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As will be elaborated in a review of research and literature, conventional coverage of Southern politics and history has been dominated by the heroic drama and subsequent related developments during the latter half of the past century. There has been scant attention to white Southern politicians and their biracial activities among many sweeping generalizations about change in the South.

Of course, our subjects are not the only whites who attempted biracial politics in this region; other scholars have documented such service throughout Southern history. But most of the earlier research has depicted isolated, individualized struggle among heroes and villains; there has been little theorizing or documentation of widespread routine endeavor among white politicians that might be characterized as a positive movement of societal consequence.[1]

Therefore, we will examine these unheralded politicos and their hushed role within the peculiar politics of Southern history. We think that understanding their role in Southern history will help us chart a positive course for the present and future. We also hope that figuring out how these leaders promoted racial progress in their racially divided society can prove constructive for the broader American system which is beset with similar challenges.

First, however, we want to define our unconventional theoretical construct—“Stealth Reconstruction”—and note the controversial nature of our project.

“Stealth Reconstruction”

We chose the title—“Stealth Reconstruction”—because it seems an intriguing and logical approach for studying these overlooked leaders and their service in Southern and national history. Also, our main concept—“stealth politics”—is simply apt, evocative wording for the “quiet, practical, biracial politics” that challenged and changed the traditional ways of Southern political life during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. We will elaborate pertinent style and substance in later sections, but we want to specify upfront what we’re talking about when we say “stealth” and “reconstruction.”

We are aware that the use of “stealth” terminology may strike some as a strange characterization of “quiet, practical, biracial politics.” However, the term and the associated language of stealthness, stealthful, stealthy, stealthily, etc., accurately conveys our new theoretical proposition.

The reader can get a quick handle on our central concept by running a computerized search of cyberspace, which specifically defines “stealth” as “a U.S. Air Force project involving a range of technologies, with the purpose of developing aircraft that are difficult to detect by sight, sound, radar, and infrared energy.”[2] More general definitions include: “not openly acknowledged”; “secret, clandestine, or surreptitious procedure”; and “marked by acting with quiet, caution, and ways intended to avoid notice.” All these expressions are appropriate analogies or references to certain aspects of stealthness.

For our purposes, we pitch stealth leadership and politics as a calculated, constructive mixture of quietness and endeavor regarding racial challenges and changes of that period. Of course, we like to think of stealth in positive terms; however, it often involved actions of less-inspired politicking.

We define our version of “reconstruction” as addressing traditional challenges and fundamentally changing Southern politics into a normalized system without legalized white supremacy and racial segregation. Race and racism are still problematic in the region, but there’s no longer a systemic “peculiarity” for perversity and contortion.

Those familiar with American history will understand that our idea is a fitting follow-up to earlier, more dramatic attempts of outsiders to reconstruct Southern regional culture. The “Southern way of life” had developed as a massive, hardened, resistant system of totalitarian white supremacy and separation of the races (except for limited interactions of necessity and personal inclination) enduring several centuries, civil war, and the civil rights revolution.

Quick review of the post-Civil War experience provides valuable background for our concept. In the federal government’s experience in the defeated South can be found instructive lessons about the difficulties of attempting fundamental change in a resistant, alien society. After more than a decade of “reconstructed” public institutions—enforced through military occupation—the federal government cut a deal with insurgent resistors and withdrew.

In much the same manner as over a century ago, the Second Reconstruction[3] of the 1950s and 1960s—combining forces of the federal government and civil rights legions—assailed regionally entrenched white supremacy and segregation with great fanfare and significant success. However, the movement seemed to stagnate in the late 1960s, reflecting the reality that transformational reconstruction required more than legal pressure and celebrated heroism. We contend that further evolution required new-style leadership within the resistant establishment of the native society.

Therefore, we consider “stealth reconstruction” an interesting and appropriate analogy for studying and explaining the South of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

An Unconventional and Controversial Thesis

We acknowledge that our idea of “stealth reconstruction” is both different and controversial; it clearly challenges the focus, method, and substance of mainstream political science and historical analysis.

Our challenge is best illustrated by examining one of the most celebrated and comprehensive analyses of reconstructive politics during the past few decades—Richard M. Valelly’s The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement . Valelly’s book—which earned the Ralph J. Bunche award (American Political Science Association) and the V. O. Key Jr., award (Southern Political Science Association)—is a prime case of outstanding scholarship which nevertheless might benefit from our research.

In a unique historical/institutional/political analysis, Valelly compared the two reconstructive endeavors in America’s experience. He showed that the “relative success” of the Second Reconstruction was due to a timely combination of national institutions and local political pressure. Valelly concluded that New Deal Democrats, federal judges, and black Southerners of the twentieth century forced the South into a more normal political environment, fostered black inclusion, and helped rebuild the Southern Democrats as a biracial party. Furthermore, he said, expansion and extension of the Voting Rights Act stabilized those gains in the latter decades of the century.

By the year 2001, the states of Mississippi and Alabama combined had more African American elected officials, 1,628, than the entire United States had had in 1970. Black office-holding was indeed widespread in the South. Black voting, too, was routine. Southern governments’ fiscal allocations for such things as hospitals, libraries, roads, and jobs, responded to the renewal of black suffrage and office-holding.

Glaring problems have emerged, to be sure . . . . Still, as the twenty-first century began the second reconstruction was a thriving concern. It had produced a well-developed, biracial public sphere that was now a fairly normal part of U.S. political life.[4]

Valelly’s book is a broad, powerful, valid, and persuasive analysis. With due respect, however, we fault his research for excluding critical people and actions—our quiet, practical politicians and their biracial politics—in the story of Southern change during the post-movement era. He employed a limited set of institutions/dynamics as change agents; he fixed on black voting/black office-holding as the narrow, singular definition of biracial progress; and apparently he didn’t talk—or didn’t talk candidly—with many Southern white politicians and black activists. He thus missed a developing indigenous phenomenon of biracial politics during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. He failed to recognize or report that during those difficult times some elected officials of one race began to represent constituents of another race. While it was often a strained relationship, these white politicians and black activists helped significantly in “reconstructing” the South.

Valelly may or may not have been aware of such politicking, but if he was it is clear that he did not consider these relationships of any theoretical or constructive consequence. We can find no serious discussion of positive white-black transaction in his chapters on post-movement developments. The only pertinent reference is disparaging speculation about the possibility of “an unhealthy relationship between black voters and paternalistic white politicians doling out crumbs of public largesse to their clients.”[5] This dismissive, offhand remark fails to convey the important role of biracial political relationships during this critical period, leaving us with an incomplete story of Southern reconstruction in the past half-century. Just as importantly, it leaves us to begin the twenty-first century with a flawed comprehension of our racial legacy.

Unfortunately, this tonal deficiency is standard practice in the conventional literature, a situation which we consider unacceptable at this stage of our academic disciplines. It is time to heed the advice of Sokol, Eagles, Feldman, Scher, and Barker/Jones/Tate about the focus, method, and substantive analysis of Southern politics and history. Thus we offer our unconventional, controversial analysis. We argue that our stealth leaders forsook the region’s historic race-game for a variety of personal and political reasons. They tried to address minority black interests, without antagonizing the white majority, in their electoral campaigns and public service. It took a risktaking yet disciplined and committed politician and cooperative allies to attempt the personal and political venture of bridging the Southern racial divide. In an almost impossible time and environment, our reconstruction crew provided such leadership, working pretty much alone, with necessarily quiet purpose, helping their areas deal with historic problems and working to build a new, viable democratic politics. In doing so, they helped end racist vestiges of Old South Democracy, they helped moderate the tone of regional public discourse, and they collectively and substantially contributed to the normalization of Southern politics.

Of course, the very idea of stealth reconstruction, along with certain expressions and references, may offend some readers. Some likely will object to our focus on white politicians; some may complain that stealth politics was no more than unprincipled compromise; and some could assert that the South has not attained their broad, bold vision of progressive society. However, our conception of stealth leadership, politics, and reconstruction is a realistic, constructive amendment to Southern history. We do not claim that we have found the single most important or best agent and course of change; but we think that our stealth alliances represent much more than flaccid, irrelevant, opportunistic accommodation.

To generalize about our new perspective, then, we envision “stealth reconstruction” to incorporate quiet, practical, biracial leaders, their individualized practice of new-Southern political ways, and fundamental change during a particularly interesting period in this region of the country. Stealth reconstruction was a transitional adjustment to an evolving civil rights struggle, and it assisted in the riddance of stubborn racial legacies and the relative moderation and normalization of the Southern political system during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

We, the authors, have personally practiced stealth politics in our political careers; now we are exploring the nature of this phenomenon and its ramifications for Southern politics of that period. At the least, we are confident that our new perspective and study will provide a useful supplement to the conventional version of heroic history. More importantly, we hope that our work will encourage positive debate about the future of democratic representation in the South and America.

Our Theoretical Proposition about Stealth Leadership

We believe that amid all the heroic history of that time, there is a fascinating and useful story of “stealth leadership,” “stealth politics,” and “stealth reconstruction”—a story generally untold and unknown except among the reconstructing participants themselves.

Our proposition is that some leaders quietly broke with Old South ways during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; we contend that these white officials, in concert with black activists, helped moderate and restructure the Southern political system in quiet biracial practicality. This stealthy white-black coalition’s distinctive working style, skills, and relationships contributed to changing the nature, players, rules, issues, and outcomes of the traditional political game. They calmed Southern political discourse; and they assisted greatly in moving campaigns and governance in positive directions.

In developing our theoretical proposition for use throughout this manuscript, we conceptualized stealth leadership and politics according to the following model.

A Conceptual Model of Stealth Leadership and Politics

Our model defines stealthness—in purely analytical terms—to include Southern white elected officials who traversed five steps, or checkpoints, of stealth service during that period. These stealth leaders: (1) served in white majority areas with significant numbers of black constituents, (2) demonstrated personal orientations toward quiet, practical, biracial politics, (3) successfully waged quiet, practical, biracial electoral campaigns, (4) effectively provided quiet, practical, biracial public service, and (5) substantially helped change the Southern system of elections and governance in moderate-to-progressive direction.

Table 1 (see next page) illustrates our conceptual model by comparing stealth leaders and traditional Southern politicians. It includes the characteristic elements of stealthness, presents each element as a cumulative step in the stealth process, and generally conveys the systemic nature and function of stealth leadership, politics, and reconstruction.

Obviously, this chart is an oversimplified depiction. By design, the model states polar examples of traditionalism and stealthness, whereas actual service was of varied mixtures and degrees. It is difficult to assess real leadership precisely in such terms. Nevertheless, the conceptual model is valuable as a theoretical construct because it neatly portrays our notion that some leaders pursued that new course of politics. Also, the model provides a framework for original research exploring the validity and broader applicability of the stealth thesis. Accordingly, we will study various politicians from that era—through structured examination of settings, orientations, campaigns, service, and impact—and the results will be presented in the second half of this book.

Before starting those examinations, however, we must further define these special leaders and take a look at the “race game” in which they performed their specialized service.

Table 1

Conceptual Model of Stealthness Versus Traditional Southern Politics

Traditional		Stealth
Politician		Leader
	1.
Served in a variety	POLITICAL	Served in majority
of white-black	SETTING	white areas with significant
constituencies.		black populations.
	2.
Evidenced acceptance	PERSONAL	Evidenced sentiment
of the historical system	ORIENTATIONS	and/or plans
of white supremacy		for quiet, practical,
and racial segregation		biracial change
in southern politics.		in southern politics.
	3.
Emphasized conservative	ELECTORAL	Emphasized communitarian
messages and openly	CAMPAIGNS	messages and discreet
segregated campaigns		dual campaigns to sustain
to maximize white support		sufficient white support
while ignoring		while cautiously addressing
or manipulating blacks.		black interests
	4.
Promoted conservative	PUBLIC	Promoted moderate policies,
policies, segregated operations,	SERVICE	biracialized operations and,
and racialized services		deracialized services that
that substantially reflected		reflected substantially fairer
discriminatory governance.		and more equitable governance.
	5.
Individually continued	SYSTEMIC	Incrementally helped
the traditional practice	IMPACT	change the nature
of Old South politics.		of southern politics.

The Historical Necessity for Practical Political Action

Again, a major plank of our thesis is the premise that progress beyond the heroic drama required practical leaders who might attempt a new biracial Southern politics. As we have already noted, the dramatic struggle between heroes and villains had so divided and traumatized Southern politics that our hypothesized reconstruction could come only when those heroes and villains yielded the historical stage to less confrontational types and times.

In fact, the broader environment for sweeping transformation of the South altered substantially and adversely. Radical ideas and actions of black unrest had spread nationally, leading many Americans and the federal government to temper their feelings about the civil rights movement.

President Lyndon Johnson and Congress felt that legal victories—such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964—had effectively addressed the situation and that further aggressive actions from the federal government or from blacks themselves might be counterproductive. As King biographer David J. Garrow noted in Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

The president used the signing ceremony not only to congratulate those who had contributed to the passage of one of the legislative milestones in modern American history, but also to caution the black leaders about how they should greet this new achievement. After the public ceremony, the president spoke in private with King, Wilkins, Whitney Young, and other black representatives. He told them that there had to be “an understanding of the fact that the rights Negroes possessed could now be secured by law, making demonstrations unnecessary and possibly even self-defeating.” Johnson suggested they would be self-defeating for the movement, but most of those in attendance, King included, knew that the president’s real fear was that protests would play into the hands of Republican candidates seeking to convince fearful whites that someone other than Lyndon Johnson should be in the White House to preserve public order throughout America.[6]

In When the Marching Stopped: The Politics of Civil Rights Regulatory Agencies, Hanes Walton Jr. studied regulatory implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and found that subsequent enforcement slowed considerably in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations. Walton found that the federal government spent only 15 percent of its civil rights budget on investigating complaints of discrimination and enforcing the law regarding the nondiscriminatory use of federal funds.[7]

As the heroic drama began to experience these adversities and other tensions, Dr. King realized that the movement had to revitalize and refocus itself in a more pragmatic manner. In 1967, he spoke of the necessity for practical political action both in his final presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference[8] and in his last book before being assassinated in Memphis.[9]

In the SCLC speech on August 17, 1967, Dr. King attempted to reorient his followers from moral and legal concerns to the political task of integrating blacks into American life. First, King proudly hailed the inspiring accomplishments of the heroic drama:

. . . when our organization was formed ten years ago, racial segregation was still a structured part of the architecture of Southern society . . . all too many Negroes were still harried by day and haunted by night by a corroding sense of fear and a nagging sense of nobody-ness.

But things are different now. In assault after assault, we caused the sagging walls of segregation to come tumbling down. This is an accomplishment whose consequences are deeply felt by every Southern Negro in his daily life . . .

But in spite of a decade of significant progress, the problem is far from solved. The deep rumbling of discontent in our cities is indicative of the fact that the plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower.[10]

King then called for a strategic shift toward the everyday realities of political power and action:

Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often we have problems with power. But there is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.

You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love . . .

Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic . . .

This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible.[11]

In his final book, expanding that discussion, Dr. King talked about new strategies and tactics for real political power. In addition to promoting the election of black officials, he advocated alliances with responsive white politicians, and he spoke specifically about the changing nature of such relationships and Southern politics in those days:

A primary Negro political goal in the South is the elimination of racism as an electoral issue. No objective observer can fail to see that even with a half-finished campaign to enfranchise Negroes some profound changes have already occurred. For a number of years there were de facto alliances in some states in which Negroes voted for the same candidate as whites because he had shifted from a racist to a moderate position, even though he did not articulate an appeal for Negro votes. In recent years, the transformation has accelerated, and many white candidates have entered alliances publicly. As they perceived that the Negro vote was becoming a substantial and permanent factor, they could not remain aloof from it. More and more, competition will develop among white political forces for such a significant bloc of votes, and a monolithic white unity based on racism will no longer be possible.[12]

As King said, the purpose of his new political plan was not simply to increase African American electoral influence, but to develop “a strong voice that is heard in the smoke-filled back rooms where party debating and bargaining proceed.”[13] Furthermore, he warned, the civil rights community would have to deal with established white power structures without petty outbursts about selling-out:

Too often a genuine achievement has been falsely condemned as spurious and useless, and a victory has been turned into disheartening defeat for the less informed. Our enemies will adequately deflate our accomplishments; we need not serve them as eager volunteers.[14]

King’s emphasis on practical alliances was echoed and elaborated, with an emphasis on biracial cooperation, by sociologist Chandler Davidson in Biracial Politics: Conflict and Coalition in the Metropolitan South. Davidson, one of the most engaged and prolific patrons of black voting rights over the past half century, proposed a new “Southern Strategy” of black-white coalition as an alternative to both conventional politics and the black separatism being preached by some in the 1960s.

Davidson dismissed normal political action as the old Southern strategy, and he said the ultimate costs of black separatism outweighed the benefits. Davidson attempted to show that blacks and whites had similar societal aspirations, that such an approach would not compromise the interests of blacks, and that there was considerable foundation for a biracial, working-class movement. “If one accepts our earlier thesis, therefore, that justice for blacks remains ahead of us in the indefinite future, then the option of class-based coalition politics in the South and in the rest of the nation is the one most likely to achieve success.”[15]

While a South-wide movement may have been impractical, Davidson noted, there were examples and clear prospects for localized success in coming years.

Blacks, most of whom still favor working through “the system,” have cooperated with whites in many different situations—formal electoral politics, union organizing activities, public demonstrations, community action groups, and within educational settings. Usually only a minority of whites have been willing to cooperate. But in many situations, a minority of whites combined with a majority of blacks is sufficient to provide a decisive force for change. While there are very few political units in the South where blacks constitute a majority (102 counties out of of more than a thousand in 1970), for example), there are numerous units where a unified black population combined with 30 percent of the whites constitute an effective majority.[16]

Davidson insightfully foresaw the developing, historical necessity for biracial politics, but his recommendations, reflecting research during the late 1960s and political developments of the early 1970s, relied on questionable strategies, tactics, and agents of change. He insisted that the coalition would have to be a movement of class-based radicalism, significantly departing from elitist liberalism. He incorporated into his plan a combination of strikes, political rallies, disruption, and harassment of corporate and governmental routine, and above all, grassroots education and propaganda.[17] He included lower-income whites and organized labor as key class partners, and he specifically targeted middle and upper-class progressives—“university people, ‘whistle blowers’ within the white-collar institutions, the traditional racial liberals, the growing middle-income supporters of tenants unions, the largely middle-class feminists, and the equally middle-class peace groups, environmentalists, and other liberal-radical reformers.”[18]

What Davidson failed to envision (and what King never lived to see) was the elusive, limited, but requisite capacity of real-world politics in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Direct, radical, coalitional action in a thousand different places—even when buttressed with voting rights laws and court decrees and all the other allies of progressive change—would likely fall short unless the movement engaged a special breed of political leaders/activists with stylistic skills and substantive agendas throughout the Southern region.

In effect, King’s inspirational ideas and Davidson’s empirical notions sorely needed “practical men of action” as described— gender-insensitively—by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. We don’t want to digress needlessly, but Hoffer’s classic essay adds solid theoretical foundation for our proposition about stealth politics.

What the classification attempts to suggest is that the readying of the ground for a mass movement is done best by men whose chief claim to excellence is their skill in the use of the spoken or written word; that the hatching of an actual movement requires the temperament and the talents of the fanatic; and that the final consolidation of the movement is largely the work of practical men of action. . .[19]

It is usually an advantage to a movement, and perhaps a prerequisite for its endurance, that these roles should be played by different men succeeding each other as conditions require.[20]

We’ll skip through Hoffer’s polemic against fanaticism and focus on the language pertinent to our thesis. The part of the essay that interests us is his assertion about the role of “practical men of action,” whose appearance represents the end of the dynamic phase and the beginning of a working new order. In fact, Hoffer claimed, “only the entrance of a practical man of action can save the achievements of the movement.”[21] Men of thought, he continued, don’t work well together, but camaraderie is an easy, indispensable, unifying agent for men of action. Among their many practical motivations, according to Hoffer, these operatives are interested in furthering their own careers as well as institutionalizing the movement; their tactics, while less than revolutionary, are often functionally successful.[22] It is difficult to draw from King’s call to action, Davidson’s insistence on biracial coalitions, and Hoffer’s provocative essay any specific directives for stealth politics. However, we think that their discussions about “strategy for change,” “cooperative majorities,” and “practical men of action” provide a particularly appropriate foundation for our thesis about stealth leaders, politics, and reconstruction. Practical men and women of both races would assume critical importance in strategically and cooperatively consolidating Southern change during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

A huge, vibrant body of literature attests to the more heroic actions of celebrated persons in the movement. However, we are interested in those quiet, practical, biracial leaders who collectively played a timely and similarly vital role. Unfortunately, history records virtually nothing about their backgrounds, their attitudes, and their activities. Therefore they are our focus, and in this project we will define and document their stealthy role in the transformation of Southern politics in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Preliminary Testimony to the Reality of Stealthness

Stealthness can be viewed as having positively addressed black issues and concerns, most commonly without pronounced intent or obvious plan, and in a way that avoided unduly antagonizing the white majority. Certainly, it would be easy to deny stealthness or to label this element of Southern politics as opportunistic pandering or ideological deception or cowardly hiding from the electorate. Stealth leaders, as a group, clearly avoided exposure. They were more progressive than conservative politicians in their region, and they were less progressive than liberal politicians from other parts of the country. They have been criticized from the right and from the left as “closet this” or “closet that.” In truth, they can most accurately be described as practical, moderate leaders politicking in a society still burdened with vestiges of segregation.

As preliminary testimony to this phenomenon, coauthor and former public official Glen Browder describes his stealth politics in simple, retrospective terms:

I got into politics because I was concerned about American democracy. I knew that in order to pursue my personal democratic interests I had to be an effective, responsive, and responsible public official in terms of broad concerns of importance to my base white constituency and to those of the black minority. So, over the course of my career, I publicly concentrated on political reform, fiscal responsibility, and national security issues. At the same time, I diligently but less-publicly focused on race and racism. I worked very hard and quietly to secure enough black support to get elected in majority-white areas; I sincerely tried to be fair, moderate, and progressive in my politics; and I didn’t talk much publicly about any of this stuff.

More direct are the remarks of Dr. Joe L. Reed, one of the most important black leaders in Alabama during the past half-century. Reed has provided leadership during the post-heroic period as a Montgomery city councilman, executive chairman of the Alabama Democratic Conference, vice chair of the Alabama State Democratic Executive Committee, and associate executive secretary of the Alabama Education Association. More pertinently, he has been a premier architect of what we have labeled stealth politics; when necessary, he has worked quietly and practically with Browder, U.S. Senator Howell Heflin, and countless other white political leaders over the past several decades. Reed passionately stated the history, reality, and logic of stealthness in an in-depth discussion in Montgomery.

We absolutely did play stealth politics! Throughout history, and especially in the days following the civil rights movement, we worked quietly with white friends. That quiet politics of accommodation was the only way we could accomplish anything during those times. You sure couldn’t go to the top of the mountain and tell everything you knew and what you were doing with white politicians. There were some of them that we wanted to give awards to but we never could because it would have killed them if it got out about what they were doing for blacks.[23]

Equally corroborative are the words of Dr. Richard Arrington Jr., who, along with Reed, has played a dominant role in Alabama political history of the past half-century. Arrington was the first African American mayor of Birmingham, where he presided from 1979 to 1999. He is generally credited with founding the powerful Jefferson County Citizens Coalition and he played a lead role in creating the Alabama New South Coalition, which now rivals the Alabama Democratic Conference in state politics. Arrington said that stealth politics worked hand-in-hand with the civil rights movement.

I find the characterization of “Stealth Reconstruction” provocative, informative, and realistic. And I agree that quiet, effective, biracial cooperation was a cornerstone of much of the heralded and hard-won racial transitions in Southern attitudes and politics. Without it, the courageous and well-recorded acts of the modern civil rights movement would have had a much more difficult course. In fact, my own political participation was grounded in stealth politics as much as in the movement. I can think of numerous important people—white and black working together—who quietly laid foundations for my career and changes in our area. I doubt that they knew at the time just how productive and far-reaching their stealthy actions were for biracial progress in the South.[24]

Without doubt, the most compelling witness to the stealth concept is storied civil rights attorney Fred Gray of Tuskegee, Alabama. Gray’s role in the civil rights movement stretches beyond Alabama, to broader Southern politics, and even to the core of American democracy. He represented Mrs. Rosa Parks in integrating Montgomery City buses; he was the first civil rights lawyer for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; he litigated representational discrimination through Gomillion v. Lightfoot; he successfully challenged Alabama governors John Patterson and George Wallace and various state agencies on important civil rights issues; he fought the United States government for justice for the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study; he was one of the first African American legislators in Alabama since Reconstruction; and he was the moving force in establishing the Tuskegee Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center. A mild-talking but determined civil rights champion who is still active, Gray adds unimpeachable testimony to the stealth thesis:

Yes, the thesis is valid and any research that can be presented will do a good service for our understanding of Southern politics and history. The civil rights movement began long before the 1950s and extended beyond the 1960s, and a lot of people don’t realize that it took many forms—not just big legal cases and dramatic protests against segregated buses, schools, and facilities. Most white politicians and black leaders didn’t even talk to each other during the 1970s, so those of us who could work together did some things quietly and in back rooms. I fought in the courts for most of my life, but a lot of good things happened, legislatively and otherwise, through this kind of politicking among practical politicians.[25]

We will hear much more “stealth talk” from other politicians and activists throughout this book.

The Practitioners of Stealth Leadership

We contend that the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s produced practical political leaders and activist allies like Browder, Reed, Arrington, and Gray who—working quietly, independently, at various levels throughout the region—sometimes changed the nature, rules, players, issues, and outcomes of the Southern political game.

More specifically, we propose that many Southern white leaders successfully combined objective and subjective elements of stealth politics in public service. In the first place, they got elected in majority-white districts with significant black constituencies. Secondly, they personally engaged in biracial politics and demonstrated substantial support for minority interests in their public service. Finally, throughout these processes, they functionally juggled the racial realities of Southern society. In sum, we envision leaders who possessed valuable perspectives and skills, who quietly and effectively worked with community activists, partisans, and miscellaneous operatives of all persuasions, and, who, collectively, helped reconstruct campaigns and governance in the South.

Of course, there are problems in generalizing about all public officials of that era and in that area. Clearly, Southern politicians did not decide in mass to practice a new, more progressive version of Southern politics. Many simply continued as traditional politicians, or switched parties.

Even among reconstructive leaders, there was tremendous diversity. Although virtually all were Democrats, they ranged ideologically from very conservative to moderate to relatively liberal; and they displayed varying degrees of caution or brashness in their racial politics. Some went about their business without outward, obvious design; others purposefully practiced a carefully calculated biracialism. Actually, a few seemed to preach and practice their racial progressivism so openly that it is impossible to label them “stealth politicians.”

So it is hard to articulate a perfect model or draw hard lines among different individuals and representational styles. Nevertheless, we believe that our thesis is an accurate generalization of important developments during that period; and we are confident that stealth politics will prove to be a useful framework for understanding biracial relations in a reconstructing regional system.

For thematic reasons, we exclude from our thesis more prominent historical figures such as President Lyndon Johnson (a Texan whose bold leadership and earthy populism were vital to important civil rights changes in the South), the wave of “New South” officials such as Georgian Jimmy Carter and Arkansan Bill Clinton (who, along with numerous state executives openly championed social change against the conservative current of their white constituents), and confrontational activists such as South Carolinian Jesse Jackson (and many others who took to the streets in their fight against racial discrimination). These leaders generally played on the stage of big issues, to a national audience, and with substantial media celebrity; their service is inappropriate for consideration because it is impossible to dissect their public/private lives in a manner meaningful to our analysis.

Finally, we exclude those Southern politicians who have famously wandered a political maze of racist politics, convenient conversions, and electoral success. Their careers are interesting and sometimes sympathetic and sincere (take the latter years of George Wallace, for example), but we are interested in leaders who fairly consistently pursued the positive politics and philosophy of stealthy biracial leadership.

The ranks of leaders within the scope of our stealth thesis include some prominent players, but we are interested mainly in their private leadership and political style away from the glare of the media, beyond the gilding reach of their public relations machinations. More specifically, we think that reconstructive action likely took place inside their political campaigns and behind closed doors of their public offices, where they employed their personalities, skills, and resources on behalf of their careers and public service, where self-interest, noble principle, and raucous exchange translated into practical politics and moderate/progressive governance.

The Tricky Essence Of Stealth Politics

Earlier, we pitched stealth leadership and politics, simply and briefly, as a calculated, constructive mixture of quietness and endeavor regarding racial challenges and changes of that period. The essence of that mixture was a representational style in which the public official projected a broadly popular and effective public image on conventional, communitarian issues, thus allowing flexibility in dealing constructively with contentious racial issues in a society historically beset with racial problems. Stealth leaders, working with allies in the new black constituency, were able to move Southern politics in relatively progressive directions of responsive service and moderate policy.

The complex and difficult work of these leaders required that they balance their progressive inclinations with the practicalities of Southern political life. Besides struggling with their own personal angst, these key officials and activists often had to deal with the demands of a stubbornly conservative white majority and an increasingly active and liberal black minority in a bitterly polarized or potentially polarizing environment.

Consequently, most of these politicians charted a centrist policy course, diverse relationships, and carefully selected activities in order to deal with their racial problems.

It is also worth noting the varying approaches among our stealth leaders. Some conducted “stealth by design,” i.e., discreet, separate activities structured so as to solicit minority support without fanning fires of resentment among the majority. For example, they sometimes invited and accompanied national black leaders to local black events; but they didn’t put out press releases or hold news conferences about these activities. Others engaged in biracial pursuits without such deftly calculated motives and plans, perhaps inadvertently, unintentionally, simply by chance—or what might be called “stealth by coincidence.” They proceeded on a quiet, practical course with moderated message; and they treated black and white in a sincere manner that mitigated their biracial politicking.

It does not make much sense, of course, to make too big a deal out of the difference between “designed stealth” and “coincidental stealth.” These are simply specific constructs that help us comprehend the broader, theoretical concept of stealth politics; it may be that this distinction is more a matter of personal self-definition than real-world consequence. Every stealth politician was an individualized combination of purposefulness and inadvertence, even without conceptualizing such stylistic considerations. The important thing is that all of these leaders were breaking with the central tradition of Southern history, and they must have understood the value of “quiet” and “practical” politics as they traveled their forward course in “de facto stealthness,” without outward pandering to either of their conflicted racial constituencies. For example, adept stealth politicians—without a lot of articulated theorizing—went to black churches on Sunday and white civic clubs throughout the week, keeping their conversations appropriate for each place; in their public demeanor, they dealt with both majority and minority issues in acceptable, communitarian manner.

As we make clear throughout, the purpose here is not to sanctify stealth leaders; they were politicians of mixed personalities, motives, and actions. Our purpose is to emphasize the difficult essence of stealth politics and the challenge of stealth leadership. Stealthy practitioners were aware that they had to craft a biracial majority for electoral victory. Then, after getting elected, they had to attempt an equally daunting assignment, pursuing moderate to progressive public service, being responsive to all citizens, without unraveling their tenuous and volatile constituency. It was a tricky assignment; that is what politics is about, whether in Selma or San Francisco. The difference back then was that Southern politicking labored under a heavy and perverse hand of black-white history.

Obviously, stealth politics defied moral posturing and dramatic public coordination, and it failed then and now to elicit interest among national media and professional scholars. But this different politicking helped incorporate and implement the usually cited forces of Southern change during the past half-century.

The Mixed Civic Nature of Stealth Reconstruction

As has been noted, this is not a thesis of public magnificence like the heroic civil rights movement.

For the most part, the new breed of Southern political leadership was interested in conventional issues such as national defense, education, agriculture, and their own careers; their stealth politics has to be understood as a civic endeavor within the primacy of broader concerns.

It would be quite a stretch to champion these leaders and their work as heroic or revolutionary—they were, after all, practical political people. There was no common soul or grand collective purpose among our politicians, just their individual political personalities and everyday operations based on a mixture of selfish and unselfish character. Few had been on the front lines or in the march for equality in their areas and states; many nurtured sentiment, but no burning passion, for the heroic drama; most did not enter public life until the 1970s, and when they did, it was not for reasons of racial justice. We’ll not claim for them a place among the icons of the civil rights movement. Instead, we characterize them simply as “stealth politicians” who, variously motivated, helped reconstruct Southern politics.

However, we do view stealthy biracial leadership and politics as a broad civic phenomenon that went beyond the personalized motives and actions of crass politicians. While some leaders contributed to this movement in individualized pursuit of individualized objectives, many others did so for philosophical and purposive reasons related to American democracy. They were as a group relatively progressive Southerners; so we prefer to envision stealth politics as an incremental, conflicted mixture—a purposeful/inadvertent, public/private, personal/interpersonal dynamic—and as an overall positive process whereby some leaders and activists really made things better in everyday life for most Southerners, who were caught in the black-white crossfire of their region’s historical dilemma.

The Inevitable Demise of Stealth Leadership

Ironically, the racial progress of the past several decades wrought the inevitable demise of stealth leadership in the South. These leaders were transformational but transient; in a way, they may have fallen victims of their own success in helping change Southern politics.

In the 1970s, stealth politicians proceeded quietly and practically. The key challenge back then was to deal tactically and tactfully with the mainstream conservative constituency of white voters in the Democratic Party primary—coalitional blacks were just coming of age in the normal political process, and Republicans were no more than a vocal nuisance. Then, in the 1980s, it became possible for stealth leaders to pursue moderate politics more aggressively and successfully. However, these positive, evolving developments simultaneously sowed the seeds of decline for such leadership in the 1990s. As time passed, the large, conservative, white constituency began splitting off and casting its votes elsewhere; blacks became more politically mature, independent, and assertive; and Republicans became more powerful in exposing and defeating stealthy leaders in the general election. Certainly, too, enhanced media coverage and advances in campaigning injected powerful new elements of transparency and volatility into the process, making quiet biracial maneuvering less feasible and effective.

Browder notes, for example, that things changed dramatically between his entry into the political arena in 1982 and his exit in 1996:

When I first ran for office and served in the Alabama legislature, it was relatively easy to please my majority-white constituents, keep my black friends satisfied, and hold the Republicans at bay. But in my last campaign, for the U.S. Senate, nobody was very happy. I know that I changed some over the course of my career, and there’s a big difference between the Alabama House and the U.S. Senate. But much of this was due to the new racial order that made “stealthy” politicking impossible.

The shift from old-style Southern politics to new-order Southern politics undermined a fundamental quality and asset—stealthness—of biracial politics. Thereafter, stealth leaders found their course more demanding and conflicted, and they became increasingly irrelevant in Southern politics. They had helped achieve substantial transformation stealthily, and much more remained to be done; but most of them realized, in appropriate quietness and practicality, that the future belonged to new leaders with different visions and styles in an altered environment of Southern democracy. Stealth leadership and politics were essentially over, in unremarked dissipation, as a new Southern political order signaled the end of stealth reconstruction.

To summarize this part of the theoretical discussion, we believe that the consequence of collective stealth efforts represents an important, distinct, supplementary movement of reconstructive and progressive evolution. Arguably, stealth leaders accomplished Southern change in a way and to an extent that was beyond the reach of federal officials, laws, and troops. While righteous souls and racial ogres dominate the pages of history books, the stealthy reconstructionists helped bring black voters into Southern elections, helped end racist control of the Southern political establishment, helped moderate Southern governance, and, in a roundabout way, helped nudge the South toward a real two-party system.

In offering our proposition, we realize that this thesis asks the reader to reconsider decades of unquestioned truisms about Southern politics and history. Frankly, any honest depiction of the South’s racial past—as we will attempt in the next few pages—poses formidable, legitimate questions regarding our high notions of stealth service.

Stealth Leaders and the Race Game of Southern History

In some ways, the South can claim to be the original, intellectual heart of the “Great Experiment” of American democracy. Even today, many Southerners pride themselves as America’s real and true patriots. However, from the beginning the South steered its own regional course, a distinct culture of white supremacy in an America that at least preached idealistic principles of equality. Historically, the white leaders and people of this region have engaged in a race game of perverse politics designed to provide themselves the blessings of democracy while oppressing, exploiting, and discriminating against their fellow human beings of African origin and heritage. Gaming the system for racial advantage was not the singular, continuous, consuming passion for most Southerners, but slavery warped the Southern political system from the start and race forever lurked in the background and foreground of Southern political life.

The unsavory realities of Southern politics derive from that accursed aspect of the American story. In embracing slavery, this part of the New World launched long-term, systemic developments that would confound its better nature and democratic destiny. The South pursued its dark regional interests in fateful arrangements—and perhaps implicit collusion—with national politicians eager to promote their nationalistic dreams. During the Constitutional period, there was contentious debate over slavery, but the Southern states convinced the founding fathers to accommodate the regional slave economy as part of their entry into the new nation. Slavery endured through decades of fitful argument—adamantly and morally defended on the floor of Congress by John C. Calhoun as “the peculiar institution of the South.”[26] Then, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, white Southerners negotiated an opportunistic new deal with national Democrats that excluded freed blacks from the political process as long as the South delivered total electoral support to the national party in Washington. Even after the Civil War and Reconstruction, states throughout the region continued Old South ways by legally disenfranchising blacks. As Alabama’s constitutional convention president said in 1901, “It is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this state.”[27] Regional white rule continued until the civil rights era, when the national government finally eliminated official sanction of discrimination.

Unfortunately then, throughout most of its history, the South’s leadership and “peculiar” political system have revolved around the unsavory realities of white supremacy and racial segregation. While Southern leaders historically pursued broad issues of national and local import, race usually lurked in the background and routinely intruded into conventional politics.

Within this racial context, we employ the terms “stealth leadership” and “stealth politics” to refer to individual leaders quietly performing biracial political roles for generally positive purposes, and “stealth reconstruction” is an incremental, collective, fundamental victory of civic progress over cynical politics in the broader race game of Southern history.

However, the stealth thesis and terminology can conjure mixed images of politicians and black-white relations; indeed, the very word that we use—“stealth”—evokes shadowy connotations from Southern politics, past and present. Our hypothetical version of stealth leadership is positive, but our designated stealth leaders were practical politicians who politicked in the real world. And in the real world of Southern politics, misdirected stealthness could just as well entail deception, fraud, and abuse of the public trust. And quiet, practical politics, when pursued for unvirtuous purposes, when exacerbated with financial considerations, and when enveloped in an environment of heated, ingrained societal division, could powerfully warp the electoral process and corrode responsive, responsible government.

So there’s no denying that our stealth leaders were ungracefully mired—either in deed or through association or by appearance—in the racial politics of Southern history. We generalize that most Southern leaders—white and black—have played the game of racial politics in some manner and to some degree. Our stealth leaders, awkwardly mired in that game, had to navigate a difficult, politically conflicted course during the era under study. Few ever talked about it, and it’s still not a popular subject of conversation. But the routine pursuit of power, policies, and other political goodies in this region during those times often involved racial considerations. We presume that most of the practitioners did some specific things that they would prefer history not record; that they allied with some people who did unseemly things as a matter of general practice; and that they hung around a political house of ill-repute.

The crucial difference between traditional Southern officials and our designated stealth leaders is that, routine pursuits and career interests aside, (a) traditional politicians readily and openly played the game for racial advantage within a historical environment of white supremacy and segregation, while (b) stealth politicians quietly and deliberatively played the game mainly to improve black-white relations and normalize racial aspects of Southern democracy.

Stealth politicians had to navigate a difficult, sometimes wayward course. Even our case-studied and surveyed leaders—oriented to racial, economic, and social progress—allow that they sometimes struggled with the challenges and compromises dictated in their regionalized calling. As will be evidenced throughout this book, certain aspects of service by public official Browder and his stealth colleagues seem uncomfortably similar to the cynical activities of traditional Southern politicos and new race-gamers. Coauthor Browder notes that since he was a professional political scientist and campaign consultant prior to entering politics, he was better prepared than most for dealing with this part of Southern politics; however, the continuing, constant, almost casual demands of racial politics were increasingly burdensome. He says that an inner-voice nagged him during those times: “I often wondered . . . Am I a ‘good guy’ fighting the right causes? Or am I becoming just another Southern political hack?”

Thus we readily acknowledge the unsavory downside of traditional Southern politics in which our touted stealth politicians were embedded. We hope the reader eventually will agree that, considered within the nature of their situations, these stealthy leaders pursued acceptable compromise between “doing what’s right” and “doing what works” during those historic times.

To conclude this cautionary discussion, we have acknowledged some broad unseemly tendencies and unsavory realities of Southern politics, and we have admitted the sometimes shadowy environs and ways of our stealthy politicians.

However, in our opinion, significant credit goes to those practical political leaders and activists—white and black—who helped restructure Southern elections and governance in moderate, progressive directions. They crafted a more savory and seemly politics, and the South did undergo fundamental political change during that period. Their stealthy service may have been tentative and transient, but during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s these politicians and activists helped close the curtain on the Old South, and they contributed greatly to the more positive aspects of a new system in this century.

An Amendment to the Race Game and Southern History

We present this thesis as a timely and critical amendment to the traditional race game and more recent Southern politics. As pointed out in the introduction, most Americans, and even Southerners themselves, have only a hazy understanding of black-white political relations in this region in response to the civil rights movement. Furthermore, scholars have ignored important realities of quiet, practical, biracial politics in the South during the rest of the twentieth century. As the 2008 presidential campaign so clearly and painfully demonstrated, public misunderstanding, ignorance, and raw sensitivities about the past woefully handicap any attempt to resolve America’s continuing racial dilemma in the twenty-first century. We believe that our research will begin filling this gaping hole in Southern and national political history.

Gerald Johnson, longtime Auburn political scientist and a Browder ally, agrees that the stealth project is a provocative, daunting, but worthy effort.

Following the provision of legal rights for black minorities in the South, what remained, and still remains to some degree in some areas, was and is the implementation of those rights. No doubt, the accommodation of mutual interests through relatively quiet quid pro quo arrangements played a positive role in this process. The attempt, however difficult, modest, and limited, to construct and tell in formal terms this untold part of history is a powerful addition to both the civil rights literature and the literature of Southern politics.[28]

Actually, according to Dr. Johnson, “Stealth Reconstruction” is simply re-conceptualization of an age-old process of accommodating marginal groups for very practical reasons. However, in this case, the accommodations are different in scope because they deal positively with a newly enfranchised set of players—black minorities—in the context of sweeping social, cultural, historic, economic, and political change:

I suspect that members of every community in the South knew about and can tell about some quiet accommodators who helped make things work during that period. But, I further suspect, most of the common talk is about the uglier aspects of the process, not to its contributions to the continuing evolution and development of the civil rights struggle and to Southern politics. Thus, “Stealth Reconstruction” can help us better understand the political history of this region.

Dr. Johnson, who now directs the Capital Survey Research Center in Montgomery, cautions about some sensitive ramifications of historical re-conceptualization; he particularly warns against the depiction of “white-hat” Caucasians supplanting African Americans as the heroes of the civil rights movement. But having stated that concern, he sees this project as an important part of contemporary public dialogue:

I think just the idea that the quiet, accommodating laborer in the vineyard contributed in substantive and substantial ways to the evolution of civil rights and Southern politics gives comfort and encouragement and hope today. The need for such service is as great now, if not greater, because the issues of Southern society are so much more subtle and complex.

Our stealth thesis, then, is an unconventional pronouncement and conceptual model that merits further consideration and investigation. We hope that the candid reflections in this chapter add credence and context to our contention, and in the pages to follow we will provide empirical evidence supporting our theoretical concept.

More specifically, we will address several important questions about stealth leadership, politics, and reconstruction during that era, hoping to raise constructive issues for the future:

1 For openers, a broad, four-part question about stealth leadership in general: Who were these stealth leaders? What did they do? What was the context of their election and service? Were they consciously playing stealth politics? And why did they do it?

2 How did their stealth politics differ from and relate to traditional Southern politics?

3 What, specifically and exactly, did they do, stealthily, in their campaigns and what was the stealthy nature of their public service?

4 How did they balance their stealth politics to appeal to black voters without alienating white constituents?

5 How did their stealth politics pay off in terms of black and white support? And public policy?

6 What were the downsides of stealth politicking?

7 Did these stealth leaders ever feel that they were exploiting black people? Or deceiving white people? And did they ever feel that they were being used—and—abused in the process?

8 What about the black activists—how did they play in this stealth process?

9 Did these stealth leaders and activists actually change Southern politics?

10 Does this stealth phenomenon still work—and what does that tell us about the future of Southern and national politics?

Before dealing with these important questions, however, we need to back up and establish historical background for the Civil Rights Revolution and Stealth Reconstruction.