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The South’s Enduring Dilemma and Changing Politics

Certainly, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, the race game referenced in the previous chapter defined the South—despite its endearing charms—as a perverse, contorted regional political subculture. “Southern politics” usually meant “white Southern politics” and African Americans were nonexistent in most discussions. Mainstream analysis of the time fretted about whether whites could ever be persuaded to accept Negro participation in governance (or how Negroes could force themselves into the democratic process); few could have foreseen the unlikely phenomenon that we now suggest as a realistic course for addressing the Southern rendition of an American dilemma.

In this chapter, we will discuss the South’s stubborn systemic racial problems and changing politics as historical prelude to our hypothetical stealth transformation.[1]

Systemic Problems of Leadership, Race, and Poverty

According to V. O. Key Jr.—a native Texan and perhaps the most insightful analyst of Southern politics at mid-twentieth century—the fundamental flaw of Southern history was a systemic failure of Southern political parties and leadership to address its conjoined problems of race and poverty. As he so famously articulated the thesis in Southern Politics in State and Nation:

When all the exceptions are considered, when all the justifications are made, and when all the invidious comparisons are drawn, those of the South and those who love the South are left with the cold, hard fact that the South as a whole has developed no system or practice of political organization and leadership adequate to cope with its problems.[2]

W. J. Cash, parallel with Key in the anthology of Southern historiography, had pitched similar, more colorful ideas about Southern politics in The Mind of the South. The North Carolinian particularly targeted the racist one-partyism of his native region:

The world knows the story of the Democratic Party in the South; how, once violence had opened the way to political action, this party became the institutionalized incarnation of the will to White Supremacy. How, indeed, it ceased to be a party in the South and became the party of the South, a kind of confraternity having in its keeping the whole corpus of Southern loyalties, and so irresistibly commanding the allegiance of faithful whites that to doubt it, to question it in any detail was ipso facto to stand branded as a renegade to race, to country, to God, and to Southern Womanhood.[3]

Key accurately stated, at the dawn of the heroic drama, a daunting challenge for Southern political leaders:

Obviously, the conversion of the South into a democracy in the sense that the mass of people vote and have a hand in their governance poses one of the most staggering tasks for statesmanship in the western world. The suffrage problems of the South can claim a closer kinship with those of India, of South Africa, or of the Dutch East Indies than with those of, say, Minnesota. Political leadership in the State of New York or California or Ohio simmers down to matters of the rankest simplicity alongside those that must be dealt with in Georgia or Mississippi or Alabama.[4]

As events would demonstrate, the systemic problems of leadership and race (overlapped and exacerbated by poverty) would inflict harsh damage throughout this region for decades to come.

An Intractable Divide Between Whites and Blacks

Even as the civil rights movement shifted into full swing, expert analysts sometimes despaired of success because of the South’s intractable segregation and dysfunctional leadership. Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, after extensively and statistically portraying both sides of the region’s populace in Negroes and the New Southern Politics, worried about the future of Southern democracy. They even referenced the possibility of a racial holocaust:

In the South today the white leader who contemplates a tentative step toward accommodating Negro demands can expect to be labeled a “nigger-lover”; the Negro who cooperates with white leaders can expect to be labeled an “Uncle Tom.” Indeed, we seriously wonder whether a viable political system in the South will be possible, granted the extreme polarization of opinion, without one race being dominated by the other.[5]

Although civil rights leaders, grassroots demonstrators, and the federal government scored effective assaults on the Southern way of life, political developments during those times clearly reflected a worsening racial situation and suggested dismal prospects for bringing blacks and whites together.

In their retrospective look at Southern politics and society of the late 1960s, Earl Black and Merle Black articulated the situation thusly:

The changing civil rights agenda, widespread white opposition to significant reforms concerning the intermediate color line, and the new black militancy had profound consequences for the major civil rights organizations . . .

Just as black Southerners were beginning to participate in electoral politics in significant numbers, prospects appeared remote for successful biracial coalitions built upon issues of central concern to blacks. In no Southern state were there enough white allies to support a winning liberal politics, much less a radical politics.[6]

Indeed, the civil rights movement played out the 1950s and 1960s as a protracted civil war between advancing blacks and retrenching whites (with most leaders taking sides with their core constituencies), rather than a successful resolution of the South’s historical dilemma; there was very little hope for meaningfully reconstructing the Southern political system.

Ironically, as the 1960s drew to a close, despite the United States government’s having weighed in with the Brown decision, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the National Guard, and federal registrars/pollwatchers, the national environment for black causes had definitely declined and there was little hope for a new brand of Southern leadership.

In a recounting of that era, Richard K. Scher systematically listed the problems of the declining movement:

The civil rights movement continued after Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It continues to this day. But after 1965, it was never quite the same again, for a number of reasons.

In the first place, it was a victim of its own success . . . Next the focus of the civil rights movement shifted . . . Vietnam and its accompanying turmoil began to take over the nation’s headlines . . . Related to these concerns was the growing white backlash . . . Finally, the civil rights movement itself became irrevocably split . . . As a result, the direction of the civil rights movement because confused, diffused, uncertain.[7]

As for the possibility of biracial leadership, Scher notes that “some former allies of the movement joined the increasingly shrill black militants, while others became disenchanted and felt that the movement neither wanted nor deserved white support. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was almost impossible to tell what civil rights leaders, and the black community—Southern and otherwise—really wanted.”[8]

Evidenced Impracticality of Biracial Politics and Progress

Despite historical reality, some white Southern leaders eagerly and openly sought to expand the heroic drama with biracial politics in the 1960s—and the results were disastrous.

Alabama provided a classic example of such ill-fated endeavor in . As we discussed in the previous chapter, Governor George Wallace was constitutionally limited to one term, so he ran his wife, Lurleen, for governor in 1966. Nine men (including two former governors, a former congressman, and a sitting attorney general) also lined up to challenge for the top job in the Heart of Dixie.

Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers and former U.S. Congressman Carl Elliott—banking on the addition of 200,000 newly-registered blacks among the 600,000 whites in the Democratic Primary—attempted to end the Wallace Era through the use of biracial coalitions.

Flowers openly sought the black vote by talking about civil rights:

When I’d speak to black groups I’d tell them, “When I’m governor and you come to Montgomery, you’re gonna get jobs, and I don’t mean with mops and brooms. You’re gonna get good jobs behind desks and typewriters. Not because you’re black. You won’t get a job in my administration simply because you’re black, but you’ll never be turned down for a job just because you’re black.” That was what they wanted to hear, and they’d all cheer and shout.[9]

Flowers was cited by the New York Times as “the first major white candidate in modern times to campaign directly among Negroes in the Deep South”; and he was endorsed by the Alabama Democratic Conference and most other black political organizations. Later analysis indicated that he got nine of every ten black votes in the primary.[10]

However, when all was said and done, Lurleen Wallace won the Democratic Primary with more votes (54 percent) than all nine male opponents combined; Richmond Flowers was a distant second, with only 18 percent of the record turnout.

Flowers himself acknowledged his miscalculation of the Alabama political situation:

That was my biggest disappointment in politics. When I ran for governor, I was thoroughly confident. My polls had told me, with the black vote I was going to receive, I could win with a small percent of the whites. That’s one time I was completely wrong. I took a calculated risk and lost. I thought I had it figured, but I didn’t . . . I guess I should have kept talking about the Southern Way of Life.[11]

Carl Elliott, a respected, moderate congressman of that time, likewise described his quixotic adventure in biracial politics as an ill-fated and career-killing experience; we’ll let the late leader talk at length because his message has particular relevance to our thesis and case study:

It wasn’t the Wallaces I worried about as that campaign hit full tilt in April. It was Richmond Flowers. By that time, everyone knew Lurleen was going to finish first in the primary. A vote for her was a vote for George, and there were more votes for George than anyone else in Alabama. The real race was to finish a strong enough second to force a runoff. To finish that strongly, I knew I had to have the black vote.[12]

While Flowers concentrated on black votes, Elliott attempted a biracial campaign.

Meanwhile I went about courting blacks and whites alike, refusing to go to either extreme for the votes of one or the other. I summarized my stance in a speech in Selma: “I have not come to Selma tonight to stand on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and shout ‘Never!’ Nor have I come to stand in the Brown’s Chapel AME Church and sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ There must be a middle ground for Alabamians.”

In the middle is just where I found myself as the black political organizations in the state moved toward endorsing a candidate. Richmond Flowers had done exactly what I’d mentioned in my speech, joining hands with black leaders in the Brown’s Chapel Church and singing “We Shall Overcome” with them. And they were responding to him as the alternative to George Wallace.

Elliott’s pitch for black votes was, he felt, honest and straightforward.

I didn’t cozy up to them, I didn’t back away either. When I made a speech in the town square in a place called Greenville, three times as many black people were in the crowd as white. When my talk was done, I shook hands with the crowd, black and white alike. Then I went inside to pay my respects to the probate judge, who hadn’t come out to hear my speech. I began to thank him for the privilege of speaking at his courthouse when he suddenly cut me off.

“You,” he said, as if pronouncing judgment from the bench, “have violated Southern tradition, shaking hands with those niggers.”

. . .

As I was walking away, this judge came out and hollered right there in front of the crowd, “You’ve gone around and shaken hands with these niggers! No white man’s ever done that around here before.”

I turned and said, “Well, this is a new kind of day, and I’m a new kind of white man.”[13]

Elliott’s politics played well in sympathetic circles—he eventually was honored as the first recipient of the John F. Kennedy “Profiles in Courage” award in 1990. However, in Alabama of the 1960s, he scored little respect among either white or black voters, finishing way back in third place (with only 8 percent), struggling with painful memories of a biracial campaign, virtual financial ruin, and the end of a celebrated, productive public career.

William R. Keech, who studied varying impacts of voting and other political actions in Southern communities of that time, speculated that the problems of blacks perhaps were unfixable through electoral democracy:

The real problem is much deeper than these tactical considerations imply. The tragedy of American racial history is that it has left the Negro with more problems than men of good-will are able to solve. Votes, litigation and even the threat of violence are useful because they can influence the behavior of elected policy-makers. The most frustrating problem of the American Negro in politics is that even if elected policy-makers were totally responsive to Negro demands, it is not at all clear that they have it in their power to eliminate the inequality with which three and a half centuries of discrimination have saddled the American Negro.[14]

Thus, apparently, the concerns of early analysts about biracial politics were well founded; the heroic struggle seemed to be running out of steam.

Surprisingly, however, the Old South changed. Despite several centuries of entrenched racism and biracial electoral disasters of the 1960s, Southern politics began evolving in different manner in the 1970s.

Some may debate the merits of the subsequent pace and direction of Southern politics, but the South began—haltingly and stubbornly and constantly pressed by black civil rights groups and the U.S. Justice Department—to address its historical dilemma. As will be shown in the rest of this chapter, the system functionally adjusted in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to incorporate black participation and move toward biracial progress, cultural moderation, and relatively normal politics.[15]

The South’s Cultural Journey of Moderation and Convergence

While the South is still divided, racially, on important political attitudes and partisan inclinations, there is expansive public opinion research showing, with some obvious variations, a blending cultural journey of internal and external dynamics: (a) white Southerners have moderated their views about race and civil rights significantly over the years; (b) there has been substantial Southern convergence with the American nation in terms of racial ideas and behavior.

We should note up front, of course, that racial history still dominates Southern culture. J. David Woodard writes about the continuing interplay of black-white issues in The New Southern Politics (2007):

Racial conflict between black and white has always been the most visible negation of whatever was commendable about the South. No matter how much one admired Southern virtues, be they the genteel manners, bravery in battle, or courage in defeat—there was always the memory of slavery, sharecropper tenancy, and white supremacy. For every word of forgiveness by a leader like Martin Luther King Jr. there was a Southern politician like Ben Tillman or Lester Maddox who needed exoneration. The debate as to how much of Southern politics is governed by class divisions, as opposed to racial ones, continues. One thing is clear, the legacy of white supremacy was the abiding memory of life in the region, and its presence was all the more paradoxical given the deep Christian religious practices in evidence in Southern communities.[16]

This historical legacy of racial conflict is reflected in contemporary patterns of partisan affiliation, as reported by Earl Black and Merle Black in The Rise of Southern Republicans:

Without question the racial divide remains the most important partisan cleavage in the South. Blacks are by far the most united of the three racial/ethnic groups. Favoring Democrats over Republicans by 87 to 10 percent, the extraordinary cohesion of Southern blacks resembles in magnitude and intensity the traditional Democratic attachments of Southern whites. White Southerners, by contrast, are now far more likely (53 to 27 percent) to be classified as core Republicans than as core Democrats.[17]

When we turn our attention to regional-national convergence, the research suggests impressive change (among otherwise mingled data and patterns of continuity). According to Robert P. Steed, Laurence W. Moreland, and Tod A. Baker in Southern Parties and Elections: Studies in Regional Political Change, “What does seem relatively clear is that the most noticeable nationalization of Southern politics has occurred, and continues to occur, in the region’s political institutions and structures (for example, the party system, the legal system, the structures of influence in Congress).” On the other hand, they then reported data attesting to continued regional differences with regard to school prayer, religion, labor unions, and military policy. Furthermore, they said, “the role of race in Southern politics lingers on, albeit in different form.”[18]

Patrick R. Cotter, Stephen D. Shaffer, and David A. Breaux more recently surveyed the Southern opinion literature, and they found comprehensive evidence of positive change. Their 2006 review showed that white Southern support for the principle of racial equality had increased over time and had reached a high level of support for this position; moreover, they concluded that South-nonSouth differences in attitudes and behaviors were declining:

Overall, research in this area generally shows that white Southerners are different from their counterparts in other regions, although the differences in racial attitudes between white Southerners and others are diminishing . . .

For example, in 1942, 2 percent of Southern whites, compared to 42 percent of nonSouthern whites, said that black and white children should go to the same rather than separate schools . . . During the last half century support for school integration has increased throughout the country, and differences in opinions between the South and the North have diminished, though they have not disappeared. Thus, by 1985, about 86 percent of white Southerners and 96 percent of white nonSoutherners favored white and black children’s going to the same school.[19]

Cotter, Shaffer, and Breaux also found little regional difference regarding ideology and social welfare. They did detect differences in terms of tolerance and cultural issues (crime, gender roles, morality, and school prayer), although those differences seemed to be declining.

The Pew Research Center provided an equally interesting picture of the latest generation of white Southerners, for whom the heroic drama is only a fading memory or homework assignment.[20] The Pew survey, comparing 1987–88 and 2002–03 data, showed that, while black-white differences continue, there has been remarkable convergence between white Southerners and nonSoutherners:

The South remains a more conservative region on racial issues, but the differences between the South and rest of the country are narrowing. Over the past generation, a declining percentage of Southern whites view discrimination as rare and fewer say they have little in common with people of other races, decreasing or eliminating the regional gap on these questions.

We conclude this discussion by acknowledging serious opinion differences between blacks and whites in this region. Attitudinal progress among Southerners over the past few decades has been a piecemeal process, and racism still permeates many aspects of Southern culture. But we suspect that most scholars would agree that the problem has greatly mitigated since the civil rights movement.

We maintain, furthermore, that these blended patterns of cultural moderation and convergence correlate to fundamentally changing regional politics. In the rest of this chapter, we will focus on the more politically pertinent aspects of the Southern system during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

An Established Record of Normalization and Transformation

When we shift attention from public opinion to more consequential activities, we find a full body of scholarship documenting new national, regional, and local patterns—reflecting black empowerment and, in some cases, biracial politics—in the latter decades of the twentieth century. The Southern political system shifted significantly toward the normal practices of broader American democracy.

Partisan and Racial Adjustment: Particularly clear is a new Southern political order shaped by party and racial developments; these adjustments in turn have impacted the American political system.

Earl Black and Merle Black summarized the regional dynamics in The Rise of Southern Republicans:

The old Southern politics was transparently undemocratic and thoroughly racist. “Southern political institutions,” as V. O. Key Jr. demonstrated, were deliberately constructed to subordinate “the Negro population and, externally, to block threatened interferences from the outside with the local arrangements.” By protecting white supremacy, Southern Democrats in Congress institutionalized massive racial injustice for generations. Eventually the civil rights movement challenged the South’s racial status quo and inspired a national political climate in which Southern Democratic senators could no longer kill civil rights legislation. Led by President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, overwhelming majorities of northern Democrats and northern Republicans united to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Landmark federal intervention reformed Southern race relations and helped destabilize the traditional one-party system. In the fullness of time the Democratic party’s supremacy gave way to genuinely competitive two-party politics.[21]

Charles S. Bullock and Mark J. Rozell similarly summarized these developments in The New Politics of the Old South: An Introduction to Southern Politics:

When V. O. Key (1949) published Southern Politics, the region was solidly Democratic. No Republican had been elected U.S. senator or governor in decades, and a generation had passed since a republican collected a single Electoral College vote. For most of a century after Reconstruction, the South provided the foundation on which the national Democratic Party rested. When the party was in eclipse in the rest of the country, little more than the Southern foundation could be seen. During periods of Democratic control of the presidency and Congress, as in the New Deal era, the South made a major contribution. After the 2004 election, the Democratic Party in the South had been reduced to its weakest position in more than 130 years. Today Republicans win the bulk of the white vote, dominate the South’s presidential and congressional elections and control half the state legislative chambers.[22]

Furthermore, they note, the South’s racial situation evolved dramatically.

Key’s South had an electorate in which Republicans were rare and blacks even scarcer. While he observed that “in its grand outlines the politics of the South revolves around the position of the Negro,” it was not a commentary on black political influence, which was non-existent, but rather an acknowledgment that the region expended much political capital to keep African Americans away from the levers of power. Since implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, black votes have become the mainstay of the Democratic Party—the vote without which few Democrats can win statewide. The votes cast by African Americans have helped elect a black governor (Virginia’s Douglas Wilder), eighteen members of Congress, and hundreds of legislators and local officials.

Partisan change and black mobilization have not been continuous but have come at different paces in various locales and for different offices. Nonetheless, the changes have been massive.[23]

Black and Black have also noted how these developments impacted the national party system:

The collapse of the solid Democratic South and the emergence of Southern Republicanism, first in presidential politics and later in elections for Congress, have established a new reality for America: two permanently competitive national political parties. Not since Democrats battled Whigs before the Civil War has there been such a thoroughly nationalized two-party system.[24]

Stanley P. Berard forecasts important consequences not only for Southern politics but also for our national future:

The particular mix of constituency perspectives offered by “the newest Southern politics” gives a measure of diversity to both the Republican caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus, even if that diversity does not show itself clearly in aggregated roll call votes. The prospect that biracial coalitions will continue to provide a base for electing some numbers of white Southern Democrats has implications not only for the diversity of representation in Congress but also for partisan control. Understanding Southern politics continues to be an essential element of anticipating and explaining change in Congress.[25]

Black Empowerment: A central factor in this reconfiguration of Southern politics, of course, has been increasing black participation and empowerment. In a recent survey statement, John A. Clark cited the transformational role played by African Americans in the region’s politics over the past few decades:

The political implications of these trends also have reshaped the South from what it was at the time of Key’s work. Most notable, perhaps are the increases in black elected officials (almost all of them Democrats) and the development of a competitive (and sometimes dominant) Republican Party. Both were almost nonexistent in Key’s time, especially in the Deep South states. Today African Americans and Republicans have all but crowded out the formerly dominant white Democrats in many areas.[26]

The most direct and comprehensive research on black participation was Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965–1990, by Chandler Davidson, Bernard Grofman, and a top-notch team of experts from several practices and disciplines. According to their chapter on black and white voter registration, written by political scientist James E. Alt, there has been a remarkable transformation of the Southern electorate:

Consequently, it may safely be said that the Voting Rights Act transformed the basis of the Southern electoral system, inasmuch as it was the vehicle for destroying the institutional barriers to black registration. . Between 1972 and 1988, a pattern of racial mobilization and countermobilization, now possibly in decline, produced a reasonably stable system characterized by a ubiquitous but eroding white numerical registration advantage. The decline in this advantage raised the very real possibility of convergence in white and black registration rates as a percentage of eligible white and black voters, respectively, sometime in the 1990s. If and when that happens, the transformation of the Southern registration system that the act began will be complete.[27]

Additionally, the Alabama chapter, by practitioners Peyton McCrary, Jerome A. Gray, Edward Still, and Huey L. Perry, provided especially interesting results affirming gains in the Heart of Dixie through litigated provisions of the VRA (1994):

As long as at-large elections were in place, white majorities voting as a bloc were able to prevent black citizens enfranchised by the Voting Rights Act from winning local office. Most changes from at-large to district elections in Alabama resulted either from litigation or, to a lesser degree, objections by the Department of Justice. Although lawsuits won by the department played a key role in eliminating at-large elections in various black-belt counties, most of the changes were due to litigation by private attorneys. These changes substantially increased minority representation on local governing bodies, both rural and urban. Indeed, black representation in our sample has now reached the level of proportional representation in Alabama.[28]

Chandler and Davidson concluded that the VRA had indeed accomplished a “Second Reconstruction”:

When we began this research, we thought it would demonstrate the success of the Voting Rights Act in changing minority representation in the South. In particular, we anticipated that many Southern jurisdictions, with a substantial black population and a history of very limited black officeholding would have adopted district or mixed plans as a result of litigation, leading to large gains in minority representation. This is exactly what we found.[29]

Bullock and Rozell provided additional assessment of black registration:

Shortly after implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, black registration jumped. Only 29 percent of the region’s voting-age blacks were registered in 1962; six years later the figure exceeded 60 percent. The most pronounced changes came in states that had been most repressive with the share of age-eligible blacks registered rising from 19 to 52 percent in Alabama and from 7 to 60 percent in Mississippi. In recent years registration and turnout rates among blacks have almost equaled those of whites.[30]

They also showed the VRA’s impact on Southern state legislatures:

In addition to helping elect white Democrats, the black electorate has also contributed to a growing number of African American office-holders. Figure 1.4 shows the increase in the number of black legislators in the South from a scant thirty-five in 1969, of whom fourteen served in Georgia. In 2001, the most recent enumeration, more than 300 African Americans sat in Southern legislatures. Most of the increase followed a redistricting that created additional heavily black districts. Two-thirds of the growth in black representation occurred within two elections of the 1970, 1980 and 1990 elections.[31]

And in Washington:

Creating districts with black concentrations also opened the way for the first black Democrats in Congress from the South. In 1972, Atlanta and Houston districts redrawn to be over 40 percent black elected Andy Young and Barbara Jordan. Two years later Harold Ford won a 47 percent black Memphis district. The 1980s saw the election of Mike Espy from the Mississippi Delta, and when Lindy Boggs retired, William Jefferson succeeded to her New Orleans district. The 1992 redistricting sent a dozen new black members to join the five African Americans representing the South.[32]

Coalitional Politics: Our concern in this project, of course, is biracial representation; and the evidence clearly supports the development of coalition politics—mainly in the Democratic Party. David Lublin explained this phenomenon interestingly in a recent textbook on the Republican South; he said that the civil rights movement had, in a sense, liberated white Southern Democratic leaders to seek biracial solutions to stubborn historical problems:

One of the wonderful political results of the changes of the 1960s is that it allowed Southerners to focus on issues besides the racial organization of their society . . . Moreover, once African Americans began voting in large numbers, Democratic candidates had extremely strong incentives to turn the focus away from race even as they quietly abandoned conservative positions on racial issues.[33]

Bullock and Rozell provided follow-up observation about the impact of biracial relationships in the new Southern politics:

Even when black votes are insufficient to elect an African American, successful white Democrats depend heavily on this component of their electorates. This reliance makes Democratic legislators more responsive to black policy concerns and has largely eliminated the traditional Southern conservative Democrat from Congress.[34]

A similar impact was noted by Earl Black and Merle Black in the changing character of racial representation over the last three decades of the century:

Democratic conservatism declined because it was increasingly incompatible with the theory and practice of biracial politics. The new realities affected both veterans and newcomers . . . All these Democrats understood the necessity of demonstrably supporting their party in order to promote their institutional careers and sustain their biracial coalitions at home.[35]

The transformation was not limited to Congress. Alexander Lamis found in Southern Politics in the 1990s that white Southern Democratic governors were appealing to both blacks and white voters during the previous few decades:

These leaders—Jimmy Carter in Georgia in 1970 was one of the pioneers—proceeded in the 1970s and 1980s to assemble potent coalitions of nearly all blacks and those whites who had weathered the integration crisis with their Democratic voting inclinations intact. These ideologically diverse, black white Democratic coalitions became a central feature of the South’s politics in the post-civil rights era.[36]

Equally remarkable, according to Lamis, was the stability of those Democratic coalitions in dealing with issues that had plagued the party for many years:

These tensions are not new. The diverse black-white Democratic coalition that took hold in the South in the post-civil rights era has grappled with them for several decades and continues to do so. In the Southern elections of the 1990s, however, this coalition has not collapsed either at the voter or the leadership level . . . A moment’s reflection on the details of the major two-party statewide contests of the 1990s as described in the state chapters should substantiate the continued endurance of the coalition as it underwent its severest test yet in the two-party era.[37]

Substantive Representation: The bottom-line measure of changing Southern politics goes beyond black voting and office-holding to more substantive questions of representation: Does it make any difference in terms of the interests and lives of black Southerners?

Increasingly, research demonstrates a positive answer to this question. Political scientist Mary Herring demonstrated statistically that by the 1980s the black vote was impacting state politicians of both races in this region. Her analysis of roll-call votes in the Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana legislatures concluded:

Although this study presents only a static picture of three Southern state legislatures, it does suggest that fundamental changes have occurred in the political process of the American South. By far the most important finding is the consistent influence of black constituencies on legislative outcomes . . . The strategy of the civil rights movement, focused on obtaining the vote, has begun to obtain significant representational benefits for black voters.[38]

Charles E. Menifield and Stephen D. Shaffer have provided comprehensive corroboration of state level transformation throughout the region in Politics in the New South: Representation of African Americans in Southern State Legislatures. In structured, team investigation of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas (along with an overview of the other Southern states), they showed definite progress in descriptive representation and mixed gains in substantive representation of African American Southerners during the 1980s–90s:

First, as we enter the twenty-first century, it is quite clear that African Americans in Southern state legislature are enjoying some notable electoral and legislative successes. Relative to twenty years ago, African Americans comprise a greater percentage of the membership of Southern state legislatures in twenty of the twenty-two chambers studied, thereby reducing the gap in descriptive representation between the African American state populations and their presence in state legislative bodies. . .[39]

Substantive success has been less striking—Menifield and Shaffer assert “many successes, but also some disappointments.”[40] They report that the black minority in this region succeeded 71 percent of the time on roll-call votes, compared to 95 percent among white Democrats and 62 percent among Republicans; and the authors suggest, based on assessments of other factors, that “the Black Caucus success level is more impressive than it might appear on the surface.”[41]

Moreover, they noted a practice of effective alliances with a variety of key political players:

Lastly, it is evident that African Americans, despite their generally liberal philosophy in a more conservative region of the nation, have been politically astute in forming coalitions in Southern state legislatures. Normally they form winning coalitions with fellow Democrats who are white, and who today exhibit basically “centrist” viewpoints relative to the white segregations of the decades past. However, on occasion, African Americans have formed coalitions with Republican lawmakers, or even backed a Republican gubernatorial candidate if discontented with their treatment by white Democratic colleagues.[42]

Some Interesting Personal Perspectives

More interesting have been the personal stories and biographies of progressive participants about how things have changed in the South as a result of the civil rights movement. The following remarks (from prominent black civil rights leaders, all native Alabamians) demonstrate imperfect but responsive change, and a certain sense of personal pride, in the new Southern politics. We’ll present their positive comments first, followed by their criticisms and challenges.

The most ironic testimony comes from John Lewis, now an Atlanta congressman, a Selma-Montgomery marcher who was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a former Freedom Rider whose family still lives in Alabama. Lewis articulated a strong message of positive change in his recent biography, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement:

No one, but no one, who was born in America forty or fifty or sixty years ago and who grew up and came through what I came through, who witnessed the changes I witnessed, can possibly say that America is not a far better place than it was. We live in a different country than the one I grew up in. The South is different . . . So many things are better . . . There is no denying the distance we have come.[43]

Fred Gray, attorney for Dr. King and Mrs. Parks and a giant of the Alabama civil rights movement, focused on legal changes in his autobiography, Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System:

I have watched the appellate courts in Alabama in recent years, particularly the Alabama Supreme Court. In my opinion, we now have a court that demonstrates respect for the constitution and laws of not only the State of Alabama but also the United States of America. I feel very comfortable in appearing before our appellate courts and arguing state law questions or federal constitutional issues, and I feel that the courts will rule on the issues in accordance with the law, regardless of the parties and regardless of race, creed or national origin . . .

Power has been utilized in the movement to change society from total segregation to one which is becoming ever more just. We are not there yet, but we are moving in that direction. I believe that the success of the legal cases that I have been involved in speaks well for democracy and for the Constitution. It shows that one can use the system, abide by its rules and regulations, and change society.[44]

Similar positive and personal reflections were expressed by J. L. Chestnut Jr., a Selma native and respected pioneer of Alabama’s civil rights battles, in concluding his autobiography, Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J. L Chestnut, Jr.:

On the ride home from Opelika that Martin Luther King’s birthday, though, I felt pretty good. I slowly crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge at sunset. There was Selma. The Times-Journal. City Hall. Our law firm. I reflected back on my return to Selma on the same road in 1958. From the vantage point of how things used to be, the present is not so discouraging. When I stop and look back, I see the many barriers that have fallen and the great distance we have traveled. Remember, I started out thinking we’d be making substantial progress if we could just get a string of black-owned supermarkets in the Black Belt. It’s disappointing that we don’t have them, but, in context, this was a modest goal. We’ve gone beyond where I even dared imagine—black people and white people.

I see my own life as helping to realize the dream in my world in Alabama. Though I never imagined I’d spend my whole life in little Selma, I don’t know of a better place I could have taken a stand. Selma is my home. I love Selma. It’s my life.[45]

Now for their criticisms and challenges, comments that soberly frame their positive assessments.

John Lewis:

But there is a mistaken assumption among many that these signs of progress mean that the battle is over, that the struggle for civil rights is finished, that the problems of segregation were solved in the 60s and now all we have to deal with are economic issues. This is preposterous.[46]

Fred Gray:

However, one of the most disheartening observations I have made over the years is that most of the persons who made up what we called the white power structure have never gone beyond doing exactly what the courts have ordered.[47]

And J. L. Chestnut:

We are far from the world envisioned by King in his “I have a Dream” speech. We are closer to it, but getting there will continue to be a struggle. People forget that King said near the end of that speech, “I [now] go back to the South”—meaning to implement the dream of freedom and justice for all by marches, boycotts, and other means the establishment detested. I see King, at the expense of his life, striving to realize the dream, not just pleasantly dreaming.[48]

John Fleming, a native white Alabamian and editor-at-large of the Anniston Star, has spent considerable time exploring and writing about the Black Belt; and he paints a similar picture of civil and subtle change in the hardcore Deep South.[49] After several days in Selma, for example, he said that the struggle for black political empowerment has been won; the city has a black mayor and a majority-black city council. He also describes contemporary race relations there as complex, healing, sometimes festering, forever evolving, never clear-cut, but something worth studying by and for the rest of us.

Today, traveling up U.S. 80 from Montgomery, along the route of the historic march, past the sprawling fields and pastures of the Black Belt, across the bridge and into town, one finds an immeasurably more peaceful Selma. It’s a more civil and subtle place.[50]

Race is still at the heart of the town known as the cradle of racial intolerance, according to Fleming. “It bubbles below the surface; its undercurrents touch nearly every aspect of life.” But he reports that steady progress has been made since the 1960s.

Then, people of authority and those of the street spat the utterances of racism into the faces of fellow humans. Worse, people died for seeking equality and for helping others to achieve it.

In today’s Selma—a place that carries a heavy burden for the injustices and for the behavior of some of its citizens so long ago and that sticks in the consciousness of the nation as a marker of an unacceptable level of inhumanity—a sort of racial healing seems to be taking place among a festering that in many ways can be a lesson to the rest of the world.[51]

Here’s another journalistic perspective—writ large to cover the state generally—from Frye Gaillard, a Mobile native and journalist who had reported the civil rights movement in his younger days:

I write, inevitably, as a person who is white, with whatever limitations that may imply. But I also write as an Alabama native who lived through the times, who covered the civil rights movement as a journalist, and who has attempted to bring a storyteller’s eye to the powerful recollections of the people in the trenches. I have tried to be fair—even to the people with whom I disagree—but I make no claim to objectivity. I am proud of Alabama’s role in the story. A state once known as the Cradle of the Confederacy can now make its case as the cradle of freedom—arguably the most important piece of geography in the most important movement of our times.[52]

Gaillard’s personal observation punctuates a message of harsh lessons and continuing change.

Maybe there was something in the Alabama soil, or maybe there was a certain quality of leadership—white as well as black—that made for a powerful clash of ideas, that made us ask who we really want to be. Whatever the realities of unfinished business, the answer we are able to give today is different from the one of fifty years ago.

All of us ought to be happy about that. But none of us should ever forget what it cost.[53]

“A Message from the Chairman” about Racial Change

Presented here, in its entirety, is a directly-relevant statement of significant change produced by aggressive civil rights action and black-white political partnering. Dr. Joe Reed (one of the region’s most powerful and effective champions of biracial practicality during the reconstructive era) posted the following statement as his chairman’s message on the Alabama Democratic Conference website in 2003. The message relates specifically to the ADC and Alabama; but we suspect it reflects systemic progress wrought by practical black and white leaders, working together, throughout the South.

The rise of the Alabama Democratic Conference (ADC) to a place of preeminence in Alabama has truly been a remarkable one. Founded in 1960 by a small group of committed leaders to support the Kennedy-Johnson presidential ticket, the organization has steadily grown in size, reputation, and influence to become one of the most effective voices in Alabama politics today. Indeed, few political groups can match ADC’s record of success when it comes to bringing about fair and equitable representation of blacks.

Check our record. In Alabama blacks constitute 25 percent of the state’s population. Black officials are well represented on most governing bodies in Alabama today. This is due largely to a comprehensive legislative and legal strategy that ADC embarked upon over the years. When ADC was founded in 1960, there were less than 10 black elected officials. In 2002, Alabama has more than 800 black elected officials statewide. Presently, black officials compromise 25 percent of the state legislature; 24 percent of the county commissions; 24 percent of local school boards; 25 percent of the state school board; and 20 percent of the membership on city councils. Black representation on the State Democratic Executive Committee stands at over 40 percent, due largely to ADC’s active recruitment and influence. Also during the last two Democratic National Conventions Alabama had one of the highest percentages of black delegates in attendance, when compared to other states.

Although getting blacks elected to every chamber in government has been one of ADC’s goals, the organization’s history has been marked by consistent, widespread support for hundreds of white candidates who have been sensitive to the needs of blacks and poor people. ADC is proud of the fact that few Democratic officials have assumed office in this state without directly or indirectly being influenced by the work and policies of the organization.

In short, ADC’s organized network of voting members, coupled with civic pressure, has brought about significant social change. The State Democratic Party changed its racist slogan. Recalcitrant candidates stopped using racial slurs in their campaigns and began to court and respect the black vote. Without question, ADC has made politicians behave, mainly by holding to three basic operating principles: 1) there is nothing that is politically right that is morally wrong; 2) there is political strength through unity; and 3) of all crimes, the worst one politically is ingratitude.[54]

These scholarly and personal accounts—coming mainly from Southerners of both races—demonstrate that the South is a substantially different society from the old days.

White Culture and Black Politics in a Changing South

Unfortunately, the academic community has been deficient in explaining these historical developments beyond general analysis and statistical tables. It is very difficult for scholars, writing from above and afar, to explore critical human aspects—such as the personalized comments of John Lewis, Fred Gray, J. L. Chestnut Jr., John Fleming, and Frye Gaillard in the previous section—that help us make sense of positive change in the latter part of the century.

Consequently, current analysts often miss essential insights into what really happened, how, and why over the past half-century. Surely, the cooling clash of heroes-versus-villains did not magically cleanse the Southern way of life; laws and decrees by themselves did not soften the tone of Southern political discourse; and certainly the surge of black voters, in-migration from other regions, and other societal factors did not automatically translate into new styles of politics and public service in the South. Nor can we accept—as applicable across the region—case studies about the public politics of a relatively few New South leaders and black elected officials of that period.

Comprehending Southern change may require us to reconsider standard historical generalizations about Southern politics. We may have to step back, away from the pronouncements of Cash and Key, away from the stark, white-black drama of the movement portrayed by activist scholars and the media. While those works were valuable for the time, they produced a single-minded, deterministic picture that obscured meaningful patterns and potential for an alternative future. We need to view the South as a more complex region than was depicted in earlier research.

One first step toward understanding the changed South is to revisit earlier assessments of Southern culture and public life in the 1950s and 1960s. More recent scholarship has attempted such reconsideration and provides differing perspective and evidence about the white Southern mindset and black activities back then. Apparently, despite the heat of those times, the white South was not as rigidly, universally, or permanently resistant to racial change as had been assumed in mainstream accounts of the heroic struggle; and, in the other camp, as the national drama abated, black Southerners were ready to proceed in more practical pursuits.

Conflicted Complexities of the Southern White Populace

Way back in the 1960s, Lewis Killian and Charles Grigg had suggested, through the discerning eyes of Southern sociologists, that Old South society was less monolithic than normally suspected and depicted.[55] Now, contemporary research is demonstrating that Southerners of that era, while comfortable with their regional racial arrangement, were a mixed lot when it came to attitudes about the civil rights movement and the future of Southern life.

Matthew D. Lassiter is one of a growing breed of young historians revisiting conventional interpretations of Southern society.[56] The University of Michigan professor grew up in middle-class, suburban Atlanta; he says that his people, his parents and grandparents, have been ignored in most historical analysis. “There were a few white Southerners who were liberals, a larger number throwing the rocks with the rioters, and the vast group in the middle were left out of the story.”[57]

Perhaps the most exhaustive and useful acknowledgment of the nuanced political world of white Southerners back then is Jason Sokol’s recent historiography of that period, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–75. Sokol—who, ironically, was born and grew up in Massachusetts, attended Oberlin College and the University of California, Berkeley, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York—has documented, in sober yet fascinating manner, the ambiguities and antagonisms afflicting most Southerners of that time. After examining historical records, letters, and publications of the civil rights era, Sokol concluded that many whites generally and purposefully lived their lives outside the whirlwind of the heroic drama:

Most white Southerners identified neither with the civil rights movement nor with its violent resisters. They were fearful, silent, and often inert. The prominent events of the era—the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 student sit-ins, the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, the Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965, for example—often had less meaning than the changes in the texture of day-to-day life.[58]

Furthermore, they found various ways to muddle through the experience that completely altered their world:

When the civil rights movement tore through the Southern landscape in the 1950s and 1960s, it challenged the attitudes of millions, undermined their customs, and upended their ways of life . . . In the end, few escaped its long reach. Some white Southerners attested to liberating experiences that forever altered their racial attitudes and behavior. Others found new ways to resist racial equality. Many more clung to any sense of normalcy they could salvage, at times willfully ignorant of the tumult around them.[59]

Sokol pronounced the South’s race troubles as a white problem; however, he presented a picture of white Southern society of the 1950s and 1960s that was not nearly as monolithic or hardcore racist as had been depicted in the literature of the earlier era. Furthermore, preaching the possibilities of “white liberation,” “biracial reconciliation,” and “regional redemption,” Sokol described, without condescension, a white Southern populace trying to deal with the uncertain contours of fundamental change:

The South in the 1970s was a society remarkably similar to that of Jim Crow times in some respects, yet fundamentally transformed in others. Even for those who resisted, change continued to seep into life. At times its arrival was sudden; more often it was halting and gradual, and came in fits and starts. When tranquility settled over the sites of the civil rights movement, the work of adjusting to life in a new world finally began.[60]

Furthermore, some whites strove to mitigate reactionary politics, and others contributed as forces of progressive change during the heated 1950s and 1960s. David Chappell has highlighted this atypical white leadership in his retrospective study of racial struggles in Montgomery, Tallahassee, Little Rock, and Albany. He wrote in Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement:

Growing up during the 1960s in what must have been a typical northern white liberal family, I had an image of the white South as one big lynch mob waiting to happen. To me Bull Connor and Sheriff Clark represented the typical, not the exceptional, Southerner. Through the mass media, northern liberals reassured themselves that vicious hatreds and prejudices were vestiges of the Old South, that Dixie remained underdeveloped in the twentieth century, clinging with recalcitrant desperation to outmoded notions. We could not see that Bull Connor represented only one end of a spectrum of Southern white opinion, that there were quieter but equally representative voices at the other end. Nor could we see the vast middle, which was uncertain which way it was being led. Seeing these complexities would make the South, which was a synonym for racial trouble, too much like our own complex reality. Ignoring them was essential to the notion that racism was somebody else’s problem.[61]

According to Chappell, black veterans of the Southern movement (including Coretta King, Charles Gomillion, Ralph Abernathy, Georgia Gilmore, Johnnie Carr, John Lewis, and Hosea Williams) told him that there were white people on their side in most Southern communities of those times. He quoted Andrew Young as saying, “If it hadn’t been for the kind of white Southerners you are talking about, the South today would look like Beirut looks today.”[62]

Of course, many of us knew all along, or at least suspected, that the early works consisted of overdrawn generalizations; now we have contemporary research and a historical picture that differ substantially from the earlier analyses. White Southerners were not nearly as monolithically and hardcore racist as the mainstream literature suggested; in the other camp, as heated confrontations subsided, some were ready to change their ways and the course of Southern history.

Subtle Dynamics of Southern Black Politics

In addition to revising our views about white Southerners of that era, we need to appreciate subtle strategic dynamics among blacks as they charted their political course toward equal rights.

As we have noted elsewhere, various national factors negatively impacted the movement, and the heroic drama declined during the late 1960s; part of that apparent decline probably was a necessary course adjustment from cosmic movement to more routine political concerns at the community level. Dr. King himself proclaimed in his final SCLC speech (1967) and book (1967) that the national civil rights movement would have to start organizing itself for political action in a thousand different places, mastering the art of political alliances, and taking part in the smoke-filled rooms where debating and bargaining proceed.

Decades later, Stanford historian and King papers editor Clayborne Carson emphasized that same point about the importance of real-world politics to the movement:

To learn from this history, however, we must begin to understand the civil rights movement not as moralistic melodrama but as politics. Southern whites were not monolithic and intransigent but divided in ways that are similar to the division among those currently in positions of privilege and power. The ways in which Southern blacks exploited those divisions for their own benefit offer profound lessons for the future.[63]

However, most historical accounts of this “down-shifting” of the civil rights movement overlook important continuities and developments among Southern blacks at the local level. J. Mills Thornton provided useful perspective in his recent study of key racial developments in Alabama, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma:

In truth, an examination of the Southern communities that generated the direct-action campaigns reveals that the presumed decline of the civil rights movement is far more an artifact of the recounting of history from a national perspective than it is an accurate portrayal of the experience of Southerners during the twentieth century’s final three decades. At the level of Southern municipalities, the struggle for civil rights continued to play itself out in numerous electoral contests for town councils, county commissions, and state legislative office and in the debates over measures in those and comparable bodies. In that sense, the death of the civil rights movement has been greatly exaggerated. While the national movement’s influence was being curtailed, at this local level the movement remained as significant as ever. It is just that, with reenfranchisement and, frequently, after court-ordered redistricting, direct action took on a less recognizable, more ordinarily American form.[64]

Apparently, Southern black activists were just as focused on local concerns as the heroic drama; and, as national emotions ebbed, they turned to more practical political pursuits in their own communities.[65]

Thus the pertinent line of inquiry, as we reconsider these aspects of Southern history, is a combination of intriguing unknowns—“who, what, where, when, how, and why”—about regional transformation in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Did a few liberal Davids heroically slay the racist Goliaths? What major battles signaled the triumph of good over evil? How do we account for significant change in Southern politics considering regional history and the still-tense environment of white-versus-black?

As in many historical quandaries, the explanatory reality perhaps was ordinary politics—somehow accommodating both white culture and black interests—rather than mythical conflict and glorious conquest (or inglorious defeat).

The Unnoted Emergence of Stealthy Leaders and Politics

New South governors, civil rights activists, federal officials, naïve liberals, right-wing segregationists, lawyers, journalists, academics, rabble-rousers, shysters, and numerous other types dominated the regional landscape of the post-civil rights period. But we think that low-profile leaders and their moderate politicking may provide an important, heretofore missing part of the broad story of Southern history.

As discussed in the previous section, we detected throughout numerous accounts of Southern community struggles (both during the civil rights movement and afterwards), an interesting developmental pattern: less heroic drama, less villainous resistance, and more conventional politics. Furthermore, our examination of numerous locales suggests that this politics worked best when pursued by quiet, practical, biracial leaders.

Thus we hypothesize that many leaders and citizens of both races, who had learned valuable lessons through the traumatic days of the 1950s and 1960s, adopted new ideas and changed their ways to accommodate racial realities. One reality, to reiterate, was a splintered, uncertain white populace. “Some white Southerners attested to liberating experiences that forever altered their racial attitudes and behavior. Others found new ways to resist racial equality. Many more clung to any sense of normalcy they could salvage, at times willfully ignorant of the tumult around them.”[66] Some were rock-throwers and liberals; but “the vast group in the middle were left out of the story.”[67] Another reality was black practicality. The real movement was “not moralistic melodrama but politics.”[68] Black politics centered on real issues in city councils, county commissions, and state legislatures; direct action in those forums and times took on a “more ordinarily American form.”[69]

Thus, an emerging Southern leadership carefully attended to specific, localized demands of the black movement without unduly antagonizing divided white society. This proved to be an effective community strategy, at least in some areas, in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights revolution. We believe these experiences laid the groundwork for routine, essential functions of campaigning and governing throughout the region during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

The “missing” aspect of this piece of the puzzle, of course, was by design. We are talking here mainly about relatively uncelebrated politicians, not the famous New South governors and other prominent officials who played on the large stage of national attention. Most astute Southern politicians, for obvious reasons, did everything they could back then to keep their biracial activities out of the headlines; in ensuing years, there seemed to be an informal code of silence among all participants in these interactions.