admiral noted for his right-­ wing extremism. In 1956, when he signed the Manifesto, Fulbright knew that he was in no danger in his reelection bid that year. By securing the backing of the single most impor­tant source of campaign funds in the state, the Arkansas Louisiana Gas Com­pany, he ensured that no opponent would have access to significant campaign funds. Fulbright used to justify his stand on civil rights by asking if p ­ eople wanted to see Orval Faubus in the Senate. But his silence helped politicians like Faubus stay in power. Popu­lar white sentiment against racial change was power­ful. But in the end, massive re­sis­tance was a top-­down strategy con116

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ceived by the Dixiecrats and propagated through the Citizens’ Councils.16 The crisis over school desegregation was reported in the mainstream media as a crisis within the white community. All too often, African Americans ­were the token participants whose ­future white leaders and the courts w ­ ere deciding. Whites w ­ ere still dictating the timetable of racial change, and by 1960 it was clear to many African Americans, North and South, that this approach had yielded few positive results. This lack of pro­gress provoked some Black students to take ­matters into their own hands. Their direct-­action protests to desegregate public spaces—­bus terminals, department stores, restaurants, and places of entertainment—­ provoked a violent white backlash that forced southern businessmen and the federal government to respond. Whites w ­ ere no longer dictating the timetable of racial change. Black activists had taken the ­future into their own hands. At the same time, a younger group of white politicians, heirs to the southern liberal governors of the 1940s, had now emerged. Fritz Hollings in South Carolina, Terry Sanford in North Carolina, and Carl Sanders in Georgia epitomized the responsible moderate white southern leadership that national leaders felt could be relied on to bring their communities into compliance with the law of the land and preempt the necessity of heavy-­handed federal intervention. Both Hollings and Sanford believed that economic pro­gress was vital, and they w ­ ere among the most successful of the southern governors as salesmen for their states. What distinguished them from their pre­de­ces­sors was that they did not believe tax breaks, subsidies, and the removal of local regulations w ­ ere all that was needed to attract outside investment. 117

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Sanford argued instead that industry would come without having to dangle mouthwatering incentives in front of them. But business leaders would want to know that their ­children would be safe and well educated, and they would be looking for skilled employees. He planned to do for North Carolina’s schools what his mentor Kerr Scott had done for the state’s roads. Both Sanford and Hollings believed that it was imperative to have a well-­trained workforce. Hollings set up a Technical Educational Council, and Sanford initiated a statewide system of community colleges. Both w ­ ere prepared to raise taxes to pay for ­these improvements. Hollings believed solving the state’s chronic bud­get deficit was a prerequisite for attracting new investment. A w ­ omen’s group challenged Sanford on how he was ­going to pay for the scale of education spending on teachers’ salaries, pensions, and buildings that he believed necessary. He looked around the room, saw no reporters ­were pre­sent, and said, “Taxes.” The audience applauded. When he basked in satisfaction at this response, his campaign man­ag­er wryly noted that the ­women had thought he said “Texas.”17 Both Sanford and Hollings endorsed John F. Kennedy in 1960, when the po­liti­cal leadership in their states was firmly in the Lyndon Johnson camp. Hollings and Kennedy w ­ ere among the Chamber of Commerce’s ten outstanding younger men for 1954. Bronze star Hollings and paratrooper Sanford w ­ ere very much part of the Kennedy generation. For their part. the Kennedys w ­ ere confident that they could rely on the governors to stamp out any segregationist vio­lence. Robert Kennedy’s aide at the Justice Department was John Seigenthaler, who cut his teeth at the Tennessean in Nashville. The administration had a comfort level with the leadership in the Carolinas, Siegenthaler recalled. “­There was never any sense that we ­were ­going to have any trou­ble in North Carolina or South Carolina.” They felt that Sanford and Hollings “had a ­handle on the politics of their own state. And that ­didn’t mean they ­wouldn’t 118

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whistle D ­ ixie, it just meant that they ­were ­going to make sure that pro­gress was made.”18 Sanford concluded that the only way to fight the enemies facing the South “is education, up and down the line across the board.” Neither Hollings nor Sanford wanted to concentrate on racial issues. But African American activism and the federal courts ­were not ­going to allow them that luxury.19 Sanford launched his campaign for governor in 1958, before the sit-­ins rocked the South in 1960. Instead of concentrating, as he had hoped, on education ­under the assumption that the token compliance policy of the state would continue, he found himself having to confront the overtly segregationist campaign of law professor I. Beverly Lake Sr., who conjured up visions of the NAACP ­running the state and classrooms filled with Black kids. Sanford retorted that he was against integration, but that Lake’s defiance would force the Supreme Court to intervene and invalidate the state’s peaceful implementation of token compliance. Like the older generation of liberal politicians, Sanford had ­little direct contact with Black leaders or voters. ­There ­were no African Americans in his campaign organ­ization. His TV ads featured only white f­ aces and white voters, and his only contact with Black voters came through the hawkers he used on Election Day to get voters to the polls.20 Hollings likewise made few concessions to racial moderation. In his 1958 campaign for governor, he promised that no schools would be desegregated while he was in office. Anyone who fights liberals, he said l­ater, is a friend of mine. When asked about Sanford in 1960, Hollings said he understood Sanford was a moderate, and if this was so, “I necessarily stand for Dr. Lake who stands for segregation and our way of life.”21 But Hollings had to confront student demonstrations and sit­ins in 1960. He prided himself on the fact that no one got hurt in the demonstrations in South Carolina. He understood that badly 119

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trained local police would make m ­ istakes and, working with Pete Strom, head of the State Law Enforcement Division, he brought in Black deputies from the cities to police the demonstrations. He repeated the pro­cess the following year with the Freedom Riders and managed to avoid the violent confrontations that would have left the Kennedy administration with no alternative but to intervene. With t­ hose tactics, Hollings in fact was enabling local communities to refuse to make concessions to the demonstrators. But he kept lines of communications open with African American leaders. He believed he had persuaded them that his sole aim was to impartially enforce the law, and he and Pete Strom successfully cracked down on the Klan.22 Like Hollings, Sanford was pleased he never had to use the National Guard to quell the demonstrations. His resolve was tested by the sit-­ins in 1963, when students across the state, particularly in Raleigh, flooded the streets as they attempted to complete the unfinished business of the 1960 sit-­ins. Sanford engaged with the students, speaking informally without security when they assembled outside the governor’s mansion. He incorporated student leader Jesse Jackson into the state del­e­ga­tion to the Young Demo­ cratic Club’s national convention. Increasingly, he came to see, as he put it, that “reluctance to accept the Negro in employment is the greatest single block to the continued pro­gress and to the full use of the ­human potential of the nation and its states.” To tackle that prob­lem, he established Good Neighbor Councils in each community to foster pro­gress at the local level. He then secured private foundation money to support a North Carolina Fund that would carry out demonstration antipoverty programs, an initiative that would ­later be bound into the War on Poverty.23 For Hollings, the pinch point came in the final year of his administration. He was alarmed that whites expected him to have some magic formula to make the race prob­lem go away. It looked to him 120

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as if it was “high time we started sobering ­people up.” The final straw was the Ole Miss crisis, when state legislators and the Citizens’ Council demanded that he lead a motorcade to Mississippi to show solidarity with Governor Barnett. Instead, he sent Pete Strom, the state’s top law enforcement officer, down to learn from the confrontation so that he would be prepared when the courts ordered Clemson University to desegregate. Working with Strom, Hollings drew up detailed plans to avoid the ­mistakes made at Ole Miss.24 South Carolina officials planned to set up a law enforcement quarantine of the entire area around Clemson and to provide journalists with access and information on a controlled basis. They knew that the courts would order Harvey Gantt to be admitted to the university. Then, in January 1963, less than a week before George Wallace promised Alabamians at his inauguration “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” Hollings told the South Carolina General Assembly in his farewell speech that Brown was “the fact of the land.” “South Carolina is ­running out of courts,” he said, and “law and order would be maintained.” Departing from his text, he turned to Pete Strom to tell him “to make sure nothing happens up ­there.”25 Hollings’s stern instructions echoed t­hose of business leaders, who had warned the local politicians that they could forget any outside investment if ­there was the slightest hint of trou­ble when Harvey Gantt was admitted to Clemson three weeks ­later. By that time, Donald Russell, former assistant to Jimmy Byrnes, would be governor, but the planning and the buildup of public support had all taken place u ­ nder the Hollings administration. Hollings would go on to defeat Russell in the race for the Senate in 1966. Gantt would go on to be mayor of Charlotte and then a surprisingly competitive candidate against Jesse Helms in 1990 and 1996.26 121

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For his part, Terry Sanford avoided meetings with, or endorsing, defiant governors like Wallace and Barnett. A ­ fter Kennedy sent troops to Oxford, Mississippi, Sanford simply said that he had never been prouder of the president.27 In North and South Carolina, African American leaders made clear-­eyed decisions about where to throw their support. They knew that it was unlikely to be openly solicited. They also knew that too public a clamor for their favored candidate would likely backfire. They ­were prepared to or­ga­nize support for Sanford and Hollings, even when ­these men appeared to sustain segregationist positions. In 1960, African American leaders in Durham, at Sanford’s ­request, voted for Sanford’s opponent in the first primary so that in the second primary he would not face accusations of being the candidate of the “Black bloc vote.” L ­ ater, John West remembered seeing Hollings’s ­people in up-­country South Carolina distributing pictures of his opponent, Donald Russell, shaking hands with the state field director of the NAACP, Isaiah DeQuincey (Deke) Newman. West wondered how they got hold of this photo­graph. They explained that Deke Newman himself gave the Hollings team the picture, knowing that it would hurt Russell.28 Kennedy’s anxiety to avoid any intervention that would put moderate white southern politicians in an embarrassing position explained why he was so reluctant to intervene in the Albany, Georgia, demonstrations in 1962. John and Bobby Kennedy w ­ ere grateful that Laurie Pritchett’s careful h ­ andling of the demonstrators averted a public confrontation. They did not want to damage the candidacy of Carl Sanders, who stood a chance of being the first candidate not from the Talmadge faction to win the Georgia governorship since the war. 122

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Sanders had been one of the first members of the Georgia General Assembly to advocate for a repeal of the state’s massive re­sis­ tance legislation mandating school closures. He wanted to ensure that the state would not have to defy the courts over the desegregation of the University of Georgia. Campaigning against former governor and massive re­sis­tance stalwart Marvin Griffin, he promised that schools in Georgia would not be closed and that he would not resist federal court ­orders. He was able to win ­because the county unit system, which had sustained the Talmadges and rural Georgia for so long, was fi­nally declared unconstitutional by the courts in the Baker v. Carr reapportionment decision of 1962.29 This small group of southern moderates that Kennedy cherished, whose roles ­were instrumental to the desegregation of their states, was unable to build on its success. Sanford could not secure the election of L. Richardson Preyer to succeed him as governor of North Carolina in 1964, and in 1966 Sanders was succeeded not by the liberal standard-­bearer Ellis Arnall but by defiant segregationist Lester Maddox. Hollings ran unsuccessfully against the ardent New Dealer and ­labor reformer Olin Johnston in 1962. In 1966, he downplayed any racial moderation in his successful Senate bid to succeed Johnston. John F. Kennedy was forced by violent southern intransigence not only to send troops into the South but to introduce coercive legislation: the two actions he knew would undercut the moderates’ position. It would fall to a southern liberal, his successor, to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964—­and, responding to another crisis created by Black direct action and white violent response—­the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In this new world where, for the first time, African Americans would dictate the timetable of racial change, southern liberals ­were marginalized. They w ­ ere largely bystanders in the legislative deliberations and confrontations of 1964 and 1965. In 1964, the Senate 123

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man­ag­ers of the civil rights bill had no expectation that they could peel away any southern moderates from their opposition to the bill. They did not expect defections, even from a moderate like Albert Gore Sr. Only Ralph Yarborough of Texas among the southern senators voted for the act. In the House, a handful of younger urban representatives like Nashville’s Richard Fulton and Atlanta’s Charles Weltner deserted the unified southern opposition. But liberals like Jim Wright, Dante Fascell, and Albert Gore who had refused to sign the Southern Manifesto voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.30 ­These same southern moderates found it easier to vote for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Gore and Ross Bass, the two senators from Tennessee, joined Yarborough to support the administration. Fascell and Wright ­were among the twenty-­two southerners in the House who ultimately supported the Voting Rights Act. African Americans in the South would now vote in large numbers. How would white liberal politicians respond to this new system of biracial politics now that a large number of their Black constituents could vote?

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Part III the rise and fall of biracial politics ­after 1965

chapter five

Voting Rights, a Long Southern Strategy, and Conservative Accommodation

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Lyndon Johnson, one of FDR’s favorites among the new generation of southerners, had knocked down two of the pillars that V. O. Key Jr. identified as underpinning white supremacy and conservative control of southern politics: segregation and Black disfranchisement. Formal compliance by southern businesses with the desegregation of public accommodations occurred remarkably smoothly. The Voting Rights Act, which provided for the direct registration of voters by federal officials in counties with historically low levels of participation had a dramatic impact on the South. Black voter registration increased tenfold in Mississippi in just two years; by 1970, it had increased by 75 ­percent across the South.1 Johnson was ­under no illusion that the right to vote on its own was enough to ameliorate the life experience of Black Americans, which is why he pushed so hard for the War on Poverty legislation, even if he often stressed what the legislation would do for poor whites. As riots broke out in the northern cities in the long hot summers of 1965 through 1968, Johnson understood Black anger, even as he despaired at the damage the riots did to his legislative 127

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ambitions. “God knows,” he told his aide Joseph Califano, “how ­little w ­ e’ve moved on this issue despite the fanfare. As I see it, I’ve moved the Negro from D+ to C-. He’s still nowhere. He knows it. And that’s why he’s out on the streets. Hell, I’d be ­there too.”2 In late 1972, civil rights activists assembled at the newly opened Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, to discuss the Johnson presidency and continued African American prob­lems. Johnson insisted on attending, despite the fact that he was in g­ reat pain, plagued by heart trou­bles and haunted by his own mortality. It would be his last public appearance before he died of a heart attack at 64. He expressed his pride in what his administration had accomplished but lamented that t­ here was so much more to do. Johnson resolved tensions at the conference much in the way he had managed meetings in his prime. Julian Bond, f­uture chair of the NAACP, who had been denied a seat in the Georgia state legislature six years e­ arlier ­because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s opposition to the Vietnam War, expressed the appreciation of the civil rights activists pre­sent. He summed up the achievements of the Johnson presidency: “When the forces demanded and the mood permitted, for once an activist, human-­hearted man had found his hand on the levers of power and a vision beyond the next election. He was t­here when he and the nation needed him, and, oh, by God, do I wish he was ­there now.”3 Johnson’s vision may have gone “beyond the next election,” but at times he was gloomy about the po­liti­cal impact of the civil rights legislation. He often expressed the view that he was handing over the South to the Republican Party for a generation. ­There was certainly evidence to bolster that pessimism. In 1964, the Demo­crats, for the first time since the Civil War, failed to get a majority of southern white votes. Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate, had exhorted his party to “go hunting where the ducks are” and appeal to white segregationists in the South. He was 128

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rewarded by winning five Deep South states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. In 1968, Alabama segregationist George Wallace, r­ unning as an In­de­pen­dent, won five southern states, and Richard Nixon won all but Texas of the other six states. Nixon had secured the endorsement of former Dixiecrat turned Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, in return for Thurmond’s control of patronage in the South, a go-­slow on school desegregation, and the appointment of strict constructionist Supreme Court judges. In 1968, Nixon won middle-­and upper-­income southern white voters and Wallace lower-­income white voters. As president, Nixon’s Southern Strategy was to win over t­ hose Wallace white voters in 1972. He delivered what Thurmond wanted and swept all the southern states that year.4 But LBJ was not resigned to handing over the region to the GOP. While he was fearful of the results of the legislation he had helped pass, he was also impressed by the analy­sis of votes in the 1964 presidential election. Although the Deep South had deserted him, he had won six southern states, including ­Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida, which Eisenhower and Nixon had won in 1956 and 1960, respectively. His pollsters showed him that Black voters had provided him with the margin of victory in ­those states, and Johnson began to won­der if the Black voter might be the savior, rather than the killer, of the Demo­cratic Party in the South. The Republicans would “blow it,” he told Martin Luther King Jr. He believed they would fail to reach out to African Americans.5 The Black vote, Johnson believed, would be the key to the long-­ term success of liberals in the South. If the initial po­liti­cal impact in the South was the election of white backlash candidates and the accommodation by white conservatives of only a degree of racial change, in the long run, the prospect of a biracial politics based on African American support was an article of faith that has sustained liberal politicians ever since.6 129

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In 1965, ­after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, state representative Karl Wiesenburg spoke to Mississippi students about the ­future of the state in the new po­liti­cal climate. Wiesenburg was one of the “telephone booth liberals,” as the leading journalist who covered Mississippi dubbed them, claiming t­here w ­ ere so few of them that they could caucus in a phone booth. In 1962, Wiesenburg had refused to bow to the stampede in support of Governor Barnett during the Ole Miss crisis. He was optimistic about the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which he believed would have a positive impact on the state. “The threat of Negro registration and Negro voting is g­ oing to have a profound effect on Mississippi politics,” he predicted: ­ ou’re not ­going to see near as many of ­these negro baiting Y speeches and this old business of striding up to the podium and getting your name on the front page of the papers by yelling “nigger” and denouncing every­body you can think of that might sound like a moderate. I think that day is ­going to dis­appear in Mississippi and perhaps in the next generation you may even have genuine participation by Negroes in the po­liti­cal life of Mississippi, but I d ­ on’t expect that during my own time.7

Wiesenburg, who died in 1990, lived to see much of the change he anticipated. But the shift in rhe­toric did not signal as much of a transformation in the under­lying re­sis­tance to assimilation as he had anticipated. One of the sticking points was school desegregation. As lieutenant governor of Mississippi, Paul Johnson Jr. had participated in elaborate plans to defy the federal government on the Oxford Ole Miss campus in 1962. But once he was elected governor in 1964 he told Mississippians, “You and I are part of this 130

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world w ­ hether we like it or not. . . . ​We are Americans as well as Mississippians.” This news undoubtedly surprised many Mississippi whites. But as Johnson recalled, “We changed every­thing that we could think of to change.” As the Mississippi Economic Development Council worked hard to attract outside investment, the language of re­sis­tance faded remarkably quickly from public discourse. In Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers ­were murdered in 1964, the Philadelphia high school desegregated ­under the “freedom of choice” approach initially sanctioned by the courts in September 1965. Supposedly race neutral, “freedom of choice” was the essence of token compliance. ­There ­were still two separate educational tracks, and while a small number of African Americans w ­ ere f­ ree to go to previously all-­white schools, whites retained the freedom to choose to attend white schools. The Black students who integrated the high school in Neshoba faced hostility, but they did not face vio­ lence. The Klansman who harassed the superintendent of schools was ­stopped in December 1966 by an ultimatum from the town’s leading citizens.8 In 1971, according to Adam Nossiter, who was covering the South for the New York Times, “for the first time since Reconstruction, major candidates for governor of Mississippi did not use racial appeals.” (Politics had certainly changed in the state of Mississippi when, by 1983, a white Demo­crat could be elected governor despite sworn affidavits that he had slept with three Black transvestites.) But before any thawing of racial hostilities, first t­ here was backlash— not just to the desegregation of schools but to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and the accelerating demands for change by Black activists and members of the civil rights movement.9 Mississippi congressman John Bell Williams, who had been stripped of his se­niority by the Demo­crats for backing Goldwater in 1964, was elected governor of Mississippi in 1967 as a defiant 131

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segregationist. Not only did he defeat moderates like William Winter, he managed to make Ross Barnett seem like a liberal traitor, claiming that rather than defy the federal government in the Ole Miss crisis, Barnett had made a secret deal with the Kennedys. But even Williams had to stand by when the federal courts called time on token compliance in Holmes v. Alexander in 1969. Holmes mandated the immediate end of dual school systems and insisted on the real desegregation of the Mississippi schools in February 1970. Any desegregation order inevitably involved the busing of ­children around a district. The Fifth Cir­cuit Court issued 166 desegregation ­orders between December 1969 and September 1970, 59 in Mississippi alone. By 1971, according to Health, Education, and Welfare figures, 44 ­percent of Black students attended predominantly white schools in the South, in contrast to 28 ­percent in the North and West.10 Real integration came at a cost. Whites fled to private schools, and Black faculty and high school principals often lost out in the integrated schools. But as Willie Morris wryly noted, in Mississippi t­ here ­were often neither suburbs to flee to nor the resources to fund high-­quality white private schools. One way or another, “Dismantling the detritus of the dual education system in the South, once thought improbable if not insuperable, became a real­ity relatively peacefully and in a very short time.”11 Still, across the South backlash politicians w ­ ere successful. In Florida, Claude Kirk Jr. embodied a Republican distrust of the federal government with his opposition to court-­ordered busing and support for capital punishment. In South Carolina, Strom Thurmond continued his crusade against Supreme Court judges, fulminating against civil rights legislation and school desegregation. His protégé Harry Dent controlled federal patronage in the South and sat in the White House seeking to build up Republican strength across the region.12 132

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In Georgia, Lester Maddox, who, wielding a pickaxe, had blocked African American customers from his chicken restaurant ­after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, translated that defiance into a gubernatorial triumph in 1966, defeating the unapologetic liberal war­horse Ellis Arnall. Maddox labeled Arnall “the granddaddy of integration” and claimed that his “wild Socialism” guaranteed him the support of the Black bloc vote. He branded Arnall the candidate of “LBJ, Humphrey, Socialism, MLK, and SNCC.” The Johnson White House was assured that Arnall would destroy Maddox in the runoff. Instead, Maddox comfortably won.13 But, of course, the poster boy of white backlash was George Wallace, famous for standing at the school­house door, a publicity stunt that attempted to block the integration of the University of Alabama in 1963. Businessmen in Alabama could see the damage done by his intransigence. They could argue that Wallace’s actions speeded up, rather than delayed, federal intervention in civil rights, ­mental health, and prisons. But the symbolism of defiance mattered more than the results. As ­V irginia Durr wearily observed, “George Wallace expresses their feelings of persecution and gets stronger all the time, and I do not see any signs of repentance on his part or on the part of the white population.”14 Wallace had found in 1964 that he could run strongly in Demo­ cratic presidential primaries in northern states like Wisconsin. Forbidden by term limits from r­ unning for governor in 1966, Wallace was able to put his wife of over twenty years, Lurleen, in the governor’s mansion as a surrogate. He now sought to plan a third-­party presidential bid, despite the fact that Lurleen was fighting metastasizing uterine cancer. Lurleen Wallace died fifteen months into her term, at forty-­one. Wallace commanded enthusiastic white support in the Deep South in the 1968 elections, winning over 85 ­percent of the vote in Alabama and over 60 ­percent in Mississippi. Two years l­ater, he 133

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defeated the moderate who had become Alabama governor when Lurleen died. Albert Brewer won the first primary with business and African American support, but Wallace fought back in the second primary in a rabble-­rousing campaign in which he shamelessly exploited white fears of the Black vote.15 ­There was also a backlash in the Upper South, partly a result of the unraveling of the “token compliance deal,” whereby white voters supported modest desegregation in southern cities in return for zero desegregation in Black-­majority areas. Affluent whites in North Carolina cities could tolerate racial change when they could retreat to the affluent suburbs or send their ­children to private schools. ­Those options ­were not available to whites in tobacco country in Eastern North Carolina, where mechanization was fi­nally reducing the need for ­labor in the rural economy. ­After 1964, displaced by economic change, tobacco country whites had to compete with increasingly assertive African Americans for scarce economic resources. As taxpayers, they resented the redistributive programs of the ­Great Society, which seemed to reward lawlessness and vio­lence.16 Between 1964 and 1967, many poor white rural residents joined the North Carolina Klan, making it the largest Klan in the South outside Alabama and Mississippi. George Wallace could tap into their hostility to privileged students at Chapel Hill protesting the Vietnam War and burning the flag. ­These rural whites also despised a Supreme Court that banned prayer in school, sanctioned pornography, and protected the rights of criminals. Eastern North Carolina supported Wallace in 1968.17 Jesse Helms, who had played such a key role in the red-­baiting and race-­baiting defeat of Frank Graham in 1950, had been addressing the concerns of rural North Carolina whites in his nightly editorials on WRAL-­TV. As his ally Frank Rouse observed, “­These Eastern North Carolina Demo­crats ­were rednecks, country, rural,

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extremely honest, plain spoken and ultraconservative, and inherently Southern Baptist”—­whether or not they attended church. George McGovern, the national Demo­cratic candidate in 1972, typified every­thing they opposed. Helms won the Senate race as a Republican, riding Nixon’s coattails and tying his opponent to McGovern, whom the ads proclaimed was g­ oing to “ditch, dam, and destroy” Amer­i­ca.18 Helms was a divisive figure. He never won convincingly in his subsequent four Senate races, even his race-­baiting 1990 campaign against African American candidate Harvey Gantt. But he amply confirmed the Republican strategy of Pat Buchanan, Charles Colson, and ­others: divide the country in two and take the bigger half. Helms maintained his hostility to the “Marxist-­oriented” Martin Luther King Jr., whose national holiday he opposed in 1983. He was unconcerned about losing Black votes. For one t­ hing, he had none to lose. As he himself put it, “I’m not ­going to get any black votes, period.”19 While George Wallace captured the headlines and Jesse Helms secured the votes, t­here ­were more subtle responses to the courts and desegregation than defiance. In the mid-1960s, a group of pragmatic law-­and-­order Demo­cratic segregationists became governors in the South: Dan Moore in North Carolina and his successor Bob Scott, John McKeithen in Louisiana, Robert McNair in South Carolina, Buford Ellington in Tennessee. They all defeated extreme segregationists, and all accepted the inevitability of Black voting and racial change but aimed to slow down its impact. They attempted to facilitate the token compliance to school desegregation ordered by the courts. As Bob McNair put it, “When we run out of courts we must adapt to the circumstances.” They tried to keep lines of communication open with increasingly assertive African

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American leaders, and while they distanced themselves from the national Demo­cratic Party, they did not become Republicans and they worked to secure largesse from ­Great Society programs.20 Above all, they sought to maintain law and order. When Kerr Scott’s son Bob set his sights on the governor’s mansion in 1967 and 1968, he blasted “the civil disobedience movement and its demonstrators,” “hippies,” “Black Power advocates,” “coddlers of criminals,” “the United States Supreme Court and the federal establishment,” “peaceniks,” and, for good mea­sure, “free-­wheeling academics.” He blamed them all for sowing disorder in Amer­i­ca. In 1968, Scott won a narrow election victory over Republican Jim Gardner by taking a tough law-­and-­order stance and distancing himself from the Johnson administration and the Humphrey campaign.21 As governor of North Carolina, Bob Scott used the National Guard and state troopers to quell disturbances in Oxford and Wilmington and to end student occupations in Greensboro and Chapel Hill. ­These actions overshadowed his introduction of the first cigarette tax in the state’s history, his decision to increase the gasoline tax to pay for roadbuilding, his establishment of the first state kindergarten program, and consolidation of the sixteen state-­ supported college campuses. It was fitting that he should finish his c­ areer as president of the statewide system of community colleges—­a Terry Sanford reform.22 Sending the National Guard to Black colleges was a frequent overreaction to rumors of snipers on campuses, and it could have disastrous consequences. The National Guard was sent to South Carolina State College at Orangeburg in February 1968, when students demanded the desegregation of a neighboring bowling alley. As protests continued, the state highway patrol fired into the demonstrators, killing three students and wounding twenty-­eight more. But the commitment to law and order also meant holding the ring 136

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when Black Power advocates, such as the Deacons for Defense in Louisiana, successfully faced down the Klan. John McKeithen could justifiably claim to have avoided a bloodbath when both Klansmen and the Deacons marched on the state capitol.23 In the long-­term, some of the staunchest segregationists embraced a highly crafted strategic accommodation. In 1970, Republican gubernatorial candidate Albert Watson ran a white backlash campaign in South Carolina during which mobs overturned two school buses of African American school ­children in Lamar. Watson was defeated. On election night, Strom Thurmond told him, “Well, Albert, this proves we ­can’t win elections any more by cussin’ Nigras.” This heralded what Thurmond’s biographer Joseph Crespino has called “a historic shift in the senator’s racial politics.” His response was to appoint an African American staff member who would secure proj­ects for Black communities. The senator’s constituency ser­vice was legendary. It now extended to his Black constituents. Thurmond would receive the Distinguished Ser­vice Medal from the South Carolina Conference of Black Mayors and would have high schools in Black communities named ­after him. He secured high-­profile federal appointments for African American leaders. In 1978, he enrolled his small ­daughter in an integrated public school in Columbia.24 The election George Wallace fought in 1970 was his last overtly racist campaign. From then on he reached out to the Black community as he had done in the early days of his c­ areer. John Stennis, who represented Mississippi in the Senate for forty-­one years, said that he did not like Black voting but he was not stupid. He and James Eastland adjusted to the expanded electorate by providing constituency ser­vices, made easier by their committee se­niority, that they had once provided solely for whites. Eastland donated to the Mississippi NAACP and developed a working friendship with NAACP leader Aaron Henry. When he asked Henry about his 137

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prospects of getting Black support in 1978 if he ran for reelection, Henry suggested they w ­ ere poor at best. Eastland, Henry explained, had “a master-­servant philosophy with regard to blacks.” Eastland helped raise money for a Black industrial college and appointed a Black staff member. Like other southern senators, ­every five years he routinely voted to extend the Voting Rights Act when it came up for renewal. He was a po­liti­cal realist who assumed that politicians wherever they came from would do their best for their constituents. He understood that northern politicians had to respond to the needs of urban African Americans and immigrants. Their voting be­hav­ior might be very dif­fer­ent to his own, but he accepted that. He never did test his friend Henry’s conviction that it would be hard for him to secure Black votes. In the end, as the elections neared, Eastland de­cided not to run.25 Before 1965, the civil rights movement had won the culture war, pitting northern public opinion against the white South. White mobs and out-­of-­control policemen ­were captured on tele­vi­sion beating up peaceful, respectable Black students and ­mothers who ­were simply attempting to protect their rights ­under the constitution. A ­ fter 1965, southern whites won that culture war. Strident African American demands, urban riots, and uncompromising Black Power advocates w ­ ere now the threatening visual images in northern ­house­holds. By 1968, segregationists avoided talk of Jim Crow or the defense of the southern way of life. Instead, they talked of states’ rights, defending the constitution, small government, taxpayers’ rights, the threat of lawlessness, the never-­ending demands of civil rights protesters, and the way in which civil rights legislation seemed to punish the South. A new emphasis on African American shortcomings, assembling statistics on illegitimacy, crime and venereal 138

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disease, could elicit a sympathetic response in the North, which was confronting civil rights protests and unrest of its own.26 No one nationally understood coded language better than Richard Nixon, whose Southern Strategy was designed to win over the segregationist Demo­crats who had voted for Wallace, particularly in the Deep South in 1968. His chief of staff, H.  R. Haldeman, captured Nixon’s aims in his diary, saying that he “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the ­whole prob­lem is ­really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”27 Yet the accommodation was subtler than simply the replacement of explicit racial language with more coded language. Even the cultured ideologue of massive re­sis­tance James Kilpatrick changed his tune. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Kilpatrick praised him in a way Jesse Helms never was able to contemplate. He praised King not only as one of the few leaders who could control the militants, but as “the bravest man I ever knew in public life.” “During the terrible days that followed upon the school desegregation ruling,” Kilpatrick wrote a­ fter King was assassinated, “no white southerner ever matched a fraction of his courage. To watch one of his marches was to sense the awesome power of strong character combined with high purpose. That is the way it must have been . . . ​when the early Christians braved the hate and ridicule of Rome.”28 For good mea­sure, Kilpatrick “renounced racism and acknowledged the rightness and permanence of the Brown ruling.” So did Sam Ervin, one of the draf­ters of the Southern Manifesto. By the late 1960s, Ervin accepted the correctness of the Brown decision and praised King. ­These ­were, of course, strategic retreats. Kilpatrick knew that his success as a nationally syndicated columnist demanded this adjustment. Ervin embraced Brown and championed King ­because he could portray King as an advocate of color-­blind 139

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policies, an argument he could now use to attack affirmative action and busing.29 John Stennis turned his attention from knee-­jerk defiance of the federal government to more subtle forms of re­sis­tance. He attempted to expose northern hy­poc­risy by seeking the impartial implementation of desegregation guidelines, North and South. He sought to ensure that local authorities in the South would have as much power as pos­si­ble to deal with local conflicts and shape racial change. Over the years he appears to have changed his views even further. In part, it was an ac­cep­tance of the inevitable. As he said in 1976, “Let me say just one t­ hing about this integration. I’m against it, always have been and always w ­ ill be, but it’s a fact. I’m not a fool. It’s a fact.” L ­ ater, he would vote against the Supreme Court nomination of conservative Robert Bork ­because he feared Bork would vote to overturn civil rights decisions. Mississippi, Stennis said, had spent too much time on ­those issues. “­They’re settled right now. It’s time for us to get on about other business. We fought that ­battle before and we lost.”30 Stennis also accepted that a changing world demanded a dif­ fer­ent stance. Over lunch in New York City with George Reedy, LBJ’s former press secretary, he was amazed by the diversity of the population on the streets. “You know, George,” he reflected, “if I ever lived in a place like this, I’d be for ­every bit of civil rights legislation ­there is. I can understand why they feel that way now.”31 In 1988, when Stennis retired, Joe Biden took over his office. During the handover, Stennis pointed to the huge ­table in his office. “This was the flagship of the Confederacy,” he said. “­Every Tuesday we gathered ­here ­under Senator Russell’s direction to plan the demise of the civil rights movement, from 1954 to 1968.” He said, “It’s time this t­ able passes from the man who was against civil rights into the hands of a man who was for civil rights.”

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“One more ­thing, Joe,” Stennis said before leaving. “The civil rights movement did more—­more to f­ ree the white man than the black man.” Biden looked at him and said, “Mr. Chairman, how’s that?” “It freed my soul,” Stennis sighed. “It freed my soul.”32

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chapter six

Thwarted Promises of a New South

“Southern Voter Spurned Race” blasted the headline of the Raleigh News and Observer on November 8, 1970. The editor of the Observer, Claude Sitton, had unrivaled experience reporting on the South. Born in Atlanta and educated on the GI bill, he had covered Albert Gore’s race for the Senate in Tennessee for the New York Times in 1958 and subsequently covered the civil rights movement and supervised the remarkable group of Times reporters who provided matchless coverage of the movement. Now Sitton wrote an epitaph for the politics of race and Nixon’s Southern Strategy. “The South turned its face to the ­future Tuesday and walked away from the wreckage of Mr. Nixon’s southern strategy,” he opined. “The keystone of that strategy was the racial issue.” The race issue had taken many white southerners into the GOP, Sitton conceded, “but election returns in state ­after state show that race alone no longer has the power to keep them ­there.”1 What had given Sitton hope was the election of four attractive younger southern liberal candidates as governors: Reubin Askew in Florida, Dale Bumpers in Arkansas, Jimmy Car­ter in Georgia, and John West in South Carolina. ­Later in the de­cade t­ hese ­were followed by Jim Hunt in North Carolina, Richard Riley in South Carolina, David Pryor and then a young Bill Clinton in Arkansas, 142

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and William Winter in Mississippi. ­These governors ­were heralded by Time as “New Day A’Coming in the South.” They ­were sufficiently conservative on social and cultural issues to attract white voters, and sufficiently moderate on race to secure African American support.2 The election of the New South governors challenged the notion, first voiced by LBJ, that an inevitable declension narrative governed the post–­Voting Rights South. This idea that the politics of race simply overwhelmed white liberals, leading to the conservative hegemony in the region ­today, has in the past informed my own thinking, but I now see a much more contested southern politics, though the liberal hopes of a politics based on economics rather than race have not been fulfilled. ­There have been four occasions in the post–­Voting Rights era when biracial co­ali­tions seemed to have a chance of success—in 1970 with the coming of ­these New South governors, in the late 1980s with the election of centrist Demo­crats like Bill Clinton, at the turn of the ­century with the election of education-­focused governors like Roy Barnes of Georgia, and finally in the aftermath of Obama’s election in 2008.3 What the New South governors seemed to have solved in the 1970s was the dilemma of how to secure the support of the Wallace voters without losing the Black vote. To win office, any candidate a­ fter 1965, except ­those in Black-­majority districts, needed to capture 35 to 40 ­percent of the white vote. The New South governors did this in the 1970s by putting together a cross-­class co­ali­ tion of affluent whites and lower-­income Blacks.4 It is tempting (and I have done it myself ) to disparage ­these governors as “business progressives” whose focus on honest and efficient government was primarily designed to attract outside investment and bring in educated, skilled professionals from outside the region. But on consideration, I now think t­ here was more of a cutting edge to their aspirations than that. ­These governors had a 143

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passion for an educational revolution that would create a skilled workforce. This was a goal that would help lower-­income African Americans, but it was also a prerequisite if they w ­ ere to revitalize 5 the financial prospects of the South. Too often as they sought outside investment, they found themselves thwarted by skepticism from potential employers. Irrespective of the tax breaks and incentives on offer, some manufacturers doubted they would find a large enough skilled workforce. This was the concern Terry Sanford and Fritz Hollings had faced a de­cade ­earlier. The drive to get the sort of growth that would materially raise their states’ income levels and help create an African American ­middle class energized the New South governors’ administrations daily. It also informed their push for infrastructure investment. Their proj­ect was helped by the fact that in the aftermath of the Voting Rights Act, the South outpaced the rest of the nation in terms of economic growth. The prospect of building a biracial po­ liti­cal co­ali­tion was much improved by the fact that both African Americans and whites ­were making economic gains. Significantly, lower-­income whites ­were not losing ­because of Black gains.6 ­There w ­ ere two new twists to the more l­imited picture of “business progressivism.” The first was a new focus on the environmental impact of industry. In the South, the drive to attract industry, particularly low-­wage industry, had given private utilities, food pro­ cessing industries, mines, and the lumber industry virtually ­free run to operate without concern for environmental damage. The New South governors of the 1970s had all recognized that environmental damage harmed the poor most of all and that middle-­class mi­ grants attracted by the quality of life in the region would be put off by polluted air and toxic rivers and lakes. Even southern environmental progressives from an older generation like Albert Gore Sr. and Frank Smith, both devoted to the TVA, had privileged economic

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growth for the poorest region in the country over environmental concerns. Conservation, for them, meant soil conservation and flood control. But in the 1970s, for the first time in the South, wider environmental protection became a serious issue. Albert Gore’s son Al would, of course, l­ater make the environmental case even more strongly.7 Second, none of the new governors claimed to have been “upfront” on the race issue when they ­were ­running for office. Where older moderates like Albert Gore, Estes Kefauver, and LBJ had refused to sign the Southern Manifesto and taken courageous positions on ending segregation, t­ hese new governors had largely tried to avoid the issue of desegregation on the campaign trail—­with the notable exception of Dale Bumpers, who successfully urged his local school board in Arkansas to comply with the Brown decision as early as 1954. Jimmy Car­ter ran for governor in 1970 against the older, classic Georgia moderate Carl Saunders. Segregationist leader Roy Harris sourly complained that Car­ter campaigned by telling voters that he was just like George Wallace and then immediately changed once he arrived in the governor’s mansion. Car­ter never disavowed the conduct of his 1970 campaign, but he was clearly sheepish about it. When his latest biographer asked him a few questions about the campaign, he asked softly, “Are we done talking about this yet?”8 Once in office, all the New South governors appointed African Americans to their staff. John West appointed f­ uture congressman Jim Clyburn, and Car­ter worked closely with Andrew Young. Both Car­ter and West used their inaugurals to promise the end of discrimination in state government. They sought to make school desegregation work. And the results seemed to testify to the seriousness of their efforts. Overt racism was largely eliminated from southern po­liti­cal rhe­toric. African American candidates ­were

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elected mayors of major cities like Atlanta and Birmingham. The end of discrimination in higher education created the skilled gradu­ ates who would vastly expand the Black ­middle class.9 Another departure from “business progressive” par­ameters was a new concern with hunger and malnutrition. No one did more to awaken the consciousness of southern governors and congressmen than Senator Fritz Hollings. Traditionally, southern politicians bristled at any suggestion that their constituents might be g­ oing hungry. They resented well-­publicized investigations and hearings by northern politicians like Bobby Kennedy, and did not wish to see damaging publicity when they w ­ ere seeking outside investment. Beyond this, they often dismissed poverty ­because of their racist ste­reo­types of rural African Americans. Hollings himself admitted to his “hunger myopia.”10 In policy terms, this led to a long-­term commitment to support and extend the food stamp program. Hollings enlisted the co­ operation of John West’s administration in South Carolina and prompted other southern senators, like Herman Talmadge in Georgia and William Spong in ­V irginia to conduct hunger tours in their own states. Hollings did not win over ­those who complained that he was merely politicking for the Black vote or assisting the undeserving. But he took time to point out how many food stamp recipients ­were whites. Why did a $40,000 federal payment to a planter not destroy their soul if a 40-­cent breakfast for a child could wreak moral havoc? As a result of Hollings’s crusade, combined with the impact of Black voter mobilization, white southern Demo­cratic senators played a key role in expanding social welfare programs, especially food stamps, in the 1960s and 1970s.11 Southern Demo­ cratic congressmen moved closer to their northern Demo­cratic counter­parts in the 1970s and 1980s than at any time since the 1930s. In the South itself, New South governors, 146

Thwarted Promises of a New South

unlike their southern liberal pre­de­ces­sors in the 1940s, often handed over to like-­minded successors.12 The po­liti­cal success of the New South governors was partly vitiated by stagflation in the late 1970s, but the liberal proj­ect was more permanently impacted by the popularity among white southerners of Ronald Reagan’s tax-­cutting and ­limited government agenda of the 1980s. Reagan sought to recapture the George Wallace supporters who had voted for Jimmy Car­ter in 1976. He opened his national campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, the first presidential candidate ever to speak t­ here, a quin­tes­sen­tial occasion for po­liti­cal speechmaking by aspirant local candidates. The choice of Neshoba was no accident. Reagan could have spoken at the state capital, Jackson. “­Going out in t­ hese rural areas . . . ​was sort of heresy,” Larry Griffiths, the state director of the Mississippi GOP recalled, but “I know from my standpoint in 1980, we w ­ ere just obsessed with how you turn around t­hese rural counties and get them started voting for us.”13 Reagan made a standard speech about patriotism, the need for a strong defense, the sins of government, and the general weakness of the Car­ter administration. But he also included an explicit appeal to “state rights.” Edwin Meese, Reagan’s counselor and then attorney general, ­later denied that the phrase was designed to appeal to former segregationists. Indeed, he argued, Reagan’s advocacy of states’ rights was designed to rescue the concept from the racist connotations of “the southern crazies.” Meese, who had been Reagan’s chief of staff as governor of California, said Reagan’s belief in states’ rights had been hardened in the first year of the Nixon administration, when so many federal guidelines landed on his desk in Sacramento. But Neshoba was no ordinary county in which to invoke that phrase. This was where three civil rights workers had 147

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been abducted and murdered in 1964. Reagan’s appeal to states’ rights consciously aimed to strike a chord with conservative former segregationists. Mississippi GOP officials said explic­itly that this was where Reagan could connect with “the George Wallace voters.” It was part of “the Long Southern Strategy” playbook.14 When Albert Gore lost his bid for reelection to the Senate in 1970, as the number one target of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, his press secretary complained bitterly that they had been defeated by “John T. Scopes, race, race, and race.” Busing, control of the judiciary, and Gore’s votes against Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees— all race-­based issues, essentially—­had been joined by school prayer, a new incarnation of the evangelical b ­ attle over secular schooling 15 that had first flared up in the 1920s. School prayer came from left field for Gore, whose generation steered clear of public religiosity. He had seen the damage that injecting religion into politics had done in the 1920s, and in 1960 he had seen virulent anti-­Catholicism in his home state aimed against John F. Kennedy. (More Tennesseans, according to Louis Harris’s polls, ­were disturbed by the prospect of a Catholic president than any other state in the nation.) In 1970, as a strict adherent to the Baptist separation of church and state, Gore strug­gled without success to come to terms with a newly mobilized religious vote. The issue of school prayer had also been a f­ actor in the defeat of Gore’s friend Ralph Yarborough in Texas that year, but religion was still not a central issue in southern politics. The candidate who defeated Gore, William E. Brock, was himself defeated in 1976 but ­later became chair of the Republican National Committee.16 Conservative po­liti­cal operative Paul Weyrich, whose Committee for the Survival of a ­Free Congress, funded by beer tycoon Joseph Coors, was one of the first organ­izations to use direct mail to fundraise, had tapped into evangelical churches for support. When Weyrich went to see Brock as chair of the Republican 148

Thwarted Promises of a New South

National Committee, he complained that Brock “simply did not get it” about the potential importance of the grassroots evangelical vote for the GOP. This lack of interest in the evangelical vote was about to change. The church had always been impor­tant in the rural South. But while it was part and parcel of community life, it was rarely overtly po­liti­cal. Fundamentalist pastors who had led the fight against the teaching of evolution in the 1920s retreated from the po­liti­cal world to separate themselves from the corrupting force of politics. They ­were the fastest growing religious group during the Depression and war years, but they set up their own parallel world of colleges and media a­ fter the war. The Cold War against godless anti-­communism and the friendship of Billy Graham with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon drew the evangelical community into the po­liti­cal arena (though Billy Graham was less confrontational than many of his fellow evangelists).17 The TV evangelists had all been ardent and noisy segregationists in the 1950s. In ­Little Rock in 1957, the mainstream churches kept largely ­silent during the crisis, but the Pentecostal churches ­were vocal supporters of defiance. The anti-­communist zealots of fundamentalism in the 1950s—­Carl McIntyre, Billy James Hargis, and Bob Jones Sr.—­were equally committed to segregation. They ­were all friends and supporters of Strom Thurmond.18 As Randall Balmer has shown, what originally energized evangelical leaders in the 1970s was the question of the tax-­exempt status of segregated schools, academies, and colleges. The attempt of the IRS to rescind that exemption pushed Jerry Falwell, president of Liberty University, to mobilize. At that stage, abortion was not an issue that particularly concerned evangelicals. The issue of school prayer made some evangelicals more po­liti­ cally vocal ­after the Supreme Court banned public schools from reciting prayers in 1962, but overt po­liti­cal organ­ization only came 149

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in the 1970s. The religious right drew on the lessons of the liberal churches that had mobilized against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Conservative evangelicals now entered the po­liti­cal arena with a vengeance, ironically targeting the first born-­again Southern Baptist who had been elected president.19 As Jimmy Car­ter reminded an audience in 1984, Jerry Falwell campaigned against him as early as 1976—­before tax exemptions for religious schools like Bob Jones University had surfaced as an issue, before the Moral Majority was founded. The religious right energized evangelical voters in the South on the lifestyle issues of the 1960s and 1970s: abortion, gays, sex education, ­family values, and school prayer. (In contrast to an ­earlier period, Catholic support was now welcomed.) If the federal government was no longer trusted on economic issues, white religious voters certainly did not trust unelected, unaccountable judges, public interest l­awyers, and bureaucrats driving through a rights revolution.20 As liberal historian and devout Baptist Wayne Flynt of Alabama noted, evangelical Christians “virtually turned their churches into Republican precinct headquarters.” The Southern Baptist Convention gave a platform to Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and both Bushes. It denied a podium to the two presidents who w ­ ere actually Southern Baptists: Jimmy Car­ter and Bill Clinton.21 By 1994, half the voters in South Carolina identified themselves as evangelicals. The Christian Co­ali­tion, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson in 1987 and headed by Ralph Reed, distributed over one million information packs through its churches in South Carolina alone on election eve and was widely credited with Republican success that year. It rapidly transformed the nature of the sermons being preached on Sundays across the South. Al Gore used to be taken to a small New Salem Baptist church in Carthage, Tennessee, by his grand­father. When he went back to Nashville ­after his defeat in 2000, he was saddened to discover that the Bap150

Thwarted Promises of a New South

tist Church was so steeped in Republican ideology he could not find a church in which he felt comfortable. “The influx of fundamentalist preachers,” he lamented, “have pretty much chased us out with their right-­wing politics.”22 It was not ­until 1979 that Paul Weyrich was able to convince Jerry Falwell that abortion was the key issue to mobilize grassroots support when they established the Moral Majority. As Balmer concluded, “The religious right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, po­liti­cally conservative evangelical movement we know is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-­right fringes of the conservative movement in the late 1970s.” Balmer sees evangelical support for Donald Trump as “the logical conclusion of that tragic aberration.”23 How could progressive southern leaders recapture the initiative and ­counter Reagan’s popularity? In the 1980s, the answer was to align themselves with the Demo­cratic Leadership Council, which sought to distance the party from the high-­spending liberalism of its northern flag ­bearers like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis— who w ­ ere hugely unpop­u­lar in the white South. Terry Sanford, elected to the Senate from North Carolina in 1986 despite being labeled a “Ted Kennedy liberal,” had hoped to persuade Dale Bumpers of Arkansas to be the party’s torchbearer in 1988. Failing that, he tried to persuade Mario Cuomo to run. Then he turned to Al Gore, who had been elected to the Senate in 1984. Gore had won his f­ ather’s old congressional seat in 1976. It was a mea­sure of a lost tradition of bipartisanship that when Republican Howard Baker Jr., who had been first elected to the Senate in 1966, de­cided not to run for reelection in 1984, one of the first ­people he told in confidence was Albert Gore Sr.’s wife, Pauline. Two weeks ­later, he 151

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called again: he thought Pauline would want to know that his protégé Lamar Alexander, now the governor, was not ­going to run for his seat. What Baker was d ­ oing was giving Pauline’s son the heads24 up to run for the Senate. For all his youth and limitations as a candidate, Gore was a moderate on race who appealed to regional values on social issues and was strong on national defense. But Gore’s hopes of emerging from Super Tuesday armed with all the southern delegates was derailed by Jesse Jackson’s appeal to African American voters, which enabled him to win a number of Demo­cratic primaries in the Deep South. When Dukakis, the Mas­sa­chu­setts governor, won the nomination, Sanford and o­ thers found the Dukakis team slow to return their calls. Southern congressmen fi­nally secured a meeting with the governor’s aides. Sanford told them it was the worst-­managed campaign he had ever seen. “­Here we have an example of a self-­ satisfied crowd, now admittedly worried and harassed, but a group that admits no error, and had no doubts.”25 Both Sanford and Gore w ­ ere friends of the Kennedy f­ amily, but they worked hard in the 1980s to avoid being tarred with the Kennedy liberal brush. Al Gore steered clear of national politics ­until he ran for president and did not even attend the national conventions in 1976, 1980, and 1984. As his former campaign man­ag­er told me, when Al ran for the Senate in 1984, he would have jumped out of the win­dow rather than have his picture taken with Ted Kennedy or indeed the Demo­cratic presidential candidate that year, Walter Mondale. When members of Congress assembled to hear President George H. W. Bush’s State of the Union address in 1989, Terry Sanford maneuvered carefully to ensure that he was not sitting close to Ted Kennedy for any camera shots. He thought he had achieved this by claiming a seat early, only for Ted Kennedy at the last minute to slip in immediately b ­ ehind him in the next row back.26 152

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The drive to reposition the party to help white southern liberals was spearheaded by southern governors Bill Clinton in Arkansas and Zell Miller in Georgia. Armed with poll data from Dick Morris, James Carville, and Paul Begala, they sought a position for Demo­crats in the South that was tough on crime and national defense, skeptical of soak-­the-­rich rhe­toric, but convinced of the need to eliminate the skills deficit among southern workers. They sought technocratic and market-­based solutions to the region’s prob­lems. Jesse Jackson dismissed the Demo­cratic Leadership Council as the “Southern White Boys Club,” or what he called “Demo­crats for the Leisure Class.” But Clinton understood that if he tacked too far to the left he would lose the support of white southerners who ­were key to electoral victory.27 Sanford summed up the dilemma posed by Jackson. In 1963 and 1964, Sanford had been something of a mentor to Jackson when he had been governor and Jackson had been a student leader in Greensboro. He secured funds for him to put together films that explained the position of African Americans in North Carolina and why they w ­ ere demonstrating. He found him a place on the state del­e­ga­tion to the Young Demo­crats national convention in 1964. But as far as Sanford was concerned, Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1988 had been a purely racist campaign—­George Wallace in reverse. Sanford laid out his concerns in his journal: “Our prob­lem has been that we have had ­great difficulty in getting back to the ­middle, to the moderate voter who thinks, perhaps with the residual prejudice that he was raised with, that the Demo­cratic Party has become the party of the blacks, unconcerned with equal rights for white males.”28 Zell Miller, r­unning for governor of Georgia, mapped out his ­recipe for a successful biracial Demo­cratic co­ali­tion to the Southern Demo­cratic Caucus in Raleigh in 1991. He said the Demo­cratic Party should be unapologetic about supporting the ERA and a 153

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­ oman’s right to choose. But they should not be fighting primarily w on ­those social issues. What they needed to do was to win over white voters on the economic issue. “We must ask why CEOs make 90 times what shopworkers can earn; why big executives have golden parachutes while working p ­ eople have no health insurance . . . ​­these issues are the bottom line for the pocket­book of working Americans.”29 It was ­these issues that took fellow southern governor Bill Clinton into the White House in 1992. Clinton had previously been punished in Arkansas for a disastrous first term as governor. Much like his first term in the White House, he ran a disor­ga­nized, chaotic administration with no clear priorities. A vehicle registration tax hike to fund roadbuilding and local resentment against inexperienced outsiders brought in to head government agencies doomed him to defeat in 1978. When he successfully ran for election in 1982, and for another term in 1986 ­after a constitutional change to allow a second term, he was tightly focused on education. He promised to raise school standards and fund college scholarships for all high school gradu­ates with a B average. Clinton was encouraged to run for the presidency by two southern governors who had also focused on education, Richard Riley of South Carolina and Jim Hunt of North Carolina. He offered voters a “New Choice based on old values.” Education was key to what Amer­i­ca needed most: greater economic productivity. He promised to end welfare and to put more policemen on the streets. But he also retained overwhelming African American support. It was a rare weekend when he did not visit a Black church.30 When Clinton won in 1992, the Demo­crats still held 12 out of the 22 southern Senate seats and 77 of the 125 southern House seats. The Reagan revolution had not eliminated the Demo­cratic Party in the South. Popu­lar Republican presidents carried a lot of local Republicans into office, but in midterm elections in 1986 and 1990, 154

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the Demo­crats could still make gains. In 1986, they picked up four Senate seats in the South (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina). Republicans made no effort to win the Black vote, and Demo­crats had learned to appeal to the Black vote surgically, through community leaders and Black radio, without having to alienate white supporters.31 Ambitious southern politicians working at the local level w ­ ere often reluctant to throw in their lot with the thin ranks of Republican activists. Rural conservatives had not entirely deserted the Demo­cratic Party, especially when veteran former segregationist conservative incumbents like Jamie Whitten or Sonny Montgomery in Mississippi ­were still in the party. The promise of the Demo­cratic Leadership Council and its platform was shaken by the national Republican breakthrough of 1994, when the Republicans took control of the House and the Senate for the first time since 1953. Clinton’s strug­gles over the bud­get, trade policy, and his failed health care reform had exacerbated voter distrust of the federal government. Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich spearheaded a Republican campaign to lower taxes, shrink the size of government, balance the bud­get, and reform Congress. His Contract with Amer­i­ca had significant input from Texas representatives Dick Armey and Tom DeLay.32 The GOP picked up nineteen House seats in the South and outnumbered Demo­cratic southern congressmen for the first time since Reconstruction. In Tennessee, Senate Majority Leader Jim Sasser was defeated ­after eigh­teen years in Washington. Al Gore’s Senate seat was taken by former Watergate counsel Fred Thompson. The Demo­crats strug­gled to get 40 ­percent of the vote in ­those elections, and Demo­crats in Tennessee have failed to win a Senate seat since 1994. 155

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George W. Bush was elected governor of Texas in 1994 in an election that heralded unbroken GOP control of the Texas state­ house. Alabama senator Richard Shelby switched to the Republican Party, and within two years Republican (and ­future attorney general ­under Trump) Jeff Sessions, with a rec­ord as district attorney of harassing civil rights activists, had been sent to join him in Washington. Party switching was no longer a rarity. As Arkansas congressman Tommy Robinson memorably put it, I could no longer stomach staying in a party run by the likes of Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson. . . . ​The Arkansas Demo­crat is nothing like the national Demo­crat. ­They’re hard-­working ­people, they believe in God and motherhood and charity and apple pie, and the eastern liberals have pointy heads and they carry big briefcases around with nothing inside but ham sandwiches.

Fifty-­eight Demo­cratic state officials switched to the Republican Party between November 1994 and March 1998, the deadline to register for the next election. Republicans have advanced in their control of the South ever since. Once the Republican Party became ­really competitive at the local level, it became an attractive proposition for ambitious young politicians. Gingrich, perhaps more than other individual, was responsible for the injection of mean-­spirited partisanship into national politics, fueling aggressive Republicanism at the local level.33 Gavin Wright has made a compelling case that, in the long run, 1994 was the turning point that set the South on the road to white Republican dominance. Biracial co­ali­tions, he argued, prospered so long as Black economic gains ­after the Voting Rights Act did not come at the expense of white jobs. For most of that time, economic growth benefited both groups. But a­ fter 1994, as manufacturing jobs 156

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collapsed, whites turned away from a Demo­cratic Party now associated with f­ ree trade and globalization. Kent Syler, administrative assistant to Congressman Bart Gordon in ­Middle Tennessee, remembered the shift vividly. In the Fourth District, Gordon used to rely on traditional Demo­cratic majorities in the rural counties to offset the 5,000-­vote deficit they had coming out of suburban Franklin and Williamson Counties. As opportunities in the small towns dried up, rural voters deserted a party that had willingly embraced the free-­trade agreements that the white voters came to believed had put them out of a job. For seven elections before 1994, Demo­crats had picked up between 45 and 55 ­percent of the southern white vote. Their share fell to one-­third in 1994 and has strug­gled to reach that since.34 ­There ­were still opportunities for white liberals a­ fter po­liti­cal evangelicals entered the stage. By 2000, the Republican Party seemed to have completely abandoned the African American vote. Demo­crats elected a number of southern governors that year who wanted to build an alliance of suburban middle-­class whites, particularly recent mi­grants to the region, who tended to be more socially liberal, with African Americans in the inner cities. Jim Hunt, now in his fourth term as governor of North Carolina, Jim Hodges in South Carolina, Zell Miller and Roy Barnes in Georgia, and Don Siegelman in Alabama believed that suburban whites and inner-­ city Blacks had a mutual interest in quality public education. Hunt had been an early proponent of state-­funded early childhood education, and t­hese governors proposed state lotteries whose revenues would be ring-­fenced to fund education. Once again, this time in a lecture at Tulane University in March  2000, Miller explained what a Demo­crat had to do to be successful in the South: Unlike their GOP counter­parts, ­every southern Demo­crat who runs for governor must still prove that he is not a wild 157

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liberal. That means he w ­ on’t let all the crooks out of jail, raise taxes, pour the public’s money down a variety of ratholes, double every­body’s welfare checks, allow the burning of the American flag, let serial murderers escape the electric chair, or take down the Christmas tree at the governor’s mansion. If they ­don’t prove it, they lose it. It’s that ­simple.35

That year, southern Demo­cratic governors still outnumbered Republicans. But this was soon ­going to change. Ronnie Musgrove in Mississippi took Miller’s advice to heart. He secured remarkable changes in education and his Advantage Mississippi Initiative brought Nissan into the state. But he also supported Roy Moore, the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who had installed a two-­and-­a-­half-­ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the state court building. The court ordered the monument removed, on the grounds that it ­violated the separation of church and state, and when Moore refused, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary removed him from office. Musgrove wrote to Moore ­after his censure and invited the judge to display his Ten Commandments in the Mississippi state capitol for a week the following month. He announced his intention of encouraging other governors to follow suit. “It would be my honor to host this monument,” he proclaimed, “as a symbol of e­ very Mississippian’s dedication to the fundamental princi­ples of the Ten Commandments.”36 Miller’s belief that southern Demo­crats could secure a workable and socially moderate biracial co­ali­tion was undermined by the boost that 9 / 11 gave Republicans, particularly in the South. The Republican Party successfully portrayed itself as the patriotic party, tough on terrorism and wrapped in God and flag. Barnes, Hodges, and Siegelman ­were all defeated when they sought second terms in 2002. They ­were the last Demo­cratic governors in their states. 158

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Despite Barack Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008, Musgrove could not translate his success as governor of Mississippi into a Senate seat that year. By now it was a rare southern Demo­crat, like Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, who could survive more than one term as a senator. Scandals beset apparently attractive, electable candidates like Mike Easley and John Edwards in North Carolina. As Republicans gained control of southern legislatures, they moved with the ruthlessness of early twentieth-­century white supremacy Demo­crats to consolidate their position with voter ID laws and highly skilled partisan gerrymandering. Eight southern states passed voter restriction laws between 2010 and 2015. In 2018, Demo­crat Stacey Abrams accused her gubernatorial opponent, the Republican secretary of state, of creating for eight years “an atmosphere of fear around the right to vote in the state of Georgia.” Following the Shelby decision in 2013, which held that southern states no longer had to have election law changes “pre-­ cleared,” a key plank of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Republican efforts to suppress the vote w ­ ere given f­ ree rein. The bulk of the 868 polling places that ­were closed ­after pre-­clearance was ended w ­ ere in poor and Black neighborhoods in the South. A final win­dow of opportunity appeared in 2008, when Barack Obama won the presidency by carry­ing three southern states: ­V irginia, North Carolina, and Florida. It seemed an improbable victory. When quizzed about Obama’s prospects in North Carolina, Rob Christensen, the veteran po­liti­cal editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, was dismissive in the summer of 2008. “Race is of course by far the most power­ful f­actor,” he told me. “But Obama is also hurt in the South by his exotic name and background, by his Ivy League credentials, by his liberal voting rec­ord, and his total lack of good ol’ boy qualities. If Obama was white he would have difficulties in the South.” Senator Lindsey Graham 159

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of South Carolina put it even more bluntly, saying, “I’ll beat Michael Phelps in swimming before Barack Obama wins North Carolina.”37 But Obama won North Carolina, and ­V irginia, which three white southern Baptists—­Jimmy Car­ter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore—­had previously failed to win. Demo­crats picked up Senate seats in ­Virginia and North Carolina and held on to their seats in Arkansas and Louisiana. Part of the success could be put down to demographic ­factors—­the migration of white northerners into North Carolina and expansion of the exurbs of Washington, D.C., into ­Virginia with the huge influx of money and jobs to the capital following 9 / 11—­and part to the full mobilization of African American voters. But Obama needed the support of whites to win, especially of the suburban whites who helped him so much nationally. His victory appeared to herald the possibility of a more biracial southern politics. But the Tea Party revolt of 2010, the toxicity of Obamacare, and the passion surrounding values issues relentlessly promulgated by Fox News and talk radio largely shut off thoughts of a liberal revival. Obama’s social media outreach, which had been such an impressive feature of his 2008 campaign, was not continued into the White House. In 2012, Republicans cemented control of congressional del­e­ga­tions and state legislatures. By 2014, the Demo­crats had lost both Arkansas senate seats, Mary Landrieu had been defeated in Louisiana, and Kay Hagan, who had been elected on Obama’s coattails in 2008 in North Carolina, lost in one of the most expensive Senate races ever.38 It seemed as if it would take an egregious Republican scandal to elect a southern Demo­crat in statewide races. In 2015, John Bel Edwards was elected governor of Louisiana, defeating Senator David Vitter only ­after Vitter was found to be frequenting prostitutes in D.C. Two years l­ater, Doug Jones in Alabama narrowly 160

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defeated former state supreme court chief justice Roy Moore, who by then was plagued by accusations of sexual harassment of young ­women. In 2016, Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s Demo­cratic attorney general, managed to eke out a wafer-­thin majority against GOP incumbent Pat McCrory, but only ­after national firms and organ­izations boycotted the state in protest of its bathroom law, which required individuals on state government premises (including schools) only to use rest­rooms and changing facilities for the sex identified on their birth certificates. Cities in the state faced the loss of their convention trade and much-­treasured basketball tournaments. The former state attorney general was one of the most successful southern governors in battling the Covid-19 pandemic, but even so, Cooper’s large lead in the polls as late as October 2020 in his bid for reelection had almost vanished on Election Day. The difficulty of electing an African American man or ­woman to statewide office in the South more than half a ­century a­ fter the Voting Rights Act highlights the per­sis­tence of conservative white racial attitudes. No Black politician has been elected governor of a southern state since 1965 other than Doug Wilder in ­Virginia in 1989—­and he ran well ­behind the rest of the Demo­cratic ticket that year. U ­ ntil 2021, only one African American, Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina, had been elected to the Senate, but he was originally appointed to fill a vacant seat and has only run as an incumbent. In 2018, Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida would both see poll leads evaporate on Election Day. Opinion polls consistently overestimate support for African American candidates, who need to be at least six points ahead in the polls if they are to win on Election Day. In 2021, Raphael Warnock bucked that trend to win in Georgia by a razor-­thin margin. At the local level, the difficulty of getting white support led African Americans and Demo­crats to support the redrawing of bound­aries to create Black-­majority districts a­fter the Gingles 161

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decision of 1982. ­These districts dramatically increased the number of Black congressmen, but they also made other districts more white and susceptible to Republican control. Black congressmen like Jim Clyburn from South Carolina and Cedric Richmond of Louisiana could be power­ful national power brokers—­but they had much less chance to shape state government policy. The policy consequences of the return to one-­party control are clear enough. Republican control has meant that few African Americans have had leadership positions in state legislatures. In an epidemic of gerrymandering, Republican legislatures have redrawn congressional districts with sometimes spectacular results. In 2010, Demo­crats held seven of the thirteen North Carolina congressional seats. Two years l­ater, 50.6 ­percent of North Carolina’s voters voted for Demo­cratic congressional candidates, but u ­ nder the new districts redrawn by the GOP, the Republicans had a nine-­to-­four margin in the House del­e­ga­tion. Public school funding declined. Taxation, through its reliance on sales taxes, became more regressive. States rejected the opportunity offered by the Affordable Care Act to take federal funds to expand Medicaid; of the eigh­teen states that turned down the federal funds to extend Medicaid, nine w ­ ere 39 in the South. Then came Donald Trump. His election in 2016 demonstrated the formidable reach of the Republican Party in the South. Trump won all the southern states except ­Virginia. In most states, Hillary Clinton strug­gled to reach even 40 ­percent of the vote. Trump campaigned for tariff protectionism and against immigrants, especially Mexicans and Muslims. He promised to “Make American G ­ reat Again”—an appeal to the 72 ­percent of his supporters who believed that the American way of life had changed for the worst since the civil rights era.40 Trump’s campaign was drawn from the Republican Southern Strategy playbook, as befitted a candidate who had been endorsed 162

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early on by Pat Buchanan. Buchanan, along with Charles Colson, had been the most consistent and eloquent advocate in the Nixon administration for a po­liti­cal strategy that would divide rather than unite the country and appeal explic­itly to white southerners. Trump resurrected the phrase “­silent majority” from the Nixon years. Winning South Carolina was one of his most impor­tant early primary victories. Among the first Republicans to endorse him w ­ ere Jeff Sessions, senator from Alabama, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, and Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana. (It should be noted that two southern senators ­were initially amongst his most vociferous critics—­Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called him a “race-­baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and Ted Cruz of Texas, who admittedly was r­ unning against him, labeled him “a bully and a pathological liar.”) Trump’s rallies in the South had the same undertone of vio­lence that had accompanied George Wallace rallies in the 1960s. Trump said of a protester in Birmingham, Alabama, “Maybe he should have been roughed up, ­because it was absolutely disgusting what he was ­doing.”41 White nationalist groups welcomed the Trump campaign. Former Klansman David Duke was “overjoyed” that Trump was embracing issues Duke had championed for years. Richard Spencer of the white nationalist National Policy Institute thought that before Trump, “our identity ideas, national ideas, they had no place to go.” Neo-­Nazis claimed Trump was “what a leader looks like.” The Southern Poverty Law Center monitored the number of times Trump or his followers e­ ither used “white nationalist rhe­toric or engaged with figures in the white nationalist movement.” The number of hate groups and white nationalist groups identified by the SPLC ­rose dramatically ­after Trump’s election.42 Trump’s appeal to white nationalism in 2016 was inextricably linked to his appeal to southern white evangelicals. Like Ronald Reagan before him, Trump had never been privately or publicly 163

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religious. But he understood that a full-­blooded appeal to white evangelicals would pay po­liti­cal dividends. In return for the support of his Evangelical Advisory Committee he promised to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, support antiabortion campaigns and legislation, and move the American embassy in Israel to the biblical capital of Jerusalem. Religion is a major ­factor in explaining Trump’s success in the short run and the failure of southern white liberals in the long run.43 In 2016, the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted of sexual conquests and demeaned w ­ omen threatened to derail his candidacy. As Republican leaders hastened to distance themselves from Trump, it was the evangelical churches in the South that came to the rescue. Jerry Falwell Jr. and o­ thers had seen and approved the list of conservative judges that Trump was considering for the Supreme Court. They considered t­ hose pos­si­ble judges more impor­ tant than the personal failings of one individual. The tape was published on Friday, October 7. On Sunday morning, in a concerted drive, pastors across the South told their congregations that Jesus had consorted with sinners and that Trump’s personal failings should be forgiven. Eighty ­percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in November 2016. They also fueled the rage and militancy that seemed to characterize so many Trump supporters, a rage so reminiscent of the emotions George Wallace aroused. As historian George Marsden memorably quipped, a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is mad about something.44 Trump, more than any previous president, delivered on what he had promised the evangelicals. He gave them three impeccably conservative Supreme Court judges, was the first president to attend a March for Life in Washington, and moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. He also welcomed evangelical leaders with considerable fanfare to the White House. Seventy-­five ­percent of evangelicals supported him in 2020.45 164

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Trump did not disappoint white nationalist supporters e­ ither. He claimed to be the least racist person in the world. But even before his inauguration he condemned civil rights hero John Lewis for having cast doubt on the legitimacy of his election. “Congressman John Lewis” he tweeted, “should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart, (Not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk—no action or results. Sad!” He returned to that theme when attacking other Black members of the House: Trump said veteran chair of the House Oversight Committee, Elijah Cummings, should take care of his district, “a rat infested mess.” He suggested the “Squad”—­four ­women of color representing the far left of the Demo­cratic Party— should go home (three w ­ ere born in Amer­ic­ a) and “fix the totally broken and crime infested place they came from.”46 Trump courted or tolerated white supremacy groups and rarely condemned right-­wing hate groups. He would ­either claim not to know about them or jocularly encourage them: the Proud Boys should stand back but stand by; all he knew about QAnon conspiracy theorists was that they ­were against pedophiles.47 Trump criticized the taking down of Confederate statues and opposed the renaming of US military bases named ­after Confederate generals, but he did more than employ racial rhe­toric. His Justice Department, ­under both Jeff Sessions and William Barr, stood by and watched Republican state legislatures in the South move to make access to the ballot for African American voters more difficult. His attorneys general also refrained from challenging egregious partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts designed to maximize Republican partisan control.48 Like George Wallace in 1968, Richard Nixon in 1972, and George H. W. Bush in 1988, Trump invoked the language of law and order as an appeal to white voters. 165

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His response to the outpouring of protest on the streets in the summer of 2020, a­ fter the death at police hands of George Floyd, exemplified his racial stance. Apart from perfunctory expressions of sympathy for Floyd’s f­amily, he made no effort to engage with the demands of Black Lives ­Matter. Instead, he blamed the protests on Antifa, a left-­wing group that he identified as a domestic terrorist organ­ization. He emphasized the vio­lence of the protesters, praised the police, visited property damaged in the protests, and mused sympathetically about a young white Trump supporter who had fatally shot a protester. When protesters marched in Washington, D.C., the attorney general ordered the police and the National Guard to clear out the protesters so that the president could walk across Lafayette Square to stand outside St. John’s Episcopal Church silently holding up a bible, as if to exorcise a demon.49 The 2018 midterm elections had confirmed the GOP stranglehold on the South. By then, Texas had not elected a Demo­crat to statewide office for a quarter of a ­century. For all the excitement surrounding Beto O’Rourke’s candidacy for the Senate, he only ever reduced Ted Cruz’s lead to 2 ­percent. In Tennessee, Phil Bredesen—­a popu­lar, moderate former governor with an impeccable business background—­had a six-­point lead in July over his Republican opponent, Marsha Blackburn, for Bob Corker’s Senate seat. He maintained a lead in September, but then lost by over ten points. The turning point was the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the ­Supreme Court. Just as Albert Gore was punished in 1970 for his opposition to Haynsworth and Carswell, Bredesen was punished for his opposition to Kavanaugh. Demo­crats focused on the allegations of sexual assaults by the nominee, but in the South Kavenaugh was seen as maligned by a cabal of liberal feminists. Despite devas166

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tating details of his humiliating and traumatizing treatment of Christine Blasey Ford, evangelical support for the conservative nominee remained unshaken. Incumbent Demo­crat Bill Nelson’s comfortable lead in Florida was likewise completely eroded by his Republican challenger Rick Scott once the Kavanaugh hearings began. For the first time since Reconstruction, Florida now has two Republican senators. In the fall of 2020, Trump accused his opponent, Joe Biden, of inciting vio­lence and seeking to defund the police. He promised to defend the suburbs. Suburban w ­ omen, he said, should like him ­because he saved “their damn neighborhoods.” But not all suburban ­women forgave him for his repeated condescension ­toward ­women and mockery of rape. “The audiences at his rallies w ­ ere almost all white,” reflected BBC correspondent Jon Sopel. Confederate flags ­were prominent. In the face of the pandemic, masks ­were rare, social distancing rarer. Trump-­supporting southern governors in Georgia, Texas, and Florida had been at the forefront of reopening their states ­earlier in the summer in defiance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, sparking a second wave of infections.50 The 2020 election results showed no signs of lessening the Republican grip on the South. G ­ oing into the election, Demo­crats ­were hopeful that demographics ­were moving their way and that an increasingly diverse electorate would tilt decisively against Trump. They believed Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida w ­ ere all in play. On election night, ­those hopes w ­ ere dashed early as South Carolina, Florida, and Texas all fell to the Republican Party by comfortable leads. North Carolina shifted into the Republican column as the eve­ning went on, though the race was close enough for counting to carry on beyond election night. ­Virginia was the only southern state to go unequivocally for Biden. In the end, Trump won over five million more votes in the South than 167

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Biden. The Demo­crats may have maintained control of the House, but GOP southern congressmen outnumbered Demo­crats 80 to 54, and Republicans continued to control both ­houses of ­every state legislature in the South except ­V irginia.51 The Demo­crats had invested their hopes in capturing Senate seats in both North and South Carolina. The race in North Carolina was the most expensive race in Senate history, surpassing even the race in the same state six years ­earlier. The Demo­crats had an attractive challenger—­a young retired military officer who raised twice as much money personally as his opponent and who led by as much as ten points in the polls for most of the summer. Even as the polls tightened, he appeared to have a lead of between 2 and 5 ­percent. Revelations of sex texts to a married ­woman, ­later confirmed as an affair, contributed to a narrow but clear Republican victory of almost 100,000 votes. In South Carolina, Jaime Harrison ran an unexpectedly competitive race against Lindsey Graham. A charismatic Yale gradu­ate who had worked for James Clyburn and served as the chair of the South Carolina Demo­cratic Party, Harrison was a seasoned Black politician with impeccable national credentials, having worked as a lobbyist for the Podesta Group. He raised $57 million in the third quarter of 2020—­a new rec­ord for a single Senate race in a southern state. Graham professed alarm and capitalized on his role in pushing through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court with unpre­ce­dented haste. He won by over ten points.52 The Demo­crats also lost their one Deep South senate seat: Alabama. In 2017, Doug Jones had narrowly defeated Roy Moore, a fervent Trump supporter who faced multiple allegations of sexual abuse of younger ­women. In 2020, Jones faced a very dif­fer­ent candidate, former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville. Trump had endorsed the coach over his own former attorney general Jeff Sessions, who had previously served twenty-­one years in that Senate 168

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seat. The Jones campaign had long been written off by national Demo­crats. With African Americans making up 27 ­percent of the Alabama electorate, he needed just over 30 ­percent of the white vote to be reelected. Jones had done much to rebuild the Demo­ cratic Party in the state at the local level. He campaigned on the success of his response to Covid and the opportunity to expand Medicaid. His opponent talked about abortion and gun rights and loyalty to a president whom he believed had been sent by God to save the nation. Jones still lost by twenty-­one points, barely securing 20 ­percent of the white vote. Jones talked like Zell Miller about the hard work Demo­crats had to do to offset the relentless organ­izing drives of the Republicans. He felt the party needed to confront the social issues head-on. The u ­ nion leader who spearheaded his campaign lamented that “all the Republicans have to do in Alabama is fly a picture of Nancy Pelosi from Mobile to Huntsville and they got e­ very son of a bitch, ­every white guy in Alabama pissed off.53 Overall, between 2016 and 2020, Trump increased his popu­lar vote in the South by almost three and a half million votes. In Alabama, he won 80 ­percent of the white vote. In Tennessee, 69 ­percent of whites voted for Trump and 84 ­percent of white evangelicals. The one bright spot for Demo­crats was Joe Biden’s eventual narrow win in Georgia—by 12,000 votes—­making him the first Demo­cratic candidate to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. Two US Republican Senate seats ­were at stake in Georgia—­and the Demo­crats did enough to force both races into a January runoff. ­Women voters in suburban counties ultimately tilted Georgia to the Demo­crats. In the previous twenty years, the population of Georgia had grown by two million. The migration into the state increased the Black share of the population by 6 ­percent. Younger, more racially diverse residents had flocked into the state for jobs, and many of them headed to the suburbs. But many of the ­women who swung away from Trump and voted for Biden ­were white.54 169

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Georgia’s experience highlights what other southern states revealed in even starker terms: the urban / rural divide between Demo­crats and Republicans. In North Carolina, Biden won more votes than Hillary Clinton had in 2016 in the large cities, but that advantage fell away in the rural parts of the state. Trump won seventy-­five of the state’s one hundred counties. His success largely correlated with lower levels of education and poor rural counties that had suffered economic losses. Robeson County, on the South Carolina border, was one of the most eco­nom­ically deprived in the state. Before 2016, the county had not voted for a Republican president since Richard Nixon in 1972. As one resident observed, voting Demo­crat was passed down from generation to generation ­until 2016. But whites resented Mexican competition for jobs, and then the textile mill closed suddenly and relocated to Pakistan. Over 80 ­percent of whites in Robeson County voted for Trump in 2016. Even more did so in 2020.55 In Tennessee, the rural-­urban divide was even more marked. The rural white switch to the Republican Party, which had happened almost overnight in 1994 when jobs dried up in small towns across the South, was entrenched. The ten most rural counties in the state, with the least racial diversity, w ­ ere the ten strongest Trump counties. It is difficult, as one southern journalist put it, “to put numbers to the cultural differences and conflicting world views” that define the two Souths. But what is clear is that the national Demo­ cratic Party brand is toxic in the rural South, especially as the national party moves to the left.56 Tennessee with its long history of bipartisanship shows how Trump has so completely changed the dynamics of the southern Republican Party. In 2016, Governor Bill Haslam, in the second of his two terms as Republican governor of Tennessee, refused to support Donald

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Trump in the presidential election. He had not endorsed Trump, and ­after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, he said he could not vote for him. But Trump won Tennessee with over 60 ­percent of the popu­lar vote. Only Richard Nixon among Republican presidential candidates had bettered his result. In 2018, Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn announced her candidacy to succeed Senator Bob Corker. She described herself as a “hard-­core, card-­carrying Tennessee conservative.” She prided herself on being “po­liti­cally incorrect” and rejoiced in the liberal description of her as a “right-­ wing nut.” She promised “no compromises, no apologies.” Once in the Senate, she was ranked the most ideologically conservative member in 2019. She carries a gun in her purse, denies climate change, does not believe in evolution, and nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.57 In 2019, Trump’s ambassador to Japan, Bill Hagerty, announced his candidacy for Lamar Alexander’s Senate seat and was immediately endorsed by Trump. A product of Boston Consulting Group, finance chair for Mitt Romney, an industry-­seeker for Governor Haslam, and a Jeb Bush backer originally, Hagerty nevertheless wrapped himself in the embrace of Donald Trump and presented himself as a Christian conservative. The TV ad announcing his candidacy lasted 109 seconds. In that time Trump’s name was spoken eight times, his picture used twice, and his name typed on the screen once. Even so, Hagerty faced an unexpectedly strong challenge from the right in the GOP primary. Hagerty reiterated his loyalty to Trump and spoke of the need to face the radicals in Washington who wanted “to push us off into socialism.” He secured further endorsements from Trump and publicized a “complete and total endorsement” from Donald Trump Jr. He swept up rural votes to capture the nomination comfortably. In a state once known for its courteous collaborations across the aisle, pollsters do not

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even bother now to track a Senate race. According to The Economist statistical analy­sis, Tennessee is one of the safest southern Republican seats.58 A veteran po­liti­cal operative in Tennessee summed up Blackburn and Hagerty’s strategy: “Both are using the same strategy: keep anyone from getting to your right in the Republican primary, embrace Trump, and ­don’t worry about the Demo­crats.” They w ­ ere rewarded in the 2020 elections. Hagerty won the election with 62 ­percent of the vote. The Demo­crats won just two of nine congressional seats. No successful GOP candidate received less than 66  ­percent of the vote, and Tennessee is the only southern state other than Arkansas that does not have an African American member of Congress. The Republicans have a 26 to 7 majority in the state senate, and a 173 to 26 margin in the Tennessee lower ­house.59 Trump carried the state of Tennessee with over 60 ­percent of the vote in 2020. Only three out of ninety-­five counties voted for Biden. When Trump refused to concede the election, all seven GOP Tennessee representatives joined the overwhelming majority of southern Republican congressmen voting against certifying the results in the House on January 6, 2021. Tennessee senators Blackburn and Hagerty had announced they would also support the challenge in the Senate; only ­after a mob stormed the Capitol on January 6 did the senators back down and vote to certify Biden’s election. In normal circumstances, the runoffs in Georgia in January 2021 would have resulted in comfortable Republican victories. The 49.3 ­percent of the vote that incumbent Republican David Perdue had received would have been sufficient to guarantee an outright majority in a runoff. Traditionally, Demo­crats found it hard to en172

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ergize a heavy African American turnout to vote in runoff elections. In the special election, the top two Republican candidates in November had together received 45.8 ­percent of the votes, which dwarfed the 32.9 ­percent vote for the leading Demo­crat, African American Raphael Warnock. Surely Republicans would flock to the polls in January, especially as the party’s control of the Senate was at stake. But the runoffs became inextricably linked to President Trump’s attempt to contest the outcome of the presidential election, the culmination of his repeated allegations of fraud on the presidential campaign. Throughout the campaign, he had condemned the action of state legislatures working to ensure p ­ eople could vote safely in the m ­ iddle of a pandemic. Now Trump inserted himself into the Georgia runoff campaign. Both incumbent Republican senators welcomed Trump’s participation in rallies that attracted the usual enthusiastic crowds. Republican leaders hoped Trump would concentrate on the threat posed by pos­si­ble Demo­cratic control of the Senate. Instead, he attacked Georgia’s governor and secretary of state, both Trump-­supporting Republicans, for allowing the state’s election results to be certified, for failing to uncover voter fraud, and for failing to “find” the 12,000 votes that would have put Georgia in the Republican column. In his rallies in Georgia, the need to overturn the results of the presidential election was the dominant theme. Both Republican senators had to commit themselves to challenging the results in the Senate on January 6, the day ­after the Georgia runoffs. Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell blamed Trump for the Demo­cratic victory in both Georgia elections on January 5, 2021. Maintaining GOP control of the Senate had been McConnell’s overriding objective. Trump’s intervention, and the ensuing mobilization of the African American vote, appear to have been decisive ­factors. In the special election, Raphael Warnock increased 173

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his November tally by over 600,000 votes. By contrast, the Republicans received fewer votes in January than the two leading Republicans in the special election had won in November. In the other election, Republican incumbent David Perdue’s vote fell by almost 250,000 votes. John Ossoff, his Demo­cratic challenger, benefited from the sustained African American turnout that Warnock inspired, but he also increased his share of the vote in the Atlanta suburbs by more than his final margin of victory.60 Biden’s victory in Georgia owed a lot to the unsuccessful candidacy two years ­earlier of Stacey Abrams, who as minority leader in the Georgia House campaigned against the voter suppression actions of her opponent, the then Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp. Kemp’s office had canceled 1.4 million voter registrations between 2012 and 2018, including nearly 700,000  in 2017 alone. Abrams took an unabashedly race-­based stance, aiming to mobilize minorities and younger voters rather than seeking to win back white blue-­collar voters. When she was defeated, she formed Fair Fight, a nonprofit that aimed to maximize voter turnout, especially of minorities, in 2020 and beyond. In the par­tic­u­lar circumstances of the Covid pandemic, with the resulting provisions for large-­ scale mail-in balloting, voter mobilization efforts in Georgia w ­ ere paramount. Almost half a million more voters cast their ballots for the Demo­cratic candidate in the 2020 presidential race than had voted for Abrams in 2018. Although Trump’s vote increased from its 2016 level, it was his smallest increase in the southern states. The Abrams-­inspired mobilization of the Black electorate carried over to the runoff elections in January 2021.61 A po­liti­cal scientist noted that Donald Trump is “screaming at ­people in power, which is what the southern whites would like to do.” Screaming at ­people in power is what southern whites have been ­doing for a long time—­and are still ­doing, as many continue to refuse to accept the 2020 election results, despite the recounts, 174

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the complete failure of any ­legal challenges, and the meeting of the Electoral College to certify the election. Seventy of the region’s eighty Republican congressmen voted on 6 January not to certify the results the Electoral College had returned. On January 6, three of ­those congressmen—­Mo Brooks of Alabama, newly elected Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia—­were the most vociferous proponents of outlandish conspiracy theories about the results. Cawthorn had e­ arlier condemned a journalist as a “race traitor.” Greene had argued that the Parkland, Florida, school shooting had been staged. Mo Brooks told the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6 that “­Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” The protesters who left that rally to storm the Capitol ­were disproportionately from the South. Confederate flags w ­ ere waved alongside Trump banners. White southerners w ­ ere prominent not only in the list of ­people arrested but also in the list of ­those charged with helping or­ga­nize the riot. For any Republican given pause by the riot who voted to impeach Trump in the aftermath of the riot, condemnation by the base was immediate. State Republican Parties voted unanimously to censure Representative Tom Rice of South Carolina and senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Richard Burr of North Carolina. But what was most striking was how few Republicans ­were willing to censure Trump for his dangerous statements and reckless acts. The unabashed Mo Brooks used his defense of Trump to launch his campaign for the Alabama Senate seat made vacant by three-­ term Republican senator Richard Shelby, who voted to certify the election results but was not standing again in 2022. Brooks said, “In 2020, Amer­i­ca suffered the worst voter fraud, and election theft, in history.” He described himself as a “fearless fighter who ­will not submit to the demands of socialist Demo­crats, weak-­kneed RINOs, 175

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or to the fake news media.” The socialist Demo­crat message, he said, is “Whites need not apply.”62 In Georgia, another Tom Rice, a former state legislator, announced that he would mount a primary challenge to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who had refused to “find” the votes needed for Trump to win the state. “What happened this past election,” said Rice, “was solely ­because of a horrible secretary of state and horrible decisions that he made.” This challenge to Raffensperger was part of a concerted drive to make sure the ­African American turnout would not reach 2020 figures again. Georgia Republicans in the state legislature passed laws limiting the number of ballot drop boxes in the state, requiring identification for absentee ballots, and making it a misdemeanor to give food or soft drinks to ­people waiting in line to vote. The Republicans also removed control of the state elections board from the popularly elected secretary of state to a chair selected by the general assembly. ­Earlier mea­sures had been even more restrictive, removing from the rolls anybody who had not voted for four years, eliminating no-­excuse absentee ballots, and ending Sunday voting—­a mea­sure clearly aimed at the voter mobilization efforts of the Black church. Republican legislators across the South tried to enact similar mea­sures in a campaign coordinated by Heritage Action for Amer­i­ca, the po­liti­cal arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Stacey Abrams described ­these efforts as “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Governor Kemp of Georgia, derided by Trump for failing to find any evidence of voter fraud, immediately signed the bills into law on the last day of the legislative session. He is up for reelection in 2022.63 ­There is one caveat to Trump’s seeming dominance of the GOP in the South. The poll data on Republican voters and their unshakeable belief that the 2020 election was stolen, the trail of candidates to Mar-­a-­Lago to seek his endorsement, and the denunciation of 176

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GOP office holders who deviate from the Trump line should not obscure the difficulty of reordering a party in one’s own image. Roo­se­velt’s attempted purge in 1938 shows how difficult it is for a politician, no ­matter how popu­lar, to intervene at the local level to secure the success of their favored candidates. Trump is already finding it difficult to persuade his favored candidates to run. ­Those candidates he endorses often have significant local electoral weaknesses. To maintain control of the party may require a leader with more discipline than the former president possesses. Over time the arguments of GOP governors like Asa Hutchinson in Arkansas that it w ­ ill be a disaster for the f­ uture of the party to re-­litigate the 2020 election in 2022 may gain traction.64 ­ ere have been key opportunities for southern Demo­crats to put Th together a biracial po­liti­cal co­ali­tion since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was always a challenge given the determination of the Republican Party to make a scarcely veiled racist appeal to white voters, but ­there ­were skilled po­liti­cal leaders in the Demo­cratic Party who could appeal to both former Wallace voters and African Americans. New South governors ­after 1970 focused on education improvements and economic growth to appeal to voters of both races. Centrist Demo­crats in the late 1980s made the same successful appeal. But it was easier to persuade whites to participate in biracial co­ali­tions when the ­whole region seemed to be benefiting eco­nom­ically in the aftermath of the civil rights gains. Since 1994, it has been increasingly difficult for Demo­crats to garner enough white votes in the South to secure statewide majorities when so many whites feel left ­behind. Many no longer have faith in the federal government to provide solutions and have been convinced their values are ­under threat. Their willingness to support candidates who appealed to Black voters became more 177

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problematic when Black gains appeared to be at their expense. ­There ­were still chances for Demo­cratic success in the late 1990s and again with Obama’s success in 2008. But t­ hose Demo­crats who ­were successful ­were increasingly vulnerable. Too many white voters have a world view that is at odds with a Demo­cratic Party committed to government activism. The election in 2021 of two liberals from Georgia to the Senate—­one Jewish, one an African American pastor—­rekindled liberal hopes. Ten months l­ater, the ­Virginia gubernatorial election suggested the fragility of ­those hopes. In a state that Joe Biden won by more than ten points in 2020, Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican to win statewide office in the commonwealth since 2009. The desertion of suburban voters alienated by Trump, which had tipped the scales in Georgia, did not occur in ­Virginia. The Republican candidate secured Trump’s endorsement early on, but then did not mention the former President in any of his campaign speeches or his ac­cep­tance speech. Residual white ­middle class conservatism on economic and culture war issues issues combined with the zeal of evangelical white support for Donald Trump suggests the scale of the obstacles facing liberals hoping to swing the South away from its entrenched conservatism may be more daunting than many recognize.65

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 Epilogue

Since the 1930s, the four ­factors that V. O. Key Jr. identified as underpinning conservative control of southern politics—­ Black disfranchisement, the malapportionment of state legislatures, segregation, and a one-­party system—­have been dismantled. The Supreme Court eliminated the white primary in Smith v. Allwright in 1944, states abolished poll taxes, and Congress paved the way for a massive expansion of African American voting in 1965. The one-­man / one-­vote Supreme Court decision in Baker v. Carr in 1962 ended the overrepre­sen­ta­tion of the rural South in state legislatures. The Supreme Court ended school segregation with Brown in 1954 and secured its full enforcement with Holmes in 1969. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public spaces and hastened, through its provision for cutting off federal funds, real school desegregation. A one-­party Demo­cratic South has been replaced by a new po­liti­cal landscape in which the Republican Party is the dominant force. Key expected that when the pillars of white control had been removed, “the under­lying southern liberalism would be mightily strengthened.” ­Today’s Sunbelt South is a very dif­fer­ent place from the South I first visited over fifty years ago. The degree of racial change should not be underestimated. Millions of African Americans have joined northern whites migrating South. A thriving Black ­middle class has seen Black businessmen and businesswomen and civic leaders in positions of vis­i­ble authority unthinkable to white 179

Epilogue

southerners of a generation ago. Black mayors have transformed public ser­vices for African Americans. The summer of 2020 highlighted per­sis­tent racism in southern police forces, but law enforcement and the day-­to-­day protection of Black citizens have been dramatically altered. But none of this has led to the strengthening of southern liberalism. From Franklin Roo­se­velt’s optimism about a “new generation” of southern liberals to the cele­bration of the New South governors of the 1970s to the possibilities seen with Obama’s election, the promise of a biracial politics has been a per­sis­tent hope repeatedly dashed. FDR’s new generation of southern leaders worked for a biracial co­ali­tion of lower-­income families that would support New Deal–­style social welfare policies to modernize the South from the bottom up. They had a Jacksonian sense of fairness t­ oward African Americans but did not envisage in immediate terms the end of segregation. Southern liberals from the 1930s to the 1960s favored gradual racial change and ­were always looking for an alternative to the race issue. In part, they believed that education and economic growth would produce that gradual change. In part, they feared the violent forces of resentment if change was imposed too quickly. When the Brown decision threatened the hopes of the gradualists, most white moderates w ­ ere fatalistic: they did not want to stir up white mobs and hoped that desegregation could occur quietly with the minimum of fuss. Conservatives, concerned that ordinary whites ­were insufficiently aroused to the racial threat, mounted a righ­teous crusade to prevent, or at least slow to a glacial pace, that change. Before 1960, it was pos­si­ble to imagine that southern whites could dictate the timetable of racial change. Northern po­liti­cal leaders like Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy ­were sympathetic to southern liberals’ dilemmas and ­were anxious not to make too many abrupt demands. Kennedy especially worked to encourage 180

Epilogue

liberals to secure gradual racial change at the local level. A ­ fter 1960, with the constant pressure of civil rights protestors, no southern white could dictate the timetable of racial change. The impatience of African Americans to secure a more equal footing, from which white southern politicians had been largely shielded, burst onto the streets with demands for an immediate end to segregation. The crises ­these protests produced forced the federal government to intervene to mandate such change, particularly in 1964 and 1965. The leaders who mediated t­hese changes at the local level and brought their communities into compliance with the new laws ­were not white southern liberals but southern businessmen. In community ­after community, businessmen had for a long time assumed that traditional patterns of race relations could go hand in hand with economic modernization. They now found that defiance threatened economic growth and therefore moved to make change work. In the aftermath of the Voting Rights Act, it was typically conservative businessmen in the South who made the strategic accommodation necessary to retain po­liti­cal power. Since 1970, white southern liberals have strug­gled to build biracial co­ali­tions linking support for civil rights with educational transformation and economic growth. It has not been a story of inevitable decline. But it has been one, particularly in recent years, of frequent setbacks. Just as they found that they could not expect to dictate the timetable of change in the 1950s and 1960s, so ­after 1970 southern liberals had to recognize that they could no longer rely on popu­lar trust in the federal government to secure the support of poor rural voters. It was an article of faith for liberals of Albert Gore’s generation that the New Deal had shown how the federal government could solve the region’s economic prob­lems. In the early 1960s, three-­ quarters of Americans believed that the federal government could be relied on to do the right ­thing. Its ability to overcome the 181

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Depression and defeat Nazi Germany, coupled with postwar prosperity, seemed amply to justify such faith. Faith in the federal government never recaptured ­those Eisenhower-­era highs once sustained economic growth came to a halt. It further eroded for southern whites once the federal government seemed to f­avor Blacks and to undermine traditional cultural values. A lily-­white Republican Party, with a g­ rand total of two African American senators nationally since the 1880s, has successfully exploited t­hose economic, racial, and cultural fears. I do not intend to suggest that the Republican Party in the South is a racist party. White voters vote Republican for a variety of economic and cultural reasons. What I am arguing is that an all-­white Republican Party has no incentive to serve the needs of African Americans. The results can be seen in policy outcomes that confirm the difficulties facing the long-­term liberal proj­ect in the South. Since the 1930s, white southern liberals have put their faith in education. In part, this reflected a genuine belief that increasing educational levels across the region would eliminate racial tensions. In part, it was a prudential attempt to get away from race and to privilege other issues. From Kerr Scott to James Hunt, from William Winter to Ronnie Musgrave, from John West to Richard Riley, southern liberal governors have enjoyed well-­deserved reputations for educational reform. They made changes at ­every level of educational provision. They instituted publicly funded kindergartens, raised teachers’ salaries, built magnet schools, found the money to pay for scholarships to college, established community colleges, and oversaw a massive investment in regional research universities. By the 1990s, the South was coming close to national education spending levels. 182

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But how far have ­these changes gone? As Republicans took control of state­houses and state legislatures in this ­century, that pro­gress ­toward national spending levels has gone into reverse. In 2012, ­Virginia ranked 11th in the nation in educational achievement based on high school and college graduation rates and eighth-­grade reading and writing skills. But Georgia ranked 28th and North Carolina 31st, and the bottom-­ranked states, from 41st onward, ­were all southern, with Mississippi (despite Ray Mabus’s hope that Mississippi would never be last again) firmly at the bottom. In 2016, all southern states (even ­V irginia) spent less than the national average per pupil. North Carolina only managed to spend $90 more than Mississippi; both spent less than 80 ­percent of the national average. To the challenges of white flight from the public schools and the legacy of the historic underspend on education, particularly on Black education, can be added the challenge of a large influx of Hispanic ­children. In thirty years, the percentage of Hispanics in southern public school ­rose from 6 ­percent to 30 ­percent. Ever since the New Deal, white southern liberals have also put their faith in economic growth and hoped that economic concerns would help unite a biracial co­ali­tion of lower-­income voters. In 1970, Albert Gore hammered away at bread-­and-­butter economic issues in an effort to win back white Wallace supporters in M ­ iddle and West Tennessee. How to win over Wallace supporters and Reagan Demo­crats has been a crucial conundrum for white liberal politicians in the South. The South has been an economic success story, in part thanks to its New Deal–­style infrastructure proj­ects championed by southern liberals. In 2005, Al Gore illustrated for me the dramatic impact of the interstate highway system, which his ­father had guided through the Senate in 1956. The interstates had made Nashville the number one city in the nation for attracting new industries 183

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and persuading o­ thers to relocate t­ here, such as car manufacturers and high-­tech computer companies. They helped make Nashville the center of gravity of a nation whose population was shifting to the Sunbelt. New Deal infrastructure investment and defense expenditures in World War II had created a market in the region large enough to attract manufacturers of consumer goods. As a result, from World War II ­until the early 1990s, the South dramatically closed the gap between regional per capita income and the national figure from 57 ­percent in 1940 to over 93 ­percent in 1994. But that increase came to a halt ­after 1994, and the under­lying figures of southern economic health showed the region lagging ­behind the rest of the nation ever since. The job losses of the 1990s disproportionately affected the South: a third of the national job losses came in textiles and apparel. A 2019 ranking of states by economic opportunity based on the unemployment rate, median ­house­hold income, and income mobility once again found ­Virginia an outlier at number 15, and North Carolina at 33. But the other nine southern states took their place in the lowest fourteen states, with Mississippi and Louisiana right at the bottom, as they would have been in the 1930s. In 2019, with the exception of ­V irginia, which has been helped by the explosion of the D.C. exurbs in the de­cades ­after September  11, the twelve states with the greatest percentage of poor p ­ eople ­were in the South—­with Mississippi dead last. Demo­crats have been convinced in the twenty-­first ­century that demographic trends w ­ ill lead to a natu­ral Demo­cratic majority. The demographic curve boosts this confidence at e­ very election. The loyalty of their African American base, a growing Hispanic share of the population, increasing suburbanization, a more educated workforce, higher voter turnout among w ­ omen, migration from ra184

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cially liberal northerners—­all, it is thought, ­will surely bring Demo­ cratic victory. ­Virginia seems to confirm that confidence, fueled by the Washington suburbs, an education system that can produce 15,000 PhDs a year, and the headquarters of high-­tech companies. Demo­cratic control of both the governor’s mansion and the state legislature produced what one journalist called “the single greatest state-­level success story for the progressive agenda in Amer­i­ca”—­the abolition of the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, police reform laws, tighter gun control, greater access to abortions, and an increase in the minimum wage. The 2021 Georgia Senate races seemed to point in the same direction, and to show that a successful mobilization of the Black vote, a progressive platform, and the votes of the burgeoning Atlanta suburbs could deliver statewide success for liberal candidates. That ­these demographic trends are real is evidenced by the fervent Republican effort to restrict the electorate. Republicans certainly think that the more ­people vote, the more likely the Demo­crats are to win. Southern Republican legislatures have used the Georgia voter restriction legislation in 2021 as a template for their own efforts to suppress the vote. Historically in the South, conservatives, from the Redeemers of the 1880s and 1990s to the conservatives of the 1930s and 1940s to ­today’s Republican Party, have sought to restrict the electorate. The history of biracial politics that I have charted out in this book might give liberals pause, however. Since 2000, liberals in the South have assumed that the demographic imperative ­will deliver po­liti­cal success. Yet they do not seem yet to be able to translate that momentum into electoral victories. The best analyses of the Georgia results suggest that Trump’s intervention and emphasis on the unfairness of the presidential election results ­were the decisive ­factors in securing enough white support to supplement the very high African American turnout. But both the presidential and 185

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Senate margins of victory w ­ ere extremely narrow, and the Georgia General Assembly remains firmly in Republican hands. If Trump’s par­tic­u­lar intervention is taken out of the equation, ­there is ­little to suggest that Demo­crats ­will be more successful in 2022 in other southern states than they w ­ ere in 2020. The GOP success in the 2021 gubernatorial election in ­V irginia confirms that the suburban move to the Demo­crats is by no means inevitable. The Demo­crats do not lack for funds: in races where the national party takes an interest, the Demo­crats have outspent the Republicans in the South. The prob­lem is no amount of money has helped them solve the conundrum of how to get the 30 to 35 ­percent of the white vote they need to win a statewide race. ­There is ­little evidence in North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina that the fundamentals of conservative control have changed. White liberals have once again to acknowledge that they are in a minority in the white population. The debate in the South for liberals is not dissimilar to the rest of the nation. How do you elect a progressive who appeals to your activists but can also appeal to a wider electorate? How do you combine the successful Black voter mobilization of Stacey Abrams in Georgia or William Barber in North Carolina with an appeal to white voters? As one frustrated activist in North Carolina complained to me: Chuck Schumer and the Demo­cratic Senatorial Campaign Committee try to install this same guy, dif­fer­ent one, but same guy, e­ very cycle. I would not mind it so much if they would occasionally win. Eight of the last nine U.S. Senate candidates the DSCC has bankrolled for N.C. have lost. It may be that the events in Georgia might persuade them to give a brilliant Black w ­ oman, a well-­known statewide campaigner, a chance. 186

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The repeated disappointment of white liberals in the South outlined in this book suggests the scale of the task. White voters in most of the South have found it difficult to sacrifice short-­term privilege for long-­term possibilities of a more progressive policy. As the North Carolina General Assembly votes to restrict mailin balloting, tighten abortion laws, and ban the teaching of critical race theory, a close look at one day in the life of the state may perhaps sum up the contradictions of the modern South which a successful liberal candidate ­will have to resolve. On April 28, 2021, the governor announced that the state had won the ­battle to land a new Apple campus, which would provide 3,000 new jobs in the Research Triangle Park. The census data released that day indicates that North Carolina, along with Texas and Florida, would gain an additional congressional seat. But a GOP operative boasted that they would be able to draw district lines in such a way as to increase the GOP majority in the state congressional del­e­ga­tion from 9–4 to 10–4, despite the closeness of the margin in popu­lar vote between the parties. And in Elizabeth City, a white sheriff ’s deputy killed an unarmed Black man. When I first met Dan Car­ter, chronicler of Scottsboro and biographer of George Wallace, over forty years ago, he took me to the federal court­house in Winchester, Tennessee, where he was due to testify in the libel case of Victoria Price Street v. National Broadcasting Com­pany. The Scottsboro case had brought Alabama to international attention in 1931, when nine young African Americans ­were charged with raping two young white ­women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. The accused ­were tried in a court­house surrounded by a white mob and only casually defended by uninterested, incompetent ­lawyers. In two-­and-­a-­half days, eight of the nine w ­ ere convicted and sentenced to death. The youn­gest, who was twelve, 187

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was given a life sentence. The Communist Party and NAACP took up their case and secured a retrial. Haywood Patterson, the first to be retried in 1933, was aggressively defended this time, but he was nevertheless again convicted. In the end, none of the boys was executed, but they served between them ninety years in Alabama prisons for a crime they did not commit. In 1976, NBC had made a docudrama focusing on the Patterson trial, based on Dan Car­ ter’s book Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Price, one of the two ­women allegedly raped on a freight train in northern Alabama in 1931, was suing NBC for libel. She had not died in 1961, as Dan had been told by the editor of the local paper. Indeed, she was very much alive and now sued NBC for labeling her a perjurer, a whore, and a bum, and for saying that she was dead. Apart from acknowledging that she was very much alive, NBC sought to prove the truth of the material it had taken from Dan Car­ter’s book, as well as arguing that Price was a public figure who thus deserved less protection from libel by media operating u ­ nder the First Amendment. The judge, Charles Neese, had been Estes Kefauver’s campaign man­ag­er in 1948. ­W ill Campbell, the courageous former chaplain of the University of Mississippi who had escorted African American ­children to school on their first day at Central High School in ­Little Rock, was ­there to observe. If ever I had evidence that Faulkner was right—­the past is never dead, it is not even past—it was t­here at the court­house in Winchester, Tennessee. Sex, race, and communism came vividly to life in an antiseptic, air-­conditioned federal court­house. I had to make myself remember that a mob had gathered outside the Decatur court­house in the original trial, ready to lynch the defendant, Haywood Patterson. Judge James E. Horton had sternly warned the packed court­house then that he had ordered armed guards to disperse the mob. They w ­ ere, he said, prepared to shoot to kill if necessary. Judge Horton had astonished observers with his fairness to 188

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the defense team and his excoriating evisceration of the prosecution’s case when he granted the defense motion for a retrial. He had been privately told by one of the doctors who had originally examined the w ­ omen that they had definitely not been raped. The doctor, however, refused to take the stand and risk his ­career. Horton proceeded with the case ­because he was confident in the good sense of the jury, many of whom he knew as good p ­ eople. When they refused to pay attention to the overwhelming weakness of the state’s case, Horton exposed ­those weaknesses systematically when he granted the motion for a retrial. The following year, Horton, who had served on the bench for twelve years and was widely mentioned for a place on the Alabama Supreme Court, was defeated for reelection. He spent the rest of his life quietly farming.1 If ever t­ here was a real-­life Atticus Finch, Horton was that man. In 2018, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was voted Amer­i­ca’s favorite book in a survey conducted by PBS. The novel is set in 1930s Alabama and told from the viewpoint of Scout Finch, six years old as the story begins. Scout’s ­father, Atticus, defends an African American accused of raping a young white ­woman. Finch annihilates the testimony of the witnesses for the prosecution, but the all-­white jury nevertheless convicts the accused. Atticus Finch is the epitome of the white southern moderate. Committed to racial fairness, he courageously took up an unpop­u­lar cause and faced down a lynch mob, but he was careful not to demonize t­ hose who saw ­things differently and took the other side. Atticus Finch appears again in Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, this time set in 1950s Alabama. At first sight, he is a very dif­fer­ent figure. Scout, returning from the North, is appalled to find her ­father involved in the local segregationist Citizen’s Council. The central conflict in the novel is between the young ­woman and her beloved ­father, a man she knew to be decent and principled but who had inexplicably fallen in with the racist reactionaries. 189

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In Atticus Finch: The Biography, Joseph Crespino has re­created the life of A. C. Lee, Harper’s ­father, who was the model for Atticus Finch. In 1919, as a young ­lawyer, Lee defended two Black men charged with robbery and murder. They ­were convicted and executed. One of the white victim’s sons sat on the jury. The speedy trial was an example of what became known as a “­legal lynching.” A. C. Lee continued as a ­lawyer but largely avoided criminal cases. He threw his energies into the job of editor and publisher of his hometown newspaper, the Monroe Journal. Crespino shows that Lee, in his editorials in the 1930s, was a passionate defender of FDR, an opponent of demagoguery, and an early ­enemy of Eu­ro­pean fascism. He vehemently denounced lynchings. He revered FDR to the end, but by the late 1930s he had concerns about the direction the New Deal was g­ oing. He disliked strikes, the culture of welfare de­pen­dency, and minimum wage legislation. By the 1940s, he was supporting some of the most reactionary ele­ments in Alabama politics. But what did A. C. Lee have to say about the Scottsboro case? He praised the farcical first trial as an example of fair-­minded southern justice. In 1933, he reserved his bitterest denunciations for the northern defense ­lawyer Samuel Leibowitz, who allowed his frustration to spill over into a tirade about the bug-­eyed bigots on the 1933 jury. A. C. Lee never mentioned Horton or his courageous decision in his editorials in the Monroe Journal.2 ­There ­were plenty of reactionary ele­ments in postwar Alabama politics for Harper Lee’s f­ ather to follow: from the Bourbon Demo­ crats elite, which took the state into the Dixiecrat column and on to massive re­sis­tance, to the good ol’ boy segregationists like John Patterson and George Wallace, who persuaded lower-­income whites that defiance of the courts and the federal government could halt racial change, to ­today’s Trump loyalist demagogues like Con-

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gressman Brooks and Senator Tuberville, who strive to maintain white control of state and national politics. ­There had been a liberal alternative in Alabama, provided by FDR and the New Deal, who wanted to use the resources of the federal government to foster a popu­lar biracial politics. ­There ­were New Deal bureaucrats and Washington insiders like Aubrey Williams and Clifford and ­Virginia Durr, senators like Hugo Black, Lister Hill, and John Sparkman, and, more recently, Doug Jones, and liberal governors, ­whether cautious reformers like Bibb Graves or more unabashed liberals like Jim Folsom. They saw themselves as TVA liberals who could deliver the economic gains, the educational reforms, and the welfare systems that conservative forces in the state had long denied their lower-­income Black and white constituents. As recently as the early 1960s, Alabama’s congressmen constituted the most liberal southern del­e­ga­tion in the House. For a time it looked as if ­these liberal reformers could sustain a biracial co­ali­tion if they concentrated on the economy and education and avoided confronting the race issue directly. But the Washington-­based reformers who saw racial reform and economic reform as inextricably linked w ­ ere po­liti­cally powerless when they returned home. Some of the new generation of liberal po­liti­cal leaders in Alabama and other states ­were fatalistic and reluctant to confront race head-on for fear of stirring up overwhelmingly popu­lar white passions. Others ran for cover and sought to protect their po­liti­cal ­careers by making concessions to the segregationists. After the Voting Rights Act and the collapse of segregation, white liberals across the South made repeated attempts to sustain a biracial politics that would deliver economic and social reform. They were serious-minded, policy-oriented politicians. However, even the most skilled of them have found it difficult to sustain an electoral base for their reform. The structure of southern politics

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has always privileged whiteness, and politicians from George Wallace to Donald Trump have proved adept at tapping into white fears about losing such privileges. The efforts of southern liberals to appeal across racial lines have time and again been thwarted by a lily-white Republican Party. It is understandable that there should be liberal optimism in the wake of the electoral successes in Georgia and the prospect of a candidate like Stacey Abrams fully mobilizing the African American and white progressive votes in the future. But it is not merely the GOP success in Virginia in 2021 that should temper such optimism. Resilient southern white conservatism, based on religious zeal, cultural traditionalism, hostility to taxation, and a pervasive distrust of the federal government, stands as a formidable obstacle to liberal aspirations.

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not e s ac know l­e d g m e nt s i nde x

Notes

P r ol o gue 1. Reuben V. Anderson, “Governor William Winter,” Journal of Mississippi History 70, no. 4 (2008): 403–406, at 403. 2. Suzanne Mars, Eudora Welty: A Biography (Boston: Mari­ner Books, 2005), 447. 3. Charles Bolton, William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 191–213. Charles Bolton, “William F. Winter and the Politics of Racial Moderation in Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History 70, no. 4 (2008): 335–382. Jere Nash and Andy Taggart, Mississippi Politics: The Strug­gle for Power, 1976–2008 ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 86–162, 186–199, 211–234, 251–276. Molpus was a reforming secretary of state of Mississippi for twelve years, and in 1989 officially apologized on behalf of the state for the 1964 murder of the three civil rights workers at a memorial ser­vice at the Mt. Zion Church in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He failed in his bid to become governor in 1995. 4. Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Ma­ya Sen, Deep Roots: How ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Prince­ Press, 2018), 3–4. 5. Anthony J. Badger, “What­ever Happened to Roo­se­velt’s New Generation of Southerners?,” in New Deal / New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 59. 6. Franklin  D. Roo­se­velt, “Athens, Georgia—­Address at University of Georgia,” August 11, 1938, box 41, speech file 1164; “Barnesville, Ga, August 11, 1938,” speech file 1165A; Franklin D. Roo­se­velt, Master Speech File, 1898– 1945, Franklin D. Roo­se­velt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York.

195

Notes to Pages 3–11 7. V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1949), 16. 8. Outstanding examples are Patricia A. S ­ ullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Virginia Foster Durr, Freedom Writer: ­Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years, ed. Patricia ­Sullivan (New York: Routledge, 2003); John  A. Salmond, The Conscience of a ­Lawyer: Clifford  J. Durr and American Civil Liberties, 1899–1975 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990); John  A. Salmond, A Southern Rebel: The Life and Times of Aubrey Williams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Glenda Gilmore, Defying D ­ ixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: Norton, 2009); Robert Rod­gers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Strug­gle for Democracy in the Mid-­Twentieth-­Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Kimberly  K. L ­ ittle, You Must Be from the North: Southern White ­Women in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); Gregg L. Michel, Strug­gle for a Better South: The Southern Student Organ­izing Committee, 1964–1969 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Strug­gle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006); Anne Stefani, Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern ­Women in the Fight for Racial Justice, 1920–1970 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015); Sarah Hart Brown, Standing against Dragons: Three Southern L ­ awyers in an Era of Fear (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998); Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Strug­gle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006). 9. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 16. 10. When I wrote Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco and North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), I believed ­there would be case studies of all the other New Deal farm commodity programs. I was wrong. 11. Anthony J. Badger, North Carolina and the New Deal (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1981), 61–73. Rob Christensen, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections, and Events that ­Shaped Modern North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 77–100.

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Notes to Pages 11–16 12. A. J. Fletcher to Tony Badger, August 6, 1975, in the author’s possession. He did not identify what he thought the issues ­were. 13. Michael Sewell, “British Responses to Martin Luther King Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–68,” in The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Brian Ward and Tony Badger, 194–212 (New York: Macmillan, 1996). Kehinde Andrews, “Paul Stephenson: The Hero Who Refused to Leave a Pub and Helped Desegregate Britain,” Guardian, October 1, 2020. 14. In Oxford, North Carolina, ­future historian Tim Tyson, then eleven, remembered hearing that his friend’s ­father had killed Marrow. Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name (New York: Crown, 2003). Tim’s ­father was a white minister who tried to get his congregation and his community to commit itself to racial change. I did belatedly manage to capture, thanks to a 1946 rural sociology dissertation and the interviews on which it was based, the sense of the greater breathing space that alternative sources of credit and their votes in crop control elections gave African Americans. Badger, Prosperity Road, 225, 227. 15. I analyzed the difficulties of party-­building in the 1930s in A. Badger, “Local Politics and Party Realignment in the Late Thirties: The Failure of the New Deal,” Storia Nordamericana 6 (1989): 69–90. 16. Carl T. Rowan, Go South to Sorrow (New York: Random House, 1957), 206. Lewis Killian, White Southerners (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1985), 36–42. Calvin Trillin, “Reflections: Remembrance of Moderates Past,” New Yorker, March 21, 1977. 17. S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 3–4. 18. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning The History of Racist Ideas in Amer­i­ca (New York: Vintage 2017). Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (London: Bodley Head, 2019). Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It Is So Hard for White P ­ eople to Talk about Racism (London: Penguin Books, ­ eople Perpetuate 2019). Robin DiAngelo, Nice Racism: How Progressive White P Racial Harm (London: Penguin Books, 2021). 19. Tony Badger, Race and War: Lyndon Johnson and William Fulbright, Stenton Lecture, 1998 (Reading, UK: University of Reading, 2000), 9–12. 20. Anthony J. Badger, “Southerners Who Refused to Sign the Southern Manifesto,” Historical Journal 42, no.  2 (1999): 517–534. Anthony  J. Badger,

197

Notes to Pages 16–26 Albert Gore,  Sr.: A Po­liti­cal Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 21. Winfred B. Moore and Orville Vernon Burton, ­Toward the Meeting of the ­Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth ­Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 3–35. 22. Brian Murphy, “With Monster Trucks and a Key PAC’s Support, Republican Ted Budd Joins the NC Senate Race,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), April 28, 2021. ­W ill Doran and Julian Shen-­Berro, “Trump Tells NC Republicans to Ban ‘Toxic Critical Race Theory’ in Schools,” News and Observer, June 5, 2021. Brian Murphy, “Armed with Trump’s Endorsement, Budd Seeks traction with Voters,” News and Observer, June 7, 2021. 23. Brian Murphy, “NC Lt. Gov. Robinson Talks History, Vaccines, His F ­ uture,” News and Observer, June  14, 2021. T. Keung Hui, “GOP Claims Some NC Teachers Are ‘Abusing Their Profession to Indoctrinate Students,” News and Observer, August 25, 2021. “Republican Rebuttal to Biden’s Speech: Tim Scott’s Full Transcript,” New York Times, April 29, 2021. 24. T. Keung Hui, “Wake School Policy Aims for ‘Equity for All Students.’ Critics Say It’s Marxist,” News and Observer, May 19, 2021. T. Keung Hui, “A ‘Respiration Trash Muzzle’? Angry Parents Give Wake School Leaders Earful over Masks,” News and Observer, June 18, 2021. Brian Murphy, “Defund K-12 Schools that Teach ‘Misleading’ 1619 Proj­ect, Tillis Says,” News and Observer, June 14, 2021. 25. Craig Huber, “Governor Abbott Signs ‘Patriotic Education’ Bill, ­Establishing 1836 Proj­ect,” Spectrum News, June 8, 2021.

1. The N e w D e al 1. Franklin  D. Roo­se­velt, “Chapel Hill, North Carolina—­Address at University of North Carolina,” December  5, 1938, box 43, speech file 1185, Franklin D. Roo­se­velt, Master Speech File, 1898–1945, Franklin D. Roo­se­velt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY. ­ ullivan, Days of Hope: 2. On the founding of the SCHW, see Patricia A. S Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 97–101. For the TNEC report, see David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, eds., Confronting Southern Poverty in the ­Great Depression: The Report on Economic Conditions of the South with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford Books / St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 1–37.

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Notes to Pages 27–34 3. Roo­se­velt, “Address at University of North Carolina,” December  5, 1938. 4. Charles J. Holden, The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 9–16, 21, 29, 31, 39, 47–62, 140–141. 5. Willard B. Gatewood, Preachers, Pedagogues and Politicians: The Evolution Controversy in North Carolina, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966). 6. Holden, The New Southern University. 56–57, 71–72, 123–126, 237, 259. Clark aimed to root out communists, socialists, and atheists, a “small group of radicals,” as he claimed, who w ­ ere a “cancer on the institution.” Glenda Gilmore, Defying ­Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: Norton, 2008), 271. 7. Warren Ashby, Frank Porter Graham: A Southern Liberal (Winston-­ Salem, NC: J.  F. Blair, 1980), 122–168. William  A. Link, “Frank Porter Graham, Racial Gradualism, and the Dilemmas of Southern Liberalism.” Journal of Southern History 86, no. 1 (2020): 7–36. 8. Patricia Bell-­Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roo­se­velt, and the Strug­gle for Social Justice (New York: Knopf, 2016), 26–28. Gilmore, Defying ­Dixie, 264–268, 274–275. 9. Bell-­Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady, 3–4, 15–16, 30. 10. Bell-­Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady, 33. Gilmore, Defying ­Dixie, 264–268. Link, “Frank Porter Graham,” 13. ­ ixie, 220. 11. Holden, The New Southern University, 18. Gilmore, Defying D 12. Bell-­Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady, 33–34. Link, “Frank Porter Graham.” Gilmore, Defying ­Dixie, 271–273. Holden, The New Southern University, 108–112, 117. 13. Link, “Frank Porter Graham,” 11. 14. James  E. Shepard correspondence, series 1.1, Frank Porter Graham Papers, 1908–1990, collection no.  01819, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Holden, The New Southern University, 80–81, 84–85, 156–159. 15. Bell-­Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady, 61–362. Link, “Frank Porter Graham,” 16-17. 16. Pamela Tyler, “A Warm Personal Friend, or Worse than Hitler? How Southern ­Women Viewed Eleanor Roo­se­velt, 1933–1945,” in “Lives Full of Strug­gle and Triumph”: Southern ­Women, Their Institutions and Their Communities,

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Notes to Pages 34–38 ed. Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 182. 17. Maurine  H. Beasley, Eleanor Roo­se­velt: Transformative First Lady (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010), 123–182. Joanna Schneider Zangrando and Robert  L. Zangrando, “ER and Black Civil Rights,” in Without Pre­ce­dent: The Life and C ­ areer of Eleanor Roo­se­velt, ed. Joan Hoff-­ Wilson and Marjorie Lightman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 88–107. Pamela Tyler, “ ‘Blood on Your Hands’: White Southerners’ Criticism of Eleanor Roo­se­velt during World War II,” in Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South, ed. Glenn Feldman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 186, 196. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the 20th ­Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 187. 18. Anthony J. Badger, “How Did the New Deal Change the South?,” in Looking Inward, Looking Outward: From the 1930s through the 1940s, ed. Steve Ickringill (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1991), 165–182. V.  O. Key,  Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1949), 307. 19. James  C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877–1984 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 51–67. Badger, “How Did the New Deal Change the South?” 20. Gavin Wright, “The New Deal and the Modernization of the South,” Federal History 2 (2010): 58–73. Jack Irby Hayes, Jr., South Carolina and the New Deal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 71. 21. Wright, “The New Deal and the Modernization of the South.” Price V. Fishback, Michael R. Haines, and Shawn Kantor, “The Impact of the New Deal on Black and White Infant Mortality in the South,” Explorations in Economic History 38, no. 1 (2001): 93–122. 22. Fred Bateman, Jaime Ros, and Jason E. Taylor, “Did New Deal and World War II Public Capital Investments Facilitate a ‘Big Push’ in the American South?,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 165, no. 2 (2009): 307–341. George Fort Milton, “The South Do Move,” Yale Review 29 (1939): 138–152. 23. Key, Southern Politics, 298–311. 24. Key, Southern Politics, 298–311. 25. ­V irginia Foster Durr, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of ­Virginia Foster Durr, ed. Hollinger  F. Barnard (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 162. ­Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Lister Hill: Statesman

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Notes to Pages 39–43 from the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 83, 211–282. 26. Devin Caughey, The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Repre­ sen­ta­tion in a One-­Party Enclave (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2018), 12. Anthony  J. Badger, “Huey Long and the New Deal,” in Badger, New Deal / New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 5–14. 27. Caughey, Unsolid South, 67. 28. Herman Talmadge, interviewed by John Egerton, November 8, 1990, interview A-0347. Southern Oral History Program, Collection 4007, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. William M. Colmer interviews, 1974–1978, box 3, Former Members of Congress, Inc., Oral History Interviews, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Almost forty years l­ater, Colmer’s last administrative assistant was a ­future conservative Republican congressman and senator, Trent Lott. Ken­ reat Depression in the Rural South (Gainesneth J. Bindas, Remembering the G ville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 150. 29. Anthony J. Badger, North Carolina and the New Deal (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1981), 67. 30. Badger, North Carolina and the New Deal, 67. 31. Badger, North Carolina and the New Deal 67. Jonathan Daniels to Tony Badger, May 10, 1970, copy in the author’s possession. 32. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 104–119. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial In­equality in Twentieth-­Century Amer­i­ca (New York: Norton, 2006), 256. Brian McCammack, Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the ­Great Migration in Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 105–248. Lawrence J. Nelson, “The Art of the Pos­ si­ble: Another Look at the ‘Purge’ of the AAA Liberals in 1935,” Agricultural History 57, no. 4 (1983): 416–435. 33. Alger Hiss, interview with the author, January 25, 1976. Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roo­se­velt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 161–162. Gareth Davies and Martha Derthick, “Race and Social Welfare Policy: The Social Security Act of 1935,” Po­liti­cal Science Quarterly 112, no. 2 (1997): 217–235. Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 123–130. Larry

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Notes to Pages 44–49 DeWitt, “The Decision to Exclude Agricultural and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act,” Social Security Bulletin 70, no. 4 (2010): 49–68. Edward Berkowitz, “Social Welfare History in the Age of Diversity.” I am very grateful to Professor Berkowitz for allowing me to use his material which ­will appear in the Journal of Policy History. 34. Martha Swain, Pat Harrison: The New Deal Years ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978), 83. 35. Chester  M. Morgan, Redneck Liberal: Theodore  G. Bilbo and the New Deal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 161–246. Charles C. Bolton, “Race and War­time Politics during the Administration of Governor Thomas L. Bailey (1944–1946),” Journal of Mississippi History 81, no. 1–2 (2019): 43–59. 36. Howard Ball, Hugo  L. Black: Cold Steel Warrior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 16, 50. 37. William  F. Anderson, The Wild Man from Sugar Creek: The Po­liti­cal ­Career of Eugene Talmadge (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 168. Josephus Daniels, Editor in Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 145. 38. Anderson, The Wild Man from Sugar Creek, 168. 39. Kevin D. Greene, “Paul B. Johnson, Sr. (1940–1943), the New Deal, and the B ­ attle for F ­ ree Textbooks in Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History 81, no.  1–2 (2019): 23–42. Randall  L. Patton, “E.  D. Rivers (1895–1967),” updated April 5, 2021; and Harold Paulk Henderson, “Ellis Arnall (1907– 1992),” last updated August  19, 2020; both in New Georgia Encyclopedia, https://­www​.­georgiaencyclopedia​.­org​/­. 40. James T. Patterson, New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1969), 80–89. Anthony J. Badger, “The New Deal and the Localities,” in The Growth of Federal Power in American History, ed. R. Jeffreys-­Jones and Bruce Collins (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 102–115.

2. L iberal H ope s and C onservat iv e Fears 1. Kenneth J. Bindas, Remembering the ­Great Depression in the Rural South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 167. 2. Ruby Barlow, unknown interviewer, no date, Bindas Oral History Proj­ect, Kent State University Library.

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Notes to Pages 49–53 3. Patricia A. S ­ ullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 69–101. 4. Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue, Vol. 1: The Depression De­cade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 135–240. ­Sullivan, Days of Hope, 69–101. Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roo­se­velt Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1–14. 5. Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 8–37. I am very grateful for Jason Ward’s formulation of a long massive re­sis­tance. 6. Ward, Defending White Democracy, 10–12. 7. Anthony J. Badger, “Huey Long and the New Deal,” in Badger, New Deal / New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 8. 8. William  F. Anderson, The Wild Man from Sugar Creek: The Po­liti­cal ­Career of Eugene Talmadge (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976). Talmadge’s purge of the university led to its loss of accreditation—an issue exploited in 1942 by the state attorney general, Ellis Arnall, who defeated Talmadge in his bid for reelection. 9. Gilbert  C. Fite, Richard  B. Russell,  Jr.: Senator from Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 122–149. David Robertson, Sly and Able: A Po­liti­cal Biography of James F. Byrnes (New York: Norton, 1980), 196–200. Ward, Defending White Democracy, 8–17. 10. James  T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Co­ali­tion in Congress, 1933–1939 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), 128–163. 11. Anthony J. Badger, North Carolina and the New Deal (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1981), 80–88. 12. Badger, North Carolina and the New Deal, 80–88. Jonathan Daniels to Anthony Badger, May 11, 1970, copy in author’s possession. Bailey extracted revenge, but he inadvertently did Daniels a ­favor: in 1942, Roo­se­velt wanted to appoint Daniels ambassador to New Zealand, a key posting as the war in the Pacific intensified. Bailey let Daniels know that he would oppose his confirmation. As Daniels recalled, “So I did not go to New Zealand and as the war moved up the Pacific, New Zealand became about the least in­ter­ est­ing place on the planet.” Instead, FDR made Daniels his administrative

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Notes to Pages 54–59 assistant, then his press secretary, a job he continued to perform for Harry Truman. 13. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism, 198–207. John Robert Moore, Senator Josiah William Bailey of North Carolina: A Po­liti­cal Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968), 147–210. Kim Phillips-­Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (London: Norton, 2009). 14. Kevin  J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roo­se­velt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1–28, 144–176. 15. Ward, Defending White Democracy, 24–25. Joseph L. Morrison, Governor O. Max Gardner: A Power in North Carolina and New Deal Washington (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 278. Bryant Simon, A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 210–211. Robertson, Sly and Able, 267–277. 16. Anthony J. Badger, “Local Politics and Party Re-­Alignment in the Late Thirties: The Failure of the New Deal,” Storia Nord Americana 6 (1989): 69–90. 17. ­Sullivan, Days of Hope, 98–114. David L. Carlton and Peter A. Co­ reat Depression: The Report clanis, eds., Confronting Southern Poverty in the G on Economic Conditions of the South with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford Books / St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 1–37. 18. Lorraine Gates Schuyler, The Weight of Their Votes: Southern W ­ omen and Po­liti­cal Leverage in the 1920s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). John Thomas McGuire, “The Bound­aries of Domestic Reform: Social Justice Feminism and Race in the South, 1931–39,” Journal of Southern History 78, no. 4 (2012): 887–912. Sarah Wilkerson-­Freeman, “The Creation of a Subversive Feminist Dominion: Interracialist Social Workers and the Georgia New Deal,” Journal of ­Women’s History  13, no.  4 (2002): 132–154. Sarah Wilkerson-­Freeman, “The Second ­Battle for ­Woman Suffrage: Alabama White ­Women, the Poll Tax, and V.  O. Key’s Master Narrative of Southern Politics,” Journal of Southern History 68, no. 2 (2002): 333–374. 19. Anthony J. Badger, “What­ever Happened to Roo­se­velt’s New Generation of Southerners?,” in Badger, New Deal / New South: An Anthony  J. Badger Reader (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 58–71. 20. Anthony J. Badger, Albert Gore, Sr.: A Po­liti­cal Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 27–31.

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Notes to Pages 59–64 21. Robert Caro, The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1982), 389–446. Billie Burdick Kemper, “Lindley Beckworth: Grassroots Congressman” (MA thesis, Stephen F. Austin State University, 1980), 33–38, in Lindley Garrrison Beckworth Papers, Barker Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin. 22. Badger, Albert Gore, Sr., 30, 34, 35. 23. Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Vote in Congress,” Po­liti­cal Science Quarterly 108 (1993): 283–306. 24. Devin Caughey, The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Repre­ sen­ta­tion in a One-­Party Enclave (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2018), 35. 25. Ira Katznelson and Quinn Mulroy, “Was the South Pivotal? Situated Partisanship and Policy Co­ali­tions during the New Deal and Fair Deal,” Journal of Politics 74, no. 2 (2012): 604–620. Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson, “The Southern Imposition: Congress and ­Labor in the New Deal and Fair Deal,” Studies in American Po­liti­cal Development 19, no. 1 (2005): 1–30. 26. Badger, Albert Gore, Sr., 17. 27. Morton Sosna, In Search of the ­Silent South (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 60–87. John T. Kneebone, Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920–1944 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 196–214. 28. Glenda Gilmore, Defying ­Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: Norton, 2008), 20–23, 202–204, 220–229, 260–282. John A. Salmond, A Southern Rebel: The Life and Times of Aubrey Willis Williams, 1890–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 198–218. John A. Salmond, The Conscience of a ­Lawyer: Clifford J. Durr and American Civil Liberties, 1899–1975 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 154–195. ­ullivan, Days of Hope, 29. Gilmore, Defying ­Dixie, 12–153, 270–340. S 11–101. ­ entury: Innocent 30. Arthur  M. Schlesinger,  Jr., A Life in the Twentieth C Beginnings, 1917–1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 243. 31. Morton Sosna, “More Impor­tant than the Civil War? The Impact of World War II on the South,” in Perspectives on the American South: An Annual Review of Society, Politics and Culture, , vol. 4, ed. James C. Cobb and Charles R. Wilson (New York: Gordon and Beach, 1987), 145.

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Notes to Pages 64–69 32. Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12, 13, 105–108. 33. Fred Bateman, Jaime Ros, and Jason E. Taylor, “Did New Deal and World War II Public Capital Investments Facilitate a ‘Big Push’ in the American South?,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 165, no. 2 (2009): 307–341. David Carlton, “The American South and the U.S. Defense Economy: A Historical View,” in The South, the Nation, and the World: ­Perspectives on Southern Economic Development, ed. David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2003), 151–162. 34. Carlton, “The American South and the U.S. Defense Economy.” Roger W. Lotchin and David R. Long, “World War II and the Transformation of Southern Urban Society: A Reconsideration,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 83, no. 1 (1999): 29–57. 35. James C. Cobb, “ ‘Somebody Done Nailed Us on the Cross’: Federal Farm and Welfare Policy and the Civil Rights Movement in the Mississippi Delta,” Journal of American History 77, no. 3 (1990): 912–936. Neil McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 151. Gilbert  C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 200–250. 36. Timothy J. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For? The TWUA in the South, 1945–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 15–19. 37. ­Sullivan, Days of Hope, 141. 38. ­Sullivan, Days of Hope, 141. Timothy  B. Tyson, Radio F ­ ree ­Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 202. American Intellectuals Confront the 39. Kenneth  R. Janken, “African-­ ‘­Silent South’: The ‘What the Negro Wants’ Controversy,” North Carolina Historical Review 70, no. 2 (1993): 153–179. Gilmore, Defying ­Dixie, 370–380. 40. Ward, Defending White Democracy, 36–64. 41. Kryder, Divided Arsenal, 65–132. 42. Ward, Defending White Democracy, 37–64. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 168–196. 43. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For? 15–19. 44. Erik Nicholas Haeuser, “A Tricky Chessboard: Albert Rains, New Deal Liberalism, and Southern Progressivism in Alabama” (MA thesis, Au-

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Notes to Pages 70–77 burn University, 2018), 27–31. Michelle Brattain, “Making Friends and Enemies: Textile Workers and Po­liti­cal Action in Post–­World War II Georgia,” Journal of Southern History 63, no. 1 (1997): 91–138, at 104. 45. Katznelson and Mulroy, “Was the South Pivotal?,” Farhang and Katznelson, “The Southern Imposition.” Caughey, The Unsolid South, 67–103. Badger, Albert Gore, Sr., 47–48. 46. Randall  L. Patton, “A Southern Liberal and the Politics of Anti-­ Colonialism: The Governorship of Ellis Arnall,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 74, no. 4 (1990): 599–621. 47. James C. Clark, “The 1944 Florida Demo­cratic Senate Primary,” Florida Historical Quarterly 66, no. 4 (1988): 365–384. 48. Robert J. Norrell, “­Labor at the Ballot Box: Alabama Politics from the New Deal to the Dixiecrat Movement,” Journal of Southern History 57, no. 2 (1991): 201–234, at 228.

3 . A L iberal Win­d ow of O pp ortunit y? 1. Chester M. Morgan, Redneck Liberal: Theodore G. Bilbo and the New Deal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 256–270. Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 64–74, 85–88. ­ eople: The Strug­gle for Civil Rights in Mississippi 2. John Dittmer, Local P (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 25–28. 3. Morgan, Redneck Liberal, 250–253. 4. Don Harris Thompson, “Senator John Cornelius Stennis, Mississippi Statesman: The Early Years,” Journal of Mississippi History 70 (Summer 2008): 125–146, at 146. 5. Don Harris Thompson, Stennis: Plowing a Straight Furrow (Oxford, MS: Nautilus, 2015), 33–49. Ryan P. Semmes, “The ‘So-­Called Civil Rights Movement’: White Reactions to Civil Rights as Seen in the John C. Stennis Collection,” Journal of Mississippi History 72, no. 1 (2010): 47–69, at 50. 6. Dennis J. Mitchell, Mississippi Liberal: A Biography of Frank E. Smith ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 73–85. Frank E. Smith, Congressman from Mississippi (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 64–92. 7. For Mississippi journalists and race relations, see David R. Davies, ed., The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement ( Jackson:

207

Notes to Pages 77–80 University Press of Mississippi, 2001). Ann Waldron, Hodding Car­ter: The Reconstruction of a Racist (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1993), chs. 9–15. Hodding Car­ter, Southern Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950), 142. 8. Car­ter, Southern Legacy, 87, 89. 9. Car­ter, Southern Legacy, 167. 10. Car­ter, Southern Legacy, 92–93. 11. Hodding Car­ter III, The South Strikes Back (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 61. 12. Car­ter, The South Strikes Back, 61, 148–157, 196. Mark Newman, “Journalist u ­ nder Siege: The Life of Hazel Brannon Smith,” in Mississippi ­Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, ed. Martha H. Swain, Elizabeth Anne Payne, and Marjorie Julian Spruill (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 220–234. 13. Car­ter, The South Strikes Back, 12. John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1995), 10–11. 14. Michael  J. Klarman, “Brown, Racial Change, and the Civil Rights Movement,” ­Virginia Law Review 80, no. 1 (1994): 7–150. Michael J. Klarman, “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (1994): 81–118. Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Strug­gle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 290–442. 15. Numan  V. Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 70, 73. Numan  V. Bartley, comments, ­Little Rock Fortieth Anniversary Conference, September  27, 1997. Professor Bartley made ­these comments from the floor in discussion of papers by John Kirk and myself. Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: L ­ abor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 786–811. For a nuanced deconstruction of Hannah Arendt’s belief that education (a private sphere for her as it was for many southern whites) was the wrong target, the real outrages ­were the denial of voting rights and the banning of racial intermarriage, see Richard H. King, Arendt and Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 165–187. 16. I have elaborated on ­these arguments in Tony Badger, “Fatalism, Not Gradualism: Race and the Crisis of Southern Liberalism, 1945–1965,” in The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Brian

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Notes to Pages 81–82 Ward and Tony Badger (New York: Macmillan, 1996), 67–96; Anthony Badger, “What­ever Happened to Roo­se­velt’s New Generation of Southerners?,” in The Roo­se­velt Years: New Perspectives on American History, 1933– 1945, ed. Robert A. Garson and Stuart Kidd (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 122–138; Tony Badger, “ ‘Closet Moderates’: Why White Liberals Failed, 1940–1970,” in The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South, ed. Ted Ownby ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 83–112; Tony Badger, “Brown and Backlash,” in Massive Re­sis­tance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, ed. Clive Webb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39–55. 17. George Barrett, interview with the author, January  10, 2006. G. Wayne Dowdy, Mayor Crump ­Don’t Like It: Machine Politics in Memphis ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 3–54. 18. G. Wayne Dowdy, Crusades for Freedom: Memphis and the Transformation of the American South ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 10, 15. David  M. Tucker, Memphis since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 40–60. J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Strug­gle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 25–29. Nahfiza Ahmed, “Race, Class and Citizenship: The Civil Rights Strug­gle in Mobile, Alabama, 1925–1985” (PhD diss., Leicester University, 1999). Edward  F. Haas, DeLesseps Morrison and the Image of Reform: New Orleans Politics, 1945–1961 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 67–81. 19. Charles S. Bullock, Scott E. Buchanan, and Ronald Keith Gaddie, The Three Governors’ Controversy: Skullduggery, Machinations, and the Decline of Georgia’s Progressive Politics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 46–52. 20. Lorraine Nelson Spritzer, The Belle of Ashby Street: Helen Douglas Mankin and Georgia Politics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 55– 134. “Helen Douglas Mankin,” in ­Women in Congress, 1917–2006, Office of History and Preservation, US House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2006), 245–247. Bullock, Buchanan, and Gaddie, The Three Governors’ Controversy, 59–61. 21. Charles Bolton, “William F. Winter and the Politics of Racial Moderation in Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History 70, no. 4 (2008): 335– 382, at 340–342. Ernest F. Hollings, Briggs V. Elliott Descendants Re-­union

209

Notes to Pages 83–86 Banquet, Keynote Address, May 11, 2002, Summerton, SC, box 695, Speeches Series, Ernest  F. Hollings Papers, SCU-­SPCP-­EFH, South Carolina Po­ liti­cal Collections, Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library, University of South Carolina. 22. John  C.  West,  interview  with  Herbert  J.  Hartsook,  February  1, 1996, South Carolina Po­liti­cal Collections, University of South Carolina, Columbia. 23. Stuart Long, interview with Chandler Davidson, June 3, 1976, box 1, folder 8, Chandler Davidson Texas Politics research collection, MS 259, Series 1, Oral Histories, Woodson Research Center Special Collection and Archives, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston. John Bragg, interview with author, Murfreesboro, TN, August 2002. 24. Clifford Davis to Tom Murray, December 2, 1948, Papers of Thomas Jefferson Murray, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville. 25. Clifford Davis to Tom Murray, December 2, 1948. Jennifer L. Brooks, Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Po­liti­cal Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 119. 26. Pamela Tyler, Silk Stockings and Ballot Boxes: ­Women and Politics in New Orleans, 1920–1963 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 78–168. 27. Carole Bucy, “Martha Ragland: The Evolution of a Po­liti­cal Feminist,” in Tennessee ­Women: Their Lives and Times, vol. 1, ed. Sarah Wilkerson Freeman and Beverly Greene Bond (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 214–242. Sally G. McMillen, “Gladys Avery Tillett: White Gloved and Iron Willed,” in North Carolina ­Women: Their Lives and Times, vol. 2, ed. Michele Gillespie and Sally  G. McMillen (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 144–167. Leslie Gale Parr, A ­Will of Her Own: Sarah Towles Reed and the Pursuit of Democracy in Southern Public Education (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 144–185. Paul E. Mertz, “ ‘Mind Changing Time All Over Georgia’: HOPE, Inc. and School Desegregation, 1958–1961,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 77, no. 1 (1993): 41–61. 28. Timothy J. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For? The TWUA in the South, 1945–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 26–118. Robert Rod­gers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Strug­gle for Democracy in the Mid-­Twentieth-­Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 224–412. 29. Devin Caughey, The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Repre­ sen­ta­tion in a One-­Party Enclave (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press,

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Notes to Pages 86–89 2018), 98–101. Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Po­liti­cal Science Quarterly 108, no. 2 (1993): 283–306. ­Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Lister Hill: Statesman from the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 70–86. 30. Sidney S. McMath, Promises Kept: A Memoir (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003), xx, 225–244. George E. Sims, The ­Little Man’s Big Friend: James E. Folsom in Alabama Politics, 1946–1958 (Tuscaloosa: Univer­ eoples, sity of Alabama Press, 1985). Michael  L. Kurtz and Morgan  D. P Earl K. Long: The Saga of ­Uncle Earl and Louisiana Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 133–194. Julian M. Pleasants, The Po­liti­cal ­Career of W. Kerr Scott: The Squire from Haw River (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 70–138. 31. Rob Christensen, The Rise and Fall of the Branchhead Boys: North Carolina’s Scott ­Family and the Era of Progressive Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 48–76. 32. McMath, Promises Kept, 41–51. Rob Christensen, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections, and Events That ­Shaped Modern North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 236. 33. Anna R. Hayes, Without Pre­ce­dent: The Life of Susie Marshall Sharp (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 21, 135–137, 139– 140, 145. ­ eoples, Earl K. 34. Sims, The ­Little Man’s Big Friend, 40–78. Kurtz and P Long, 19, 150. Pleasants, Po­liti­cal ­Career of W. Kerr Scott, 121–124. 35. Marshall Frady, Wallace (New York: Random House, 1968), 107–108. Frady identifies the ambassador as Lord Halifax. The story fits well with the fastidious Halifax, a devout Anglo-­Catholic with an artificial left hand, but Halifax had left Washington by the time Folsom became governor. Inverchapel had his own distinctive qualities, with a dislike of the telephone and a preference for writing with a quill. ­ ittle Man’s Big Friend, 18–82. Kurtz and ­Peoples, Earl  K. 36. Sims, The L Long, 211–229. A writ of habeas corpus secured Long’s release from the Texas hospital but on his return to Baton Rouge he was immediately committed to the state m ­ ental hospital. Long rallied his allies to fire the director of the hospital and replace him with a director who declared him sane and released him. Anthony Badger, “ ‘When I Took the Oath of Office I Took No Vow of Poverty’: Race, Corruption and Democracy in Louisiana, 1928–2000,” in

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Notes to Pages 89–94 Badger, New Deal / New South: An Anthony  J. Badger Reader (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 155–156. 37. Badger, “When I Took the Oath of Office,” 155. Harris Wofford, Of Kennedy and Kings (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980), 162. ­ ittle Man’s Big Friend, 80–81, 98, 113, 161–167, 170, 172–174, 224. 38. Sims, The L Kurtz and ­Peoples, Earl K. Long, 194–210. Badger, “Closet Moderates,” 112. 39. Badger, “Closet Moderates,” 107–114. 40. Badger, “Closet Moderates,” 107–114. William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roo­se­velt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 147–225. 41. Badger, “What­ever Happened?,” 71. Badger, “Closet Moderates,” 113–114. 42. Sims, The ­Little Man’s Big Friend, 167–168. J. D. Messick to Terry Sanford, April 16, 1954; Sanford to Messick, April 24, 1954; and W. Kerr Scott to Clark Brown, June 15, 1954; all in William Kerr Scott Papers, PC 1175, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh. Sidney McMath, interviewed by John Egerton, September 8, 1990, interview A-0352, Southern Oral History Program, Collection no. 4007, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Patrick Maney, “Hale Boggs: The Southerner as National Demo­crat,” in Masters of the House, ed. Raymond Smock, Susan Hammond, and Roger Davidson (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 222–258. Dante Fascell, interview with Tony Badger, February 27, 1997. 43. Car­ter, The South Strikes Back, 18. 44. Stephen Tuck, “A City Too Dignified to Hate: Civic Pride, Civil Rights, and Savannah in Comparative Perspective,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 79, no. 3 (1995): 539–559. 45. Tuck, “A City Too Dignified to Hate.” 46. William  H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Strug­gle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 13–70. John Kirk, Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in ­Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940–1940 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 63–68. Don H. Doyle, Nashville since the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 150. Barry Jacobs, Across the Line: Profiles in Basketball Courage: Tales of the First Black Players in the ACC and SEC (Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2008), 95. Stephen G. N. Tuck, Beyond Atlanta: The Strug­gle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 94.

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Notes to Pages 95–98 47. Hollings, Briggs V. Elliott Descendants Re-­union Banquet, Keynote Address. Anthony J. Badger, “From Defiance to Moderation: South Carolina Governors and Racial Change,” in Badger, New Deal / New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 131–132. David Robertson, Sly and Able: A Po­liti­cal Biography of James F. Byrnes (New York: Norton, 1980), 507–521. David  T. Ballantyne, New Politics in the Old South: Ernest  F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016), 10–13. 48. Badger, “From Defiance to Moderation,” 131–132. Robertson, Sly and Able, 507–521. 49. Robertson, Sly and Able, 507–521. Car­ter, The South Strikes Back, 36. Ward, Defending White Democracy, 130–133. Charles C. Bolton, The Hardest ­ attle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870–1980 ( Jackson: Deal of All: The B University Press of Mississippi, 2005), ch. 2. 50. Jennifer  E. Brooks, “Winning the Peace: Georgia Veterans and the Strug­gle to Define the Po­liti­cal Legacy of World War II,” Journal of Southern History 66, no. 3 (2000): 563–604. 51. “Brooks, “Winning the Peace,” 584. 52. Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s Amer­i­ca (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 32–60. Ward, Defending White Democracy, 88–106. Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 101–173. 53. Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, “Nell ­Battle Lewis: The Po­liti­cal Journey of a Liberal White Supremacist,” in North Carolina ­Women: Their Lives and Times, vol. 2, ed. Michele Gillespie and Sally G. McMillen (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 120–143. 54. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, ­Mothers of Massive Re­sis­tance: White ­Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3. Rebecca Bruckmann, Massive Re­sis­tance and Southern Womanhood: White ­Women, Class and Segregation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021), 1–17. 55. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For? 48–68, 199–209. Bryant Simon, A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 221. 56. Bolton, “William  F. Winter,” 343. Caughey, The Unsolid South, 37, ­51–52. Semmes, “So-­Called Civil Rights Movement,” 48–51.

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Notes to Pages 98–104 57. Ward, Defending White Democracy, 76, 78. Anthony J. Badger, Albert Gore,  Sr.: A Po­liti­cal Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 69–70. 58. Ira Katznelson and Quinn Mulroy, “Was the South Pivotal? Situated Partisanship and Policy Co­ali­tions during the New Deal and Fair Deal,” Journal of Politics 74, no. 2 (2012): 604–620. Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson, “The Southern Imposition: Congress and ­Labor in the New Deal and Fair Deal,” Studies in American Po­liti­cal Development 19, no. 1 (2005): 1–30. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Is Freedom of the Individual Un-­American? Right-­ to-­Work Campaigns and Anti-­Union Conservatism, 1943–1958,” in The Right and ­Labor in Amer­i­ca: Politics, Ideology and Imagination, ed. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer and Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 114–138. Caughey, The Unsolid South, 36. 59. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 245, 261. Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph  R. McCarthy and the Senate (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1987), 88. 60. James  C. Clark, Red Pepper and Gorgeous George: Claude Pepper’s Epic Defeat in the 1950 Primary (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 22–37, 39–41, 96–101. Jonathan  W. Bell, “Conceptualising Southern Liberalism: Ideology and the Pepper-­Smathers 1950 Primary in Florida,” Journal of American Studies 37, no. 1 (2003): 17–45. 61. Clark, Red Pepper and Gorgeous George, 8, 39–41. Bell, “Conceptualising Southern Liberalism.” 62. Clark, Red Pepper and Gorgeous George, 127–135. Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 221–233. 63. Pleasants, Po­liti­cal ­Career of W. Kerr Scott, 95–99, 139–161. Rob Christensen, The Rise and Fall of the Branchhead Boys, 77–100. 64. Pleasants, Po­liti­cal ­Career of W. Kerr Scott, 139–161. William A. Link, Righ­teous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2008) 43–41. 65. Pleasants, Po­liti­cal ­Career of W. Kerr Scott, 166–175. Link, Righ­teous Warrior, 37–40. 66. Michael J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1998). 67. Bullock, Buchanan, and Gaddie, The Three Governors Controversy, 63–128.

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Notes to Pages 105–113 68. Bullock, Buchanan, and Gaddie, The Three Governors Controversy, 63–128. 69. Sims, The ­Little Man’s Big Friend, 112–115. 70. Semmes, “So-­Called Civil Rights Movement,” 48–51. Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 85.

4. B ro w n and Bac kl ash 1. Hodding Car­ter III, The South Strikes Back (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 36. Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 140. 2. Ward, Defending White Democracy, 139. Anders Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–52. 3. Dan  T. Car­ter, The Politics of Rage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 90–98. 4. Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow, 65–104. 5. Anthony  J. Badger, “The South Confronts the Court: The Southern Manifesto of 1956,” Journal of Policy History 20, no.1 (2008): 126–142. Anthony J. Badger, “Southerners Who Refused to Sign the Southern Manifesto,” Historical Journal 42, no. 2 (1999): 517–534. Tony Badger, Race and War: Lyndon Johnson and William Fulbright, The Stenton Lecture, 1998 (Reading, UK: University of Reading, 2000). 6. Hodding Car­ter, interviewed by Jack Bass and Walter De Vries, April 1, 1974, interview A-0100, Southern Oral History Program, Collection no. 4007, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 7. Anthony  J. Badger, “Lyndon Johnson and Albert Gore: Southern New Dealers and the Modern South,” in Poverty and Pro­gress in the U.S. South since 1920, ed. Suzanne W. Jones and Mark Newman (Amsterdam: VU Press, 2006). 8. Charles Bolton, “William F. Winter and the Politics of Racial Moderation in Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History 70, no. 4 (2008): 335–382, at 348 and 359. 9. Frank E. Smith, interview with the author, November 1, 1995. 10. Willie Morris, Yazoo: Integration in a Deep Southern Town (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012).

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Notes to Pages 114–119 11. “Elizabeth Jacoway: Historian’s Look at 1957 LR Integration Opens F ­ amily Secrets,” History News Network, August 4, 2007. Elizabeth Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son: ­Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008), 84–100. John A. Kirk, “Massive Re­ sis­tance and Minimum Compliance: The Origins of the 1957 ­Little Rock Schools Crisis and the Failure of School Desegregation in the South,” in Massive Re­sis­tance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, ed. Clive Webb (New York: Oxford University Press 2005), 76–98. 12. Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son, 195–213. Anthony J. Badger, “The White Reaction to Brown: Arkansas, the Southern Manifesto and Massive Re­sis­ tance,” in Understanding the L ­ ittle Rock Crisis: An Exercise in Remembrance and Reconciliation, ed. Elizabeth Jacoway (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 83–97. Kirk, “Massive Re­sis­tance and Minimum Compliance.” 13. Sidney McMath, interviewed by John Egerton, September 8, 1990, interview A-0352, Southern Oral History Program, Collection no.  4007, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sidney S. McMath, Promises Kept: A Memoir (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003), 301–306. Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son, 291–358. 14. Charles W. Ea­gles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 305. J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Strug­gle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 239–253, 309–379. 15. Anthony  J. Badger, “From Defiance to Moderation: South Carolina Governors and Racial Change,” in Badger, New Deal / New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 129. 16. Badger, “From Defiance to Moderation,” 135. Badger, Race and War, 10. 17. David T. Ballantyne, New Politics in the Old South: Ernest F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016), 25–28. Howard  E. Covington and Marian  A. Ellis, Terry Sanford: Politics, Pro­gress and Outrageous Ambitions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 233–234, 239–243. 18. Ballantyne, New Politics in the Old South, 46. John Seigenthaler, interview with author, February 27, 2003. 19. Covington and Ellis, Terry Sanford, 252, 255–258. 20. Covington and Ellis, Terry Sanford, 201–237.

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Notes to Pages 119–128 21. Covington and Ellis, Terry Sanford, 267. Ballantyne, New Politics in the Old South, 17, 24–27. 22. Ballantyne, New Politics in the Old South, 32–34. Badger, “From Defiance to Moderation,” 136–137. 23. Covington and Ellis, Terry Sanford, 273–293. 24. Badger, “From Defiance to Moderation,” 138–139. 25. John  C.  West,  interview  with  Herbert  J.  Hartsook,  February  1, 1996, South Carolina Po­liti­cal Collections, University of South Carolina, Columbia. 26. John C West, interview with Herbert Hartsook, 1996. Badger, “From Defiance to Moderation,” 138. 27. Covington and Ellis, Terry Sanford, 267, 286–287. 28. Covington and Ellis, Terry Sanford, 231–233. John West, interview with Herbert Hartsook, 1996. 29. Tim S. R. Boyd, Georgia Demo­crats, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Shaping of the New South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 116–120. 30. Patricia ­Sullivan provides a compelling account of the Kennedy administration’s response to racial crises. Patricia S ­ ullivan, Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s Amer­i­ca in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 168–213. “Stephen Horn’s notes that ­were taken during meetings of a bipartisan Senate group working for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” photocopy of 201 pages, John Stephen “Steve” Horn Collection, CAC­PP-066, Congressional and Po­liti­cal Collections, Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center, University of Oklahoma. Todd S. Purdum, An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the B ­ attle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 305–309. Gary May, Bending ­toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

5. Vot ing R ig ht s, a L ong S o ut her n S t rat e g y, and C onservat iv e Ac c om modat ion 1. Steven  F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965–1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 282–303. 2. Joseph Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 62, 209, 218–219.

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Notes to Pages 128–132 3. Steven Lawson, “Civil Rights,” in The Johnson Years, Vol. 1: Foreign Policy, the ­Great Society and the White House, ed. Robert A. Divine (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 98. 4. Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 1–36. Numan  V. Bartley and Hugh Davis Graham, Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 111–135. Dan T. Car­ter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 5. Mark Stern, Calculating Visions: Kennedy, Johnson, and Civil Rights (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 85. 6. William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roo­se­velt, Harry  S. Truman, Lyndon  B. Johnson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 325. Tim  S.  R. Boyd, Georgia Demo­crats, the Civil Rights Movement and the Shaping of the New South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 1–7. 7. Charles M. Dollar, “Otto Karl Wiesenburg: A Racial Moderate Who Helped Crack the Walls of the Mississippi ‘Closed Society,’ ” Journal of Mississippi History 76, no. 1–2 (2014): 19–42. 8. Florence Mars, Witness in Philadelphia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 272. David Wilson, “The Neshoba County Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy, 1964–2012” (BA dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2013), 36–37. 9. Adam Nossiter, Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers (Reading, MA: Addison-­Wesley, 1994), 161. Jere Nash and Andy Taggart, Mississippi Politics: The Strug­gle for Power, 1976–2006 ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 151–162. 10. William P. Hustwit, Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 143–164. 11. Hustwit, Integration Now, 143–164. Willie Morris, Yazoo: Integration in a Deep Southern Town (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012), 73–74, 189–190. 12. Edmund  F. Kallina,  Jr., Claude Kirk and the Politics of Confrontation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 235–237. Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s Amer­ic­ a: A History (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 193–244.

218

Notes to Pages 133–137 13. Boyd, Georgia Demo­crats, 157–180. 14. ­V irginia Durr to Elizabeth and Hugo Black, March  18, 1965, in ­Virginia Foster Durr, Freedom Writer: ­Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years, ed. Patricia ­S ullivan (New York: Routledge, 2003), 321–322. 15. Dan T. Car­ter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 371–414. 16. David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 39. 17. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road, 39. 18. Frank Rouse, interviewed by Jack Bass and Walter De Vries, December 13, 1973, interview A-0139, Southern Oral History Program, Collection no. 4007, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. William A. Link, Righ­teous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 98–129, 261–269. 19. Link, Righ­teous Warrior, 98–129, 261–269. Chuck Smith, “The Case against Jesse Helms,” Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2001. 20. Philip G. Grose, South Carolina at the Brink: Robert McNair and the Politics of Civil Rights (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 266–294. 21. Rob Christensen, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections and Events That ­Shaped Modern North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 152–153. Steve Niven, “The Slow Rebellion of Forgotten Americans: White Backlash in North Carolina, 1964– 1968,” unpublished manuscript, 1997, copy in possession of the author, courtesy of Steve Niven. 22. Rob Christensen, The Rise and Fall of the Branchhead Boys: North Carolina’s Scott ­Family and the Era of Progressive Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 175–241. 23. Grose, South Carolina at the Brink, 198–244. Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Strug­gle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 412–414. Lance  E. Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Re­sis­tance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 252. 24. Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s Amer­i­ca, 230–285.

219

Notes to Pages 138–143 25. Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s Amer­i­ca, 230–285. Ryan P. Semmes, “The ‘So-­Called Civil Rights Movement’: White Reactions to Civil Rights as Seen in the John  C. Stennis Collection,” Journal of Mississippi History 72, no.  1 (2010): 47–69, 50–63. Car­ter, The Politics of Rage, 455–466. Christopher Myers Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Strug­gles of James  O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 286–290. 26. Anders Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4, 8. 27. H. R. Haldeman Diaries Collection, January 18, 1969–­April 30, 1973, National Archives and Rec­ords Administration, Online Public Access Cata­log Identifier 7787364, Monday, April  28, 1969. Maxwell and Shields, Long Southern Strategy, 1–12. 28. William  P. Hustwit, James  J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 159. 29. Karl Campbell, Senator Sam Ervin: Last of the Founding ­Fathers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 158–160. 30. Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 202. 31. Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 203. 32. Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 200–210. Semmes, “So-­Called Civil Rights Movement,” 47–70.

6. Thwart ed P r omise s of a N e w S o ut h 1. Claude Sitton, “Southern Voter Spurned Race,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), November 8, 1970. 2. “New Day A’Coming in the South,” Time, May  31, 1971. Numan  V. Bartley and Hugh Davis Graham, Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 150–175. 3. A particularly effective challenge to the declension narrative has been put forth in Tim S. R. Boyd, Georgia Demo­crats, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Shaping of the New South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 1–23. Anthony  J. Badger, “The Dilemma of Biracial Politics in the South since 1965,” in New Deal / New South: An Anthony  J. Badger Reader (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 168–180. 4. Bartley and Graham, Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction, 150–175.

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Notes to Pages 144–148 5. “New Day A’Coming in the South.” Philip G. Grose, Looking for Utopia: The Life and Times of John C. West (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), 144–202. Gordon E. Harvey, A Question of Justice: New South Governors and Education, 1968–1976 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 1–12. Martin  A. Dyckman, Reubin O’D. Askew and the Golden Age of Florida Politics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 49–261. Jonathan Alter, His Very Best: Jimmy Car­ter, A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020), 148–204. Gavin Wright, “Voting Rights and Economics in the American South,” unpublished manuscript, February 2016, https://­economics​.­yale​ .­edu​/­sites​/­default​/­files​/­voting​_­rights​_­and​_­economics​_­nh​.­pdf. 6. Wright, “Voting Rights and Economics.” 7. Anthony J. Badger, Albert Gore, Sr.: A Po­liti­cal Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 261–262. 8. Alter, His Very Best, 148. 9. Alter, His Very Best, 148. 10. David T. Ballantyne, New Politics in the Old South: Ernest F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016), 88–107. David T. Ballantyne, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Southern Senators and the War on Hunger,” paper delivered at the Conference of Histo­ entury United States, Liverpool, June 2019. I am rians of the Twentieth C very grateful to David Ballantyne for permission to cite this paper. 11. Ballantyne, New Politics in the Old South, 88–107. 12. Layne Hoppe, “Increasing Liberalism among Southern Members of Congress, 1970–1990, with an Analy­sis of the 1994 Congressional Elections,” in Southern Parties and Elections: Studies in Regional Po­liti­cal Change, ed. Robert P. Steed, Lawrence W. Moreland, and Tod A. Baker (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 109–130. 13. Jere Nash and Andy Taggart, Mississippi Politics: The Strug­gle for Power, 1976–2006 ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 119. 14. Edwin Meese to the author, January 1998. Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2007). Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 1–30. 15. Badger, Albert Gore, Sr., 155–156, 251–252. 16. Louis Harris, report, September  20, 1960, box 45, Robert  F. Kennedy Pre-­administration Files, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum,

221

Notes to Pages 149–152 Boston. Badger, Albert Gore, Sr., 155–156, 251–252. Albert Gore, Sr., interview with the author, December 1, 1990. 17. D.  G. Hart, That Old-­Time Religion in Modern Amer­i­ca: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth ­Century (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2002), 53–83. 18. Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s Amer­i­ca: A History (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 157–159, 169–170. 19. Hart, That Old-­Time Religion, 53–83, 143–171. Albert Gore, Sr., interview with the author, December 1, 1990. 20. Hart, That Old-­Time Religion, 53–83, 143–171. Albert Gore, Sr., interview with the author, December 1, 1990. Jimmy Car­ter to class of history majors, Emory University, April 15, 1984. Kevin Kruse, in One Nation U ­ nder God: How Corporate Amer­i­ca In­ven­ted Christian Amer­i­ca (New York: Basic Books, 2015), shows how anti–­New Dealers encouraged ministers to speak out against liberal economic policies in the 1950s, an early breach of the “religious truce” that had characterized public life in the United States since the 1920s. 21. Wayne Flynt, “The Transformation of Southern Politics, 1954 to the Pre­sent,” in A Companion to the American South, ed. John Boles (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 500. 22. “Ministers Disagree on Voters’ Guides,” The State, November 7, 1994. David Remnick, “The Wilderness Campaign: Al Gore Lives on a Street in Nashville,” New Yorker, September 13, 2004. 23. Randall Balmer, Evangelicalism in Amer­i­ca (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), ch. 8. Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” Politico, May 27, 2014. 24. Al Gore related this incident in a discussion of his f­ather’s legacy at a forum at ­Middle Tennessee State University, September 16, 2019, https://­www​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=h ­ 81QcT3ECIw. Keel Hunt, who was Lamar Alexander’s press secretary, has documented the long history of bipartisan cooperation in Tennessee. Keel Hunt, Coup: The Day the Demo­crats Ousted Their Governor, Put Republican Lamar Alexander in Office Early, and S ­ topped a ­Pardon Scandal (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013); and Keel Hunt, Crossing the Aisle: How Bipartisanship Brought Tennessee to the Twenty-­First ­Century and Could Save Amer­ic­a (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018). 25. Howard E. Covington and Marian A. Ellis, Terry Sanford: Politics, Pro­ gress, and Outrageous Ambitions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 467–469, 472.

222

Notes to Pages 152–160 26. Covington and Ellis, Terry Sanford, 467–469, 472. 27. Patrick J. Maney, Bill Clinton: Gilded Age President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 9–44. 28. Covington and Ellis, Terry Sanford, 312, 317, 339–340, 473. 29. Richard Hyatt, Zell: The Governor Who Gave Georgia HOPE (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 350–353. 30. William H. Chafe, Hillary and Bill: The Clintons and the Politics of the Personal (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012), 84–133. Maney, Bill Clinton, 9–44. 31. James M. Glaser, Race, Campaign Politics, and the Realignment in the South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 15, 75–79, 104, 120, 163, 192, 194. 32. Dan T. Car­ter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 160. 33. Alexander P. Lamis, “The Two-­Party South: From the 1960s to the 1990s,” 44–45; Jay Bush, Diane  D. Blair, and Ernie Dumas, “Arkansas: Characters, Crisis, and Change,” 167; both in Southern Politics in the 1990s, ed. Alexander  P. Lamis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999). 34. Gavin Wright, “The Republicanization of the American South: ­Causes and Consequences,” unpublished paper, February  23, 2018. Gavin Wright, “Voting Rights, Deindustrialization, and Republican Ascendancy in the South,” Working Paper no. 135, Institute for New Economic Thinking, New York, September 2020. Kent Syler to the author, November 19, 2020. 35. Zell Miller, “The Dilemmas of Modern Southern Politics: Challenges and Opportunities for Southern Demo­cratic Governors,” lecture, Tulane University, March 20, 2000, copy in the author’s possession. 36. Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 305. 37. Rob Christensen, email to author, May 16, 2008. Rob Christensen, “N.C. Vital in U.S. Politics,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), May 23, 2010. John Bentley, “Graham v. Phelps Instead of McCain v. Obama for North Carolina,” CBS News, October 28, 2008, https://­www​.­cbsnews​.­com​/­news​ /­graham​-­v​-­phelps​-­instead​-­of​-­mccain​-­v​-­obama​-­for​-­north​-­carolina​/­. 38. Trymaine Lee, “Demo­crat Kay Hagan Loses Her Seat to GOP Challenger Thom Tillis,” MSNBC, November 4, 2014, https://­www​.­msnbc​.­com​ /­msnbc​/­north​-­carolina​-­results​-­kay​-­hagan​-­loses​-­thom​-­tillis​-­msna451276.

223

Notes to Pages 162–168 39. Wright, “Republicanization of the American South.” Rob Christensen, “Redrawn Districts Decide Elections,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), January 8, 2014. 40. Nick Bryant, When Amer­i­ca ­Stopped Being ­Great (New York: Viking, 2020), 274. 41. Jenna Johnson and Mary Jordan, “Trump on Rally Protester: ‘Maybe He Should Have Been Roughed Up,’ ” Washington Post, November 22, 2015. 42. “White Supremacist and Former Ku Klux Klan Leader David Duke Announces Senate Run,” ABC30 Action News, July  22, 2016. Graeme Wood, “His Kampf: Richard Spencer Is a Troll and Icon for White Supremacy,” Atlantic, June  2017. “The Year in Hate and Extremism, 2019,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery, AL, March 18, 2020, https://­www​ .­splcenter​.­org​/­news​/­2020​/­03​/­18​/­year​-­hate​-­and​-­extremism​-­2019. 43. “ ’Til Kingdom Come: Trump, Faith and Money,” dir. Ma­ya Zinshtein, BBC Four, January 19, 2021. 44. Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “ ‘Still the Best Candidate’: Some Evangelicals Back Trump Despite Lewd Video,” Washington Post, October 8, 2016. Balmer, Evangelicalism in Amer­i­ca, 143. 45. “ ’Til Kingdom Come,” dir. Zinshtein. 46. Adam Gabbatt, “Black Leaders Boycott Trump Visit over ‘Racist, Xenophobic Rhe­toric,’ ” Guardian, July 30, 2019. Mark Landler, “ ‘All Talk,’ ‘No Action,’ Says Trump in Twitter Attack on Civil Rights Icon,” New York Times, January 14, 2017. Bryant, When Amer­i­ca ­Stopped Being G ­ reat, 328–332. ­ topped Being G ­ reat, 328–332 47. Bryant, When Amer­i­ca S 48. Laura Jarrett, “Jeff Sessions Ushers in ‘Trump Era’ at the Justice Department,” CNN Politics, April 13, 2017. ­ topped Being ­Great, 370–371. It was the fourth 49. Bryant, When Amer­i­ca S time Trump visited the church during his presidency. He rarely attended a church ser­vice on Sundays during his term of office. Jon Sopel, UnPresidented: Politics, Pandemics, and the Race that Trumped All O ­ thers (London: BBC Books, 2021), 135–146, 235–236. 50. Sopel, UnPresidented, 286–296. 51. Sopel, UnPresidented, 314–317. 52. Brian Murphy, “Tillis Wins Reelection in North Carolina  U.S. Senate Race as Cunningham Concedes,” Raleigh News and Observer, November 10, 2020. Nichlas Fandos, “Lindsey Graham Hangs On, Overcoming Steep Demo­cratic Challenge,” New York Times, November 3, 2020.

224

Notes to Pages 169–177 53. Brian Lyman, “Tommy Tuberville Wins Alabama Senate Race, Defeats Doug Jones,” Montgomery Advertiser, November 3, 2020. Jordan Heller, “What Happened to Doug Jones?,” GQ, November  10, 2021. Brandon Moseley, “Exit Polling Shows Alabama Divided Po­liti­cally on Race,” Alabama Po­liti­cal Reporter, November 5, 2020. 54. Adam Tamburin, “Younger, More Diverse Voters Could Reshape the South and Turn Georgia, NC, Purple,” Tennessean, November 9, 2020. 55. Andrew Car­ter, “North Carolina’s Urban-­Rural Divide Widens in 2020 Election,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), November 9, 2020. 56. Allie Clouse, “As Georgia Becomes a Blue Wedge State in the Deep South, Tennessee Cleaves Tighter to the GOP,” Knoxville News Sentinel, November 6, 2020. 57. Sarah Smith, “GOP Rep. Blackburn Announces Senate Run, Says Failure to Repeal ObamaCare a ‘Disgrace,’ ” FOX News, October 5, 2017. Michael Collins, “Tennessee Republicans Sign Letter Formally Nominating Trump for the Nobel Prize,” Tennessean, April 30, 2018. 58. Kent Syler to the author, September 24, 2021. “Our New Senate Model Inches t­ owards the Demo­crats,” Economist, September 26, 2020. 59. Kent Syler to the author, September 24, 2021. 60. Charles Bullock, email to the author, January 22, 2021. 61. Charles S. Bullock III, “Stacey Abrams’s Bid to Become Amer­i­ca’s First Black ­Woman Governor Comes Up Short,” unpublished paper prepared for pre­sen­ta­tion at the Annual Meeting of the British Association of American Studies, Brighton, United Kingdom, April 25–27, 2019, updated July  2019. I am very grateful to Chuck Bullock for sharing this paper with me. 62. Brian Lyman, “Mo Brooks Announces Candidacy for US Senate,” Montgomery Advertiser, March 22, 2021. 63. Jelani Cobb, “The High Cost of Georgia’s Restrictive Voting Bills,” New Yorker, March 21, 2021. Fredreka Schouten, “Major Conservative Groups Unify ­behind GOP Efforts to Restrict Voting,” CNN Politics, March  25, 2021. Fredreka Schouten and Kelly Mena, “Putting ‘Cologne on Jim Crow’: Georgia GOP Lawmakers Drive t­oward New Voting Restrictions,” CNN Politics, March 22, 2021. “Georgia Governor Signs Sweeping Elections Bill,” CNN Politics, March 25, 2021. 64. Xander Landen, “GOP Governor Calls Trump’s Obsession with 2020 Election ‘­Recipe for Disaster’ for Midterms,” Newsweek, October 17, 2021.

225

Notes to Pages 178–190 65. David Smith, “Republican Wins ­Virginia Governor’s Race in Blow to Biden,” Guardian, November 3, 2021. Maeve Reston, “Republican Youngkin Wins ­ V irginia Governor’s Race, CNN Proj­ ects,” CNN Politics, November 3, 2021.

E pil o gue 1. Dan Car­ter describes the 1977 trial in Dan  T. Car­ter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), epilogue. 2. Joseph Crespino, Atticus Finch: The Biography (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

226

Acknowl­edgments

The invitation from Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to give the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University in 2018 was a very welcome, if daunting, surprise. I am extremely grateful to Skip for allowing me the opportunity to reflect on more than half a ­century of studying the South. Skip’s legendary generosity as a host was matched by the friendly efficiency of the Center’s staff in organ­izing the lectures, particularly Abby Wolf, Sandra Mancebo, and Matt Weinberg. Fellows at the Center—­Kinitra Brooks, Pablo  D. Herrera Veitia, Mary Hicks, Peter Hulme, and ZZ Packer—­were unfailing and stimulating companions and interrogators. I was also grateful for the presence and support of Senator Paul Kirk Jr., who does so much to facilitate the efforts of the Kennedy Memorial Trust; Devin Caughey, my former master’s degree student and now a prize-­winning author; and my good friends from Boston University’s American Po­liti­cal History Institute, Bruce Schulman and Brooke Blower. No author could have wished for more conscientious, incisive, and constructive readers of a manuscript than Glenda Gilmore and Joe Crespino. Nor could an author wish for a more enthusiastic, meticulous, and challenging editor than Joy de Menil. The book is far better for their close engagement. If the book nevertheless falls short of their expectations, the fault is mine.

227

Acknowledgments

Writing and revising a book during lockdown and with no access to libraries or, indeed, to stored research notes has its difficulties. I am very grateful to Kenneth Bindas, Charles Bolton, Gareth Davies, Ed Berkowitz, Charles Holden, Suzanne Mars, Marjorie Spruill, Tim Tyson, and Pamela Tyler for their generous assistance in tracking down errant references. Brian Ostrander and the wonderful team of copy editors at Harvard University Press and Westchester Publishing Ser­vices did a remarkable job in nailing down many of ­those references. I have been privileged to share platforms and seminars with distinguished southern politicians, notably Al Gore, Fritz Hollings, Zell Miller, Moon Landrieu, and John West, and interviewed many ­others. They w ­ ere uniformly welcoming and candid. I have also benefited from the observations and advice of some very distinguished journalists and po­liti­cal scientists—­Keel Hunt and Kent Syler in Tennessee, Chuck Bullock in Georgia, and the doyen of journalist historians, Rob Christensen in North Carolina. I was the external examiner for Nick Bryant’s Oxford doctoral thesis on Kennedy and civil rights in 1993. It was a ­great plea­sure to renew our acquaintance at the end of 2019. Nick was the BBC’s New York correspondent, and over the next two years we exchanged ideas that informed his When Amer­i­ca ­Stopped Being ­Great. His analy­sis of the historical background of Trump and his followers and his observations on the 2016 and 2020 campaigns helped me greatly. A book of this kind disproportionately relies on the scholarship of ­others. Readers w ­ ill see how dependent I have been on the rich work of Numan Bartley, Charles Bolton, Dan Car­ter, Devin Caughey, Joe Crespino, Charles Ea­gles, Glenda Gilmore, Hugh Davis Graham, Elizabeth Jacoway, Ira Katznelson, Steve Lawson, Bill Link, Pat S ­ ullivan, Anders Walker, Jason Morgan Ward, and Gavin Wright. I would like to emphasize how impor­tant both their work and their friendship have been for me. My PhD students 228

Acknowledgments

have taught me so much about the South, but I am particularly indebted to two of my most recent students, David and Katherine Ballantyne. Brian Ward and my friends and colleagues at Northumbria University could not have provided a more collegial environment for thinking and teaching about the South in my final years as a university teacher, taking me back to Newcastle where I started. Not many British ­children celebrate their ­fourteenth birthdays in Meridian, Mississippi, and Nick and Chris continue to be a source of g­ reat pride. They and their families express polite interest in what I do but w ­ ill prob­ably not have to spend their holidays traveling round the South in the ­future. From Prosperity Road to Why White Liberals Fail, Ruth has been a constant source of love and support, as well as healthy skepticism. I owe her far more than I can ever repay. The book is dedicated to old friends Christina and Tim Benn, who could not have been more generous to Ruth and myself and shared their passion for Yorkshire, opera, American history, Clare College, and fun. Sadly, Tim died while this book was being written. We miss him.

229

Index

Abortion, 148–151 Abrams, Stacey, 159, 174, 176, 186 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 21 African American politicians, 161–162 African American voting, 49, 80–82, 89, 92–93, 99, 104–105, 119, 124, 127–129, 143, 155, 160, 169, 173–174; increase a­ fter 1965, 127, 179; shift to Demo­crats in the North, 52, 54 Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 41 Alabama, 105, 169, 188–191 Alexander, Lamar (TN), 59, 152 Alexander, ­Will, 56, 62 Almond, J. Lindsay (VA), 110 American Federation of ­L abor (AFL), 61 Anderson, Reuben, 1–2, 5, 9 Anti-­communism, 99–104 Arnall, Ellis (GA), 46, 70, 82, 93, 132, 203n8; 1944 commitment to white supremacy, 70 Askew, Reubin (FL), 142 Atlanta, GA, 81–82 Atticus Finch: The Biography, 190

Backlash: pre Brown, 3, 79–80, 104; ­after Brown, 3, 107–117; ­after 1965, 132–135 Bailey, Josiah (NC), 40–41, 53–54, 203n12; and Conservative Manifesto, 53–55; and racial fears, 54 Baker, Howard, Jr. (TN), 151–152 Baker v Carr (1962), 179 Baldwin, C. B. (Beanie), 56 Ball, Ed, 100 Balmer, Randall, 149, 151 Barber, William, 186 Barnes, Roy (GA), 143, 157–158 Barnett, Ross (MS), 110, 115, 121–122, 130 Barnwell Ring, 38 Barr, William, 165 Barrett, Amy Coney, 168 Bateman, Fred, 36 Bates, Ruby, 187 Beckworth, Lindley (TX), 57, 59 Beesley, Clint, 61 Begala, Paul, 153 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 67 Biden, Joe, 7, 140–141, 167, 169 Big Mules, 38

231

Index Bilbo, Theodore “The Man” (MS), 44, 75–76, 95 Bindas, Kenneth, 40 Birmingham, AL, 105 Birmingham, Dave, 81 Black, Hugo (AL), 7, 44, 60–61, 191 Blackburn, Marsha (TN), 166, 171–172 Black Lives ­Matter, 18, 166 Black majority districts, 161–162 Boggs, Hale (LA), 92 Bond, Julian, 128 Bork, Robert, 140 Boswell Amendment, Alabama, 105 Bragg, John (TN), 83 Bredesen, Phil (TN), 166 Brewer, Albert (AL), 134 Briggs, Harry, 94 Briggs v Elliott (1952), 95 Brock, William E. (TN), 148–149 Brooks, Mo (AL), 175–176, 191 Broughton, J. Melville, Jr. (NC), 91 Browder, Earl, 28 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 4, 7, 70–80, 102, 139–140, 148, 178, 180; conservative defiance, 107–122; liberal fatalism, 111–113; Supreme Court caution, 111 Bruckmann, Rebecca, 97 Buchanan, Pat, 135, 163 Budd, Ted (NC), 17 Bumpers, Dale (AR), 142, 145, 151 Burns, James MacGregor, 10 Burr, Richard (NC), 17, 175 Bush, George H. W. (TX), 150, 152, 165 Bush, George W. (TX), 150, 156 Businessmen, 114–115, 181

Byrd, Harry F. (VA), 38 Byrnes, James (SC), 51–52, 54, 94–95, 113 Califano, Joseph, 128 Campbell, ­Will, 188 Carbon Hill, AL, 35–36 Cardozo, Benjamin, 25 Carswell, G. Harrold, 166 Car­ter, Dan T., 187–188 Car­ter, Hodding, 76–78, 93, 111 Car­ter, Hodding, III, 78, 92–93 Car­ter, Jimmy, 142–146, 150, 160 Carville, James, 153 Cassidy, Bill (LA), 175 Caughey, Devin, 39 Cawthorn, Madison (NC), 175 Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 167 Central High School, ­Little Rock, 114–115, 188 Chase, Harry Woodburn, 27 Chatham, Thurmond (NC), 15 Chattanooga, TN, 17 Chiles, Lawton (FL), 59 Christensen, Rob, 158 Christian Co­ali­tion, 150 CIO Po­liti­cal Action Committee (CIOPAC), 85, 168 Citizen’s Council, 78, 92, 105, 109, 111, 117, 121 Civil Rights Act 1964, 4, 123–124, 179 Civil Rights Movement, 11, 12, 18–20, 48, 49, 63, 68, 79–80, 104, 131, 138, 140–142 Civil Rights Section, Justice Department, 43

232

Index Clark, David, 27, 199n6 Clement, Frank (TN), 110 Clinton, Bill (AR), 5, 142, 143, 150, 152–154, 160; and education, 154 Clinton, Hillary, 162 Clyburn, James (SC), 144, 161, 168 Coleman, James P. (MS), 109 Collins, Leroy (FL), 110 Colmer, William (MS), 40, 43, 98 Colson, Charles W., 135, 163 Columbians, 104 Commission on Interracial Co­ operation, 32–33, 62 Commonwealth College, 63 Communist Party, 8, 28, 49, 63, 188 Congress of Industrial Organ­izations (CIO), 57, 61, 82 Connally, Tom (TX), 69 Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 115 Conservative Manifesto, 53–54 Cooley, Harold D. (NC), 15 Cooper, Roy (NC), 161 Corker, Bob (TN), 166 Cotton, 43, 51, 65 Couch, William Terry, 67 County unit system, 51, 82, 123 Crespino, Joseph, 137, 190 Critical race theory, 17–20, 187 Crump, Edward H. (TN), 38, 70, 80–81, 84 Cruz, Ted (TX), 166 Cummings, Elijah, 165 Cuomo, Mario, 151 Dabney, Virginius, 67 Daniels, Jonathan, 42, 203–204n12 Daniels, Josephus, 26, 45

Davis, Chester, 43 Davis, Clifford (TN), 83–84 Davis, John W., 95 Davy, Jimmy, 94 Deane, Charles B. (NC), 15 Decatur, AL, 191 Delta Demo­crat Times, 76 Delta Pine and Land Corporation, 65 Demo­cratic Leadership Council, 5, 151–153 Dent, Harry, 132 DiAngelo, Robin, 14 Dies, Martin (TX), 60 Disfranchisement, 3, 4, 10, 38, 42, 127, 179 Dixiecrats, 7, 78, 91, 97, 105, 117 Double V campaigns, 66, 68 Doyle, Don, 94 Dukakis, Michael, 151 Durr, Clifford, 56, 62, 191 Durr, ­Virginia, 38, 57, 63, 133, 191 Earle, Willie, 96 Easley, Mike (NC), 159 Eastland, James (MS), 97; accommodation to racial change, 137–138 Economic growth, 5, 7–8, 35, 64, 115, 144, 156, 177, 180–183; from bottom up, 9, 57; economic modernization, 6, 20, 26, 55, 181; outcomes, 183–184; Southern liberal faith in, 7–8, 20, 92, 106, 117, 177 Economic issues, 183–184 Education, 7, 18, 71, 79–86, 90, 94–97, 102, 103–118, 131–132, 143–144, 154, 157–158, 177, 179, 185; outcomes, 182–183; southern liberal faith in, 7, 8, 31–32, 102, 119, 144, 154, 177, 181, 191

233

Index Edwards, John (NC), 159 Edwards, John Bel (LA), 160 Egerton, John, 78–79 1836 Proj­ect, 19 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 112–115, 129, 149, 182 Elections: 1936, 41; 1938, 54–55; 1944, 70–71; 1950, 99–104; 1964, 2, 129–132; 1994, 155–156; 2008, 159–160; 2016, 2, 162, 164, 170, 174; 2018, 16, 166–167; 2020, 167–172 Ellington, Buford (TN), 135 Elliott, Carl (AL), 85, 116 Elliott, Harriet, 56, 57 Ellis, Clyde (AR), 57 Elton, Geoffrey, 9 Engelhardt, Sam, 105 Environment, 144–145 Ervin, Samuel J., Jr. (NC), 139–140 Ethridge, Mark, 68 Evangelical religion, 147–151, 169 Evans, Hiram W., 44 Evers, Charles, 75 Evers, Medgar, 75 Executive Order 8802, 67 Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), 68, 91, 98 Fair ­Labor Standards Act, 54 Faith in the federal government, 177, 181–182 Falwell, Jerry, 149–151 Farley, James, 49 Farm Security Administration, 56 Fascell, Dante (FL), 92, 124 Faubus, Orval (AR), 15, 110, 114–116 Federal Art Proj­ect, 49

Federal Housing Administration, 42 Figg, Robert, 94 Fletcher, A. J., 11 Floyd, George, 165 Flynt, Wayne, 150 Folsom, James (AL), 59, 86, 191; and drinking, 89; as governor, 86–91; and race, 88–92 Ford, Christine Blasey, 167 Ford, Gerald, 150 Foreman, Clark, 56 Franklin, John Hope, 32 “Freedom of Choice,” 131–132 Freedom Rides, 11, 120 Freedom Summer, 9 Fulbright, J. William (AR), 15, 85, 110, 115, 116 Fulton, Richard (GA), 124 Gaines v. Missouri (1938), 30, 62 Gallup Polls, 60, 99 Gantt, Harvey, 121, 135 Gardner, James (NC), 168 Gardner, O. Max (NC), 41, 54 Garner, John Nance (TX), 39 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 5 George, Walter F. (GA), 26; 1938 campaign, 55–56 Georgia, 46, 169, 185; 2021 run offs, 172–174, 185 Gerrymandering, 159, 162, 165, 187 Gillum, Andrew (FL), 181 Gilmore, Glenda, 9 Gingles v. Thornburg (1986), 161 Gingrich, Newt (GA), 155–156 GI Revolts, 83–84 Glass, Car­ter (VA), 54

234

Index Goldwater, Barry (AZ), 128 Gordon, Bart (TN), 157 Gore, Al (TN), 16, 145, 150–152, 183 Gore, Albert, Sr. (TN), 16, 20, 57, 70, 85, 98, 124, 142, 144–145, 155, 160, 166, 181, 183; 1938 campaign for Congress, 58–60; 1970 defeat, 148; school prayer, 148; and Southern Manifesto, 111 Gore, Pauline, 151–152 Go Set a Watchman, 189 Graham, Billy, 149 Graham, Frank Porter (NC), 25–34, 56, 85, 97; caution and segregation, 28–33; and civil liberties, 27–28, 32; and the New Deal, 28; 1950 defeat, 101–104 Graham, Lindsey (SC), 159–160, 168 Graves, Bibb (AL), 44, 191 Graves. John ­Temple, 68 Greene, Marjorie Taylor (GA), 175 Greensboro, NC, 93 Griffin, Marvin (GA), 123 Griffiths, Larry, 147 Hagan, Kay (NC), 160 Hagerty, Bill (TN), 171–172 Haldeman, H. R., 139 Halifax, Lord, 211n35 Hancock, Gordon Blaine, 67 Hargis, Billy James, 149 Harris, Louis, 148 Harris, Roy, 145 Harrison, Jaime (SC), 168 Harrison, Pat (MS), 43 Hartsfield, William, 81, 94 Haslam, Bill (TN), 170–171

Hayes, George E. C., 82 Hayes, Jack Irby, 36 Haynsworth, Clement, 166 Hays, Brooks (AR), 56, 91 Heale, Michael, 103–104 Helms, Jesse (NC), 11, 97, 102–103, 134–135, 139 Henry, Aaron, 137–138 Higgins, Andrew, 64 Highlander Folk School, 63 Highways, 36, 183. See also Roads Hill, Lister (AL), 38, 60–61, 70–71, 85, 106, 111, 116, 191 Hiss, Alger, 43 Hodges, Jim (SC), 157–158 Hodges, Luther (NC), 110 Hoey, Clyde (NC), 41 Holden, Charles, 32 Hollings, Fritz (SC), 14, 16, 82–83, 94; as governor, 117–121; Hunger crusade, 146; and race, 119–121; and World War II, 82–83 Holmes v. Alexander (169), 132, 179 Hopkins, Harry, 53 Horton, James E., 188–189 House Armed Ser­vices Committee, 63 House Un-­American Activities Committee (HUAC), 60, 70; ­little HUACs, 104 Housing Act, 52 Houston, Charles H., 49 Houston, TX, 57 Howard University, 49 Hughes, Langston, 28 Hull, Cordell (TN), 39 Hunt, Jim (NC), 86, 142, 154, 157, 182 Hutchinson, Asa (AR), 177

235

Index Immigration, 59–60 Ingalls, 65 Institute for Research in Social Science (University of North Carolina), 27 Inverchapel, Lord, 88–89, 211n35

Kilpatrick, James J., 139 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 11, 80, 90, 129, 135, 139 Kirk, Claude, Jr. (FL), 132 Klarman, Michael, 79 Kneebone, John T., 62 Ku Klux Klan, 44–45, 55, 104, 109, 120, 131, 134, 137, 163

Jackson, Jesse, 151–152, 156 Jacoway, Elizabeth, 114 Johnson, Lyndon (TX), 2, 16, 57, 59, 60, 88–89, 111, 145; expectations of Voting Rights Act, 127–129, 143 Johnson, Paul B., Jr. (MS), 130–131 Johnson, Paul B., Sr. (MS), 46 Johnston, Olin (SC), 123 Jones, Bob, Sr., 149 Jones, Doug (AL), 160–161, 168–169, 191 Jones, Madison, 66 Jones, Robert (AL), 85 Justice Department, 43, 54, 91, 118–165 Kavenaugh, Brett, 166 Kefauver, Estes (TN), 57, 59, 81, 84–85, 106, 111, 145 Kemp, Brian (GA), 174, 176 Kendi, Ibram X., 13–14 Kennedy, Anthony, 166 Kennedy, Edward (MA), 151–152, 156 Kennedy, John F. (MA), 8, 115, 118, 123–123, 148; faith in southern moderates, 4, 180 Kennedy, Robert F. (NY ), 4, 118, 122, 146 Key, V. O., Jr., 3, 10, 35, 127, 179, 191 Kiker, Douglas, 93 Killian, Lewis, 13

Lake, I. Beverly, Sr. (NC), 14, 118 Landrieu, Mary (LA), 159–60 Landrieu, Moon, 16 Langan, Joseph, 81 Lanham, Henderson (GA), 69 Law and order, 121, 135–136, 165 Lawrence, Alton, 34 League of ­Women Voters, 84 Lee, A. C., 190 Lee, Harper, 189–190 LeFlore, John, 81 Leflore Co., MS, 2 Leibowitz, Samuel, 190 Lewis, John (GA), 165 Lewis, John L., 70 Lewis, Nell ­Battle, 97 Literacy tests, 38 ­Little Rock, AR, 93; crisis, 113–125, 188 Lockheed, 65 Logan, Rayford W., 67 Long, Earl (LA), 86, 211n36; as governor, 86–91; personal collapse, 88–89; and race, 89–91 Long, Huey P. (LA), 39, 50–51 Long, Stuart (TX), 83 Long Civil Rights Movement, 48, 49, 60

236

Index Long Massive Re­sis­tance, 45, 55, 68, 97 Long Southern Strategy, 127, 148 Lott, Trent (MS), 40 Lucy, Autherine, 89 Mabus, Ray (MS), 2, 183 Maddox, Lester (GA), 123, 132 Malapportionment, 1, 3 Mankin, Helen Douglas (GA), 82 Mann, Thomas, 10 Marietta, GA, 65 Marsden, George, 164 Mason, Lucy Randolph, 57 Massive Re­sis­tance, 107–113, 116–117 McCrae, Elizabeth, 97 McDonald, Ralph W. (NC), 10–11, 41 McDonnell, 64 McIntyre, Carl, 149 McKeithen, John (LA), 135–137 McKellar, Kenneth (TN), 64 McMath, Sidney (AR), 86–91, 106, 114–115 McNair, Robert (SC), 135–137 Meadows, Mark (NC), 17 Meese, Edwin, 147 Memphis, TN, 80–81 Meredith, James, 113 Miller, Zell (GA), 5, 16, 153–154, 157–158, 169 Milton, George F., 37 Minchin, Timothy J., 97 Minimum wage legislation, 60–61 Mississippi, 1–2, 43–44, 46, 75–79, 95, 109, 111, 113, 130–133 Mississippi Economic Development Council, 131

Mobile, AL, 81, 93 Molpus, Dick (MS), 2, 153 Mondale, Walter, 151–152 Monroe Journal, 190 Montgomery, Sonny (MS), 155 Montgomery, AL, 81 Moore, Dan K. (NC), 135 Moore, Roy (AL), 158, 161, 168 Moral Majority, 149 Morris, Dick, 153 Morris, Willie, 132 Morrison, DeLesseps, 81, 84 ­Mothers’ League for Central High, 97 Murray, Pauli, 29–33; and Eleanor Roo­se­velt, 28–33; and Frank Graham, 30–32 Murray, Tom (TN), 83 Musgrove, Ronnie (MS), 158–159, 182 Nashville, TN, 57, 81, 94, 183–184 National Association for the Advancement of Colored ­People (NAACP), 4, 31, 33, 49, 63, 66–67, 80–81, 187 National ­Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 61 National Planning Association, 64 National Recovery Administration (NRA), 42 National War L ­ abor Board (NWLB), 33 National Youth Administration (NYA), 57 Neese, Charles, 188 Nelson, Bill (FL), 166 Neshoba Co., MS, 131, 147–148

237

Index New Deal, 3, 6, 9–12, 25–47, 190, 191; African American hopes, 48–49; and African Americans racial status quo, 42–44; conservative opposition, 49–55; as a holding operation, 35; and modernization of the South, 35–37; racism of New Deal supporters, 43–45; Social Security, 42–43; Southern enthu­ nions, 61 siasm, 39–47; and trade u Newman, Isaiah DeQuincey (Deke), 122 New Orleans, LA, 38, 64, 81 News and Observer (Raleigh NC), 42, 45, 53, 142 New South governors, 4, 142–147; and education; and hunger, 146–147; and race, 145–146 9 / 11, 158 Nixon, H. C., 66 Nixon, Richard M., 7, 115, 129, 139, 142, 149, 165 North Carolina, 9–13, 41, 132–135, 168, 187; rural-­urban divide, 170 Nossiter, Adam, 131 Oak Ridge, 64 Obama, Barack, 2, 5, 143, 159–160, 180 Odum, Howard W., 27, 62, 67 Old Regulars, 38 Ole Miss, 113, 115, 120–122, 130, 188 Operation ­Dixie, 8, 85 Orangeburg Massacre, 136 Or­ga­nized ­labor, 15, 49, 52, 57 Ornstein, Norman, 10 O’Rourke, Beto (TX), 166 Ossoff, John (GA), 174

Pacscagoula, MS, 65 Parker, Mack, 19 Patrick, Luther (AL), 57 Patterson, Haywood, 188 Patterson, John (AL), 110, 190 Pelosi, Nancy (CA), 169 Pepper, Claude (FL), 60, 61, 70; 1944 commitment to white supremacy, 70; 1950 defeat, 99–101 Perdue, David (GA), 172–174 Poll tax, 33, 38, 42, 46, 50, 52, 57, 68, 72, 82, 91, 101 President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 33, 91, 102 Preyer, L. Richardson (NC), 123 Price, Victoria, 187–188 Priest, J. Percy (TN), 57 Pritchett, Laurie, 122 Progressive Party, 8, 101 Pryor, David (AR), 142 Public Works Administration (PWA), 36 Purge of, 1938, 26, 54–55 Raffensburger, Brad (GA), 176 Ragland, Martha, 57, 84 Rains, Albert (AL), 69 Ramspeck, Robert (GA), 45, 82 Randolph, A. Philip, 66 Reagan, Ronald, 147–148, 150, 151, 154, 163, 183 Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 56 Reed, Ralph, 150 Reedy, George, 141 Report on Economic Conditions of the South, 26, 28

238

Index Republicans, 16, 17, 25, 53, 76, 86, 129, 136; since 1994, 155–178, 179. See also Nixon, Richard M.; Reagan, Ronald; Southern Strategy; Trump, Donald Rice, Tom (GA), 176 Rice, Tom (SC), 175 Richards, Larry, 58 Ridley, Cornelius, 94 Riley, Richard (SC), 142, 154, 182 Rivers, Eurith D. (GA), 45 Roads, 6, 36, 39, 86–87, 92, 118 Robertson, Pat, 150 Robeson, Paul, 101 Robinson, Mark (NC), 17 Robinson, Tommy (AR), 156 Roo­se­velt, Eleanor, and Pauli Murray, 29–30, 33; and Southern hostility, 33–34 Roo­se­velt, Franklin D., 2–3, 6, 10, 12, 29, 35, 48, 53–54, 177, 180, 190; African-­American support, 8–49; attempt to purge southern conservatives, 26, 54–55, 180; easy relationship with white southern politicians, 38; optimism about a new generation of southerners, 2–3, 55–56, 127, 180; popularity in South, 40–41; reluctance to challenge racial status quo in South, 42–48; at the University of North Carolina, 25–27 Roo­se­velt, Theodore, 25 Rotnem, Victor, 43 Rouse, Frank, 134 Rowan, Carl, 13 Rural electrification, 44, 57, 65, 86

Russell, Donald (SC), 14, 121–122 Russell, Richard B. (GA), 51, 98, 169 Sanders, Carl (GA), 117, 122–123 Sanford, Terry (NC), 14, 86; and African American voters, 122; as governor, 117–122; and race issue, 119–120, 153; as senator, 151–153 Sasser, James (TN), 155 Savannah, GA, 77, 93 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 34, 63 School desegregation, 4, 6, 90, 104, 105–115, 129–132, 135, 139, 145, 179 School equalization, 94–95 School Prayer, 148–149 Schumer, Chuck (NY), 186 Scott, Rick (FL), 167 Scott, Robert W. (NC), 135–136 Scott, Tim (SC), 17, 161 Scott, W. Kerr (NC), 86, 105–106, 136, 182; as governor, 86–91; and 1950 campaign, 102–103; and race, 90–92 Scottsboro, 49, 190 Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, 187 Segregation, 3, 29, 30, 42, 44, 54, 67, 68, 82, 92, 94, 104, 109, 112, 115, 119, 121, 149, 151, 181; dismantling of, 4, 79, 127, 179, 191; liberal reluctance to challenge, 7, 20, 31, 62, 70, 71, 77–79, 89–93, 106, 107–108, 180 Seigenthaler, John, 118–119 Senate Appropriations Committee, 64 Senate Armed Ser­vices Committee, 63 Sessions, Jeff (AL), 156, 165, 168 Sharecroppers, 3, 12, 42–43, 52

239

Index Sharp, Susie Marshall, 87 Shelby, Richard (AL), 156, 175 Shelby County v. Holder (2013), 159 Shelby Dynasty, 38 Shepard, James, 32, 33 Siegelman, Don (AL), 157–158 Sillers, Walter, Jr. (MS), 78 Simon, Bryant, 98 Simpson, James, 70 Sitton, Claude, 142 1619 Proj­ect, 18 Smathers, George (FL), 86, 100–101 Smith, Ellison D. (Cotton Ed), 26, 54 Smith, Frank E. (MS), 20, 76, 92, 113, 146 Smith, Gerald L. K., 51 Smith, Hazel Brannon, 78 Smith, Howard (VA), 69 Smith, Willis (NC), 102–103 Smith-­Connally War ­Labor Disputes Act, 69 Smith v. Allwright (1944), 67, 179 Snipes, Maceo, 104 Social Security Act, 28, 42–44, 50, 56, 66, 100 Soldiers’ Vote, 68 Sopel, Jon, 167 Sosna, Morton, 62, 63 South Carolina, 16, 94–95, 119–121, 168 Southern Conference for ­Human Welfare (SCHW ), 8, 26, 28, 56, 63 Southern Manifesto of 1956, 15–16, 110–111, 139

Southern States Industrial Council, 50 Southern Strategy, 7, 11, 128–129, 139, 142 Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, 63 Sparkman, John (AL), 40, 57, 85, 106, 111, 116, 191 Speaker Ban Law, 104 Spong, William (VA), 146 Starnes, Joe (AL), 69 State Sovereigny Commission, MS, 104 Steel, 66 Stennis, John C. (MS), 76, 98, 105, 109; accommodation to racial change, 137, 140–142 Stephenson, Paul, 12 Stevenson, Adlai, 180 Streator, George, 31 Strom, Pete, 120–121 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 9 ­Sullivan, Pat, 9 Supreme Court, 4, 7–8, 15, 30, 54, 71, 80, 82, 85, 90, 95, 102, 129, 132, 134, 148–149, 164, 166–167, 179; caution implementing Brown, 4, 111 Supreme Court Reform, 54, 60 Syler, Kent, 157 Taft-­Hartley Act, 99 Talmadge, Eugene (GA), 40, 51, 70, 90, 104–105, 203n8 Talmadge, Herman (GA), 40, 85, 96, 146 Tarver, Malcolm C. (GA), 70

240

Index Temporary National Economic Council, 26, 27 Tennessee, 170–172 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 36, 58, 66, 86, 144 Texas, 19 Textiles, 61 The South Strikes Back, 78–79 Thomas, Albert (TX), 57 Thomas, Norman, 2, 55 Thompson, Fred (TN), 155 Thurmond, Strom (SC), 94, 96, 129, 137, 149 Tillett, Gladys, 57, 85 Tillis, Thomas (NC), 18 Timmerman, George (SC), 110 Tobacco, 9–12, 41, 134 Token compliance, 110, 114, 119, 131–132, 134–135 To Kill a Mockingbird, 189 Trade Unions, 66, 69–70, 79, 85, 91, 97–99. See also Or­ga­nized ­labor Trillin, Calvin, 13 Trimble, James (AR), 91 Truman, Harry S, 33, 91, 99–101 Trump, Donald, 2, 5, 17, 60, 151, 162, 190, 192; and evangelicals, 163–166; and Georgia run-­offs, 172–174, 185; and southern strategy; and South in 2020, 167–172; and white nationalists, 163 Trump, Donald, Jr., 171 Tuberville, Tommy (AL), 168–169, 191 Tuck, Stephen, 93 TVA liberals, 57, 191 Tyson, Tim, 12, 197n14

United States Commission on Civil Rights, 89 United States Maritime Commission, 64 University of Georgia, 51, 123, 203n8 University of Mississippi. See Ole Miss University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 25–34 University of North Carolina Press, 67 Vandiver, Ernest (GA), 110 Veterans, Black, 4, 75, 104; White, 76, 82–84, 96, 118 Victoria Price Street v. National Broadcasting Com­pany, 187 ­Virginia, 185, 186 Vitter, David (LA), 160 Voter restriction laws, 76, 165, 185 Voting Rights Act, 1965, 2, 4, 8, 123–124, 127, 138, 144, 156, 159, 161, 177, 181, 191 Vultee, 64 Wages and Hours legislation, 12, 42, 45 Wagner Act, 61, 99 Walden, Col­o­nel A. T., 81 Wallace, George C. (AL), 7, 103, 110, 129, 130, 133–134, 137, 145, 153, 163–165, 190, 192; backlash candidate, 121–122, 129; Wallace voters, 143, 147, 148, 177, 183 Wallace, Henry A., 43, 100, 101 Wallace, Lurleen, 133 Waller, Odell, 33 Warm Springs, GA, 25, 33, 39

241

Index Warnock, Raphael (GA), 161, 173–174 Watson, Albert (SC), 137 Weltner, Charles (GA), 124 Welty, Eudora, 1 West, Ben (TN), 81 West, John C. (SC), 16, 83, 122, 192; as governor, 142–146; and World War II, 83 Weyrich, Paul, 148, 151 What the Negro Wants, 67 White, Hugh (MS), 95, 108, 113 White, Walter, 31 White Citizens’ Council. See Citizen’s Council White Primary, 67, 70, 75, 80, 82, 93, 104, 105 Whitten, James (MS), 155 Wiesenburg, Karl (MS), 130 Wilder, Doug (VA), 161 William, John Bell (MS), 131–132 Williams, A. E., 36 Williams, Aubrey, 56, 62 Williams, Robert F., 67 Wilson, Woodrow, 25

Winchester, TN, 187 Winter, William (MS), 1–3, 20, 132, 142, 182; as governor, 1–2; and race, 2, 19, 111–112; World War II, 82 ­Women, and New Deal, 56–57; conservative, 96–97; liberals, 56–57, 84–85; voters in 2020, 169; ­after the War, 84–85 ­Women for Constitutional Government, 97 Woodward, Ellen, 56, 57 Works Pro­gress Administration (WPA), 56, 60, 68 World War II, 6, 7, 35, 63–71; economic change, 63–66; racial Change, 66–69; and ­union growth, 69–70 Wright, Fielding (MS), 76, 96, 98 Wright, Gavin, 36, 156 Wright, Jim (TX), 124 Yarborough, Ralph (TX), 124, 148 Young, Andrew, 144 Young, Whitney, 94 Youngkin, Glenn (VA), 178

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