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America today speaks in clear, strong voice and reverent tone about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, the Freedom Riders, and other heroes of the civil rights revolution that rocked the South a half-century ago. Most citizens, when reflecting on the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, proudly cite Brown v. Board of Education as the legal and moral death knell for segregated schools. Some emotionally quote the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act promoting equality in Southern society and elections. A few have actually read “Letter from Birmingham Jail” or have sung “We Shall Overcome.”

Also seared into contemporary America’s collective conscience and consciousness is the memory of the South’s massive resistance to that revolution. Images of Southern white racism are still vivid and often brutal: George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, Bull Connor and his police dogs, ugly crowds at Little Rock, the Birmingham bombings, the Orangeburg Massacre, and Bloody Sunday.

However, America seems to have little sense of how that public struggle among heroes and villains during the 1950s and 1960s actually played into Southern politics during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The trauma of the mid-century civil rights movement has so dominated American public thinking and discourse that subsequent developments pale in comparison with emotional, time-frozen, black-and-white images from the earlier period. Furthermore and ironically, as recent presidential politics has demonstrated, historical sensitivities still constrict our ability to address the continuing racial dilemma in twenty-first century America.

Thus, few people understand that some leaders and activists quietly and biracially translated dramatic confrontation into the relative normalcy of a new political order in the post-movement South. There’s little evidence in the public record attesting to this phenomenon, and knowledgeable participants have held their silence since those early days. In this book, we document this untold story of Southern politics and history.

The Movement: A Common Vision of Heroic Racial Drama

Over the past half century, our national news institutions, journalists, academicians, activists, and other chroniclers have developed a vibrant history of the civil rights movement as a heroic drama. Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and media merchants of all stripes celebrate, popularly and profitably, the moral challenges and courageous actions of that era. The common vision of the movement is a universal morality tale of good and evil, a raw, monolithic struggle, a clash of righteous souls and racial ogres, depicted literally and figuratively in black and white.[1]

George Wallace articulated the dark side of this struggle in a defiant pledge at his Alabama gubernatorial inauguration in 1963:

In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.[2]

Alternatively, perhaps no speech in American history stirred our national emotion more so than Dr. King’s visionary remarks at the Lincoln Memorial a few months later:

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.[3]

Ever since, this stark vision of good-versus-evil has been ingrained in our minds as a psychic national monument. It also has served as permanent pressure on the South to conform to the “Great Experiment” of American democracy.

Now, fast-forwarding to the twenty-first century, we find an interesting situation. Almost half a century after Wallace’s “segregation forever” declaration and the massive resistance of the old days, social scientists increasingly portray a new and different South that reflects real racial progress. Although such claims tend toward overstatement, demographic analysis shows the region diversifying; economic research shows blacks and whites sharing in regional growth; cultural studies show Southerners converging with the rest of the country; and opinion surveys, voting returns, and policy analyses demonstrate the coming of a more normalized, moderated political system.[4]

Most strikingly, of course, substantial biracial support in the South for Barack Obama in 2008 attests to fundamental, systemic change in this region. Race and racism are still vital matters, and much remains to be done, but the South has transformed dramatically over the past half-century.

An Intriguing Issue of Incongruent Political History

Arrival of a new racial order is a time of great interest and speculation; fortunately, too, it presents an opportunity for serious retrospection on the nature and meaning of regional transformation. Such matters are of more than casual consequence for the future of Southern and national democracy.

Our aim in this book, for example, is to pursue an intriguing, consequential question about the past half-century: How did we get from the brutally contentious civil rights movement to the substantial progress of the contemporary South? This would seem an easy task. However, it does not take much time at the library or on the computer to discover that there has been little work on the causes of racial progress of the last few decades. What we can ascertain is piecemeal, oblique, and perplexing.

We find, as has been noted, flourishing statistical depictions of many aspects of the emerging new South, such as shifting social and economic patterns, moderating cultural parameters, the expanding role of African Americans, and rising Republicanism in Southern public life. We find interesting historical and legal narratives—flush with names, dates, and places. There are fascinating anecdotes touching on changed racial interactions. And, frankly, interspersed throughout are periodic reports qualifying our notion of progress, reports that testify to the continuing problem of white-versus-black in this part of the nation. But something important—a general accounting of inside, real-world operations and systemic change—is missing from the conventional story line on racial politics of the last few decades. In particular, nothing in the literature addresses—theoretically, comprehensively, and coherently—the “what” and “how” and “why” of the broad political progress that has occurred since the contested days of the heroic drama.

Obviously, the movement’s heroes deserve full credit for their moral suasion, personal sacrifices, and righteous triumphs in fighting for equal rights and racial justice during the 1950 and 1960s. However, it is highly unlikely that the movement by itself hammered the Old South into progressive submission. In many ways, the days of protest, violence, and forced desegregation were somewhat like the Civil War experience, leaving white Southerners whipped and resentful, and unleashing bad memories and fresh grievances among black Southerners. Furthermore, the ordeal afflicted all with an uncertain, distrustful future. Progressive politicians and civil rights leaders faced formidable obstacles in nurturing biracial relations and racial progress in that environment; their antagonists (including white segregationists and black separatists) were disinterested in partnerships for progress. Consequently, the triumphant heroes constantly struggled against recalcitrant villains, resistant populations, and traditional practices in the Southern states. The Second Reconstruction waned considerably during the late 1960s and early 1970s, again just as had happened with Civil War Reconstruction a century earlier. But, somehow, inexplicably, the monolithic struggle of good-versus-evil morphed into a relatively normalized political system by 2000.

In short, the stark Old South defied rational reconciliation—simply through the heroic drama—into racial progress in the contemporary period. Southern society gradually moderated, and persistent litigation kept pressure on stubborn individuals and institutions. But otherwise there has been little accounting for political developments leading to the new and different South. Thus the nagging retrospective assignment is to square this important incongruity of Southern political history over the past half-century. Or, to slightly restate our intriguing question: “What really happened between then and now?”

We suspect that a variety of theoretical, methodological, and normative factors has underlain the failure to address this aspect of Southern change. Early on, natural fixation on the movement focused scholarly eyes too subjectively and narrowly on that mystic vision of good versus evil, heroes versus villains, and blacks versus whites to consider such mundane possibilities. In ensuing years, research was probably limited to phenomena that could be readily observed, empirically measured, and graphically presented.

Whatever the reasons, we see little in the way of causal analysis for broad racial progress, and we think that we have found and can document an important missing piece of this puzzle of Southern political history.

The Historic Role of Quiet, Practical, Biracial Politics . . .

While the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s is a celebrated heroic drama, we believe there is an intriguing subplot of hushed, yet positive political endeavor in the South’s history of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

We contend that Southern politics was significantly moderated during the closing decades of the twentieth century, and that it happened through the relatively progressive but quiet, somewhat secretive, sometimes uncomfortable, oftentimes less than noble, biracial service of practical politicians and activists. We believe that this moderating trend can be discerned in the raw racial conflicts, trade-offs, alliances, and transactions of “real politics”—both out front and behind the scenes—that has underlain the Southern race game for the past half-century.

By the 1970s, as the dramatic struggle cooled, some Southern leaders—doing what politicians do best—began accommodating new racial realities into routine campaigning and governing. These leaders were not much different from other politicians in their social origins and general orientations; in most ways they reflected traditional Southern politics. They were mainly interested in national defense, agriculture, the economy, building schools, and paving roads—and their own careers. In fact, their moderation coincided rather conveniently with the pressures of black voters, civil rights activists, and court litigation.

Nevertheless, relatively free from constraints of personally heroic or personally villainous history, these officials and their new allies went about the business of incorporating black and white voters, activists, and organizations into their election campaigns, and they worked together to articulate moderate policies and provide more equitable public services to both black and white constituencies. At first slowly and cautiously, with measured success, then increasingly as the situation allowed, they quietly helped move things forward without the drama and trauma of the preceding two decades.

A significant key to Southern change, then, was “stealthness,” the quiet, practical, biracial politics practiced by many Southern white public officials and black allies during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The essence of their varied service is that they deftly attempted racial progress in a society wrought with racial tension. Or, to put it in political terms, they purposely and positively addressed black issues, without unduly antagonizing the white majority, while pursuing normal missions and careers as Southern public officials.

Most of these white politicos never considered themselves civil rights leaders, and their quiet endeavor has never been considered part of the civil rights movement; but, in individualistic practice and in alliance with key black activists, they helped implement important elements of the evolving movement’s spirit and agenda in everyday Southern life.

. . . And the Untold Story of “Stealth Reconstruction”

The civil rights movement of the 1950s–’60s challenged and crippled institutions of the Old South. However, the movement, by itself, was unable to overcome the intransigence of the “Southern way of life” during the following decades. That aspect of the assignment inevitably fell to more functional operatives and their service inside “real Southern politics.”

Thus, the heretofore untold truth is that these politicians and their friends—effectively supplementing the movement’s assault on Old South ways—helped accomplish a Southern version of systemic reconstruction with their low-profile yet constructive service from the 1970s to the 1990s. There were no ballyhooed regional summits of white elected officials and black activists, nor any public pronouncements, nor any coordinated agenda, nor any media attention, nor any subsequent documentation by academic scholars. However, the record shows that things changed significantly in those decades; substantial progress was evidenced in local schools, in city halls, in county courthouses, and in state legislatures throughout the South, and even in Washington, D.C.

Of course, this stealthy reconstruction was often under duress, and stubborn racial problems persisted. Moreover, that service proved to be a temporary transition between traditional ways and a different order of the new century. But during those few decades, these leaders comprised a racial evolution that fundamentally and positively helped to reconstruct regional elections and governance.

We do not employ serious theoretical language—terms such as “thesis,” “systemic,” and “reconstruction”—frivolously, and we acknowledge that there has always existed a smattering of isolated mavericks who pricked the traditional culture of their communities with varying styles of surreptitiousness and/or boldness. But we “theorize” that there developed in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s a special sense among many mainstream Southerners of both races that, like it or not, things had to change. Some leaders—white and black—belatedly came up with a better way of dealing with civil rights, the federal government, and their own past.

We posit that these leaders collectively and significantly contributed to the evolution of the civil rights struggle and the reconstruction of Southern politics.

A Timely and Critical Mission

Our project may strike some as a simplistic and needless exercise, particularly at this point in history. However, we think that our “Stealth Reconstruction” project is a timely and critical mission on several counts.

First, we want to recognize a reality of recent Southern political history that has escaped the attention of professional scholars and that now is disappearing into an abyss of ignorance and irrelevancy. This reality needs to be documented before aging participants and witnesses of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s cease their earthly existence.

Our focus on white Southern public officials and their practical biracial leadership during that period is an unusual approach to the study of civil rights in the South, but it will supply new information and perspective about that era. As we have noted, conventional fixation on heroic figures and dramatic aspects of the movement has ignored a significant segment of major players and political developments of the past half-century, and this avoidance has produced an incomplete picture of the fundamentally changing South. As Jason Sokol recently remarked, “The literature on the South during this era privileges the dramatic demonstrations and famous battles of the civil rights movement, often at the expense of analyzing the very realm that those struggles sought to change—Southern life, black as well as white.”[5]

Second, we want to encourage our academic associates to pursue this matter with an open, balanced, inquisitive approach. It may be time, as historian Charles Eagles argued in a survey of the literature, for exploring “new histories” of the civil rights movement, for challenging the established story, and for extending the debate in more balanced, even iconoclastic directions.[6] Historian Glenn Feldman has suggested, furthermore, that his discipline should constrain personal sentiments in future research on Southern history; “Those convictions may make good politics and good social policy, but they do not always make good history.”[7]

Third, we also agree with Richard K. Scher that our discipline—political science—needs to contribute more substantively to the literature on racial politics. In a recent review, Scher recommended that we grapple with race and assess how it impacts on Southern politics in real-world terms instead of as a cold, independent variable for statistical models; “Race is a fundamental element in American politics in exactly the same way V. O. Key saw it as fundamental to Southern politics more than fifty years ago.”[8]

Fourth, perhaps today’s political leaders and journalists might learn something from the biracial functionaries of that era. As our colleagues Lucius J. Barker, Mack Jones, and Katherine Tate observed in their analysis of contemporary racial politics:

. . . we need to know more about the behavior and responsiveness of elected white officials from districts where there are very large and discrete black and minority populations. Conversely, we need to know how black members of Congress deal with the matter of representing white populations in their districts. Given the historical and contemporary context of racial politics and race relations in this country, along with the thorny conceptual issues surrounding political representation more generally, answering this question could prove difficult for any representative, regardless of race or ethnicity. But we suggest that precisely those representatives who are able to overcome such difficulties will do much to improve both race relations and the overall quality of life in this country.[9]

Finally, as democratic citizens, we hope that our work will help America understand Southern history and think seriously about its own challenges of the future. We believe that narrow focus on the noble vision keeps us from addressing persistent aspects of regional and national race problems. The civil rights movement was indeed a noble venture, but time-warped fixation has hindered our understanding of subsequent history and has made us so supersensitive as to impede constructive discussion about race and American democracy.

Recent presidential campaign politics, for example, demonstrates our reverent but dysfunctional temperament about the civil rights movement. The 2008 election suggests that America yearns for transformational dialogue, yet we still experience festering tension and clumsy sensitivities when dealing with the civil rights era within politics.[10] Democrat Barack Obama—the first African American presidential nominee of a major political party—struggled to explain to white voters how black liberation theology conformed to Dr. King’s articulation of a vision deeply rooted in the American dream. There also were testy moments, as when Republican John McCain—who once opposed the Martin Luther King Holiday—glowingly invoked Dr. King’s memory in his pursuit of African American votes. But no incident created a firestorm as volatile as Hillary Clinton’s implication that it took a white politician, Lyndon Johnson, to achieve King’s civil rights agenda. To be precise, candidate Clinton—liberally credentialed spouse of the so-called “first black president”—told a reporter that “it took a president to get it done.”[11] Whatever her intent, the impolitic remark inflamed deep and conflicted emotions about the heroic drama.

Obviously, many white and black Americans are happy to celebrate the civil rights movement in a comfortable context and with fuzzy images from a half-century ago. However, they seem reluctant to scrutinize the conventional story for important realities of those times and lessons for contemporary democracy. Absent such information and insights, strained emotions will continue to disrupt meaningful discourse and racial progress. It is time to accord the heroic drama its proper place in history, time to accurately assess subsequent, realistic, biracial developments, and perhaps then we can advance toward implementation of Dr. King’s dream.

Therefore, in this book, we hope to take a critical step forward in historical interpretation, documentation, and sophisticated awareness of biracial aspects of America’s evolving Great Experiment.

The Stealth Project and Its Thesis

This book is part of a political science project conceived as a biracial approach to our own nagging questions about what really happened racially and practically inside politics in the South after the civil rights movement. In brief, our thesis is one of “Stealth Reconstruction.” While the conventional version of the twentieth century civil rights movement is a compelling heroic drama, we believe that the Southern political system was subsequently reconstructed through the quiet leadership and biracial politics of practical politicians and activists during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Obviously, both white and black elected public officials practiced biracial leadership—i.e., a leader of one race effectively representing constituents of another race—during those decades. Also, it is clear that some African American activists in our stealth relationships were powerful elected officials themselves; many were seasoned veterans of the movement. However, because of the exploratory nature of our thesis (and our own experiences and data resources), this book looks mainly at white elected officials and their special relationships with black activists and the black community in majority white areas. We will incorporate black veterans of the stealth era into a roundtable discussion of our thesis toward the end of the book.

Methodology

As has already been noted, the stealth thesis relies considerably on the authors’ experience, and this book represents an unusual mixture of personal observation, original research, and existing literature.

Our methodology involves creatively thinking about, identifying, and assessing the phenomenon of quiet, practical, biracial politics. The central ideas—“stealth” and “reconstruction”—are used here in a somewhat new and specialized manner. Thus, we will define the terms and explain our planned implementation in a preliminary discussion of regional history and racial representation. Other challenges of our project—especially dealing with sensitive orientations and behaviors of the past—will be addressed as encountered throughout the book. We also must admit, frankly, that some stubborn quandaries of conceptualization and operationalization await resolution in future theory and research.

Our procedural methodology, on the other hand, is simple and direct. We set out to tap otherwise unavailable sources—people and documents—in pursuit of the relatively unexplored phenomenon of stealth leadership and representational politics. We elaborated a thesis and conceptual model based on our own experience, then we constructed a historical overview to place this idea within relevant research and literature. We began to demonstrate the thesis with a case study of Browder’s campaigns and service for evidence about the nature, activities, and impact of his “stealth politics.” We then explored the broader stealth proposition through an unscientific survey among other Southern political leaders of that time. Next we convened an eclectic group of individuals—both black and white—from that era for a virtual roundtable discussion about stealth leadership, politics, and reconstruction. Finally, we related our conclusions to the past, present, and future of Southern politics.

Clearly, some aspects of our thesis, methodology, and results merit refinement; future scholarship should expand the focus of biracial leadership and politics. For example, we have concentrated on white Southern elected officials during this particularly interesting period; much more needs to be addressed in the broader area of biracial politics and American democracy. However, to the best of our knowledge, the stealth project is a groundbreaking endeavor in understanding Southern history.

In the rest of this manuscript, we will (a) elaborate our stealth thesis, (b) present a case study, congressional survey, and roundtable discussion of stealthy leadership, politics, and reconstruction, and (c) consider the ramifications of our findings for the history and future of the South and America.