UNC Press - Defending White Democracy

264 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 9 illus., notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN 978-0-8078-3513-5

Published: November 2011

The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965

After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. Journalists profiled the rise of a segregationist movement committed to preserving the "southern way of life" through a campaign of massive resistance. In Defending White Democracy, Jason Morgan Ward reconsiders the origins of this white resistance, arguing that southern conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, in the era before World War II, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South.

As Ward shows, years before "segregationist" became a badge of honor for civil rights opponents, many white southerners resisted racial change at every turn--launching a preemptive campaign aimed at preserving a social order that they saw as under siege. By the time of the Brown decision, segregationists had amassed an arsenal of tested tactics and arguments to deploy against the civil rights movement in the coming battles. Connecting the racial controversies of the New Deal era to the more familiar confrontations of the 1950s and 1960s, Ward uncovers a parallel history of segregationist opposition that mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement and raises troubling questions about the enduring influence of segregation's defenders.

About the Author

Jason Morgan Ward is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University.

Reviews

"With all the talk in recent years about the long civil rights movement, we now have an essential corollary to that enterprise--a study of the civil rights countermovement that pushes back into the decades before the massive resistance era. Ward provides an elegant and incisive examination of the forces that shaped white reaction in this critical period in the political life of the South and the nation."
--Joseph Crespino, Emory University, author of In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution

"Although white opposition to the modern civil rights movement has often been characterized as a 'backlash' that was purely reactive in its origins and crudely reactionary in its aims, Jason Ward ably demonstrates that southern whites worked to create new and innovative forms of resistance decades before the postwar struggle over segregation."
--Kevin M. Kruse, Princeton University, author of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism