New Deal New South by Badger Anthony J.;Cobb James C.;

Author:Badger, Anthony J.;Cobb, James C.; [Badger, Anthony J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

VIII

The Texas-born political scientist V. O. Key had confidently predicted that the collapse of the main institutional supports of conservative power, which duly took place, and the extension of political participation and competition, which also duly took place, would substitute the politics of economics for the politics of race. The forces of southern liberalism would be greatly strengthened and the “have-nots” who lost out in traditional southern politics would at last receive tangible benefits from the distribution of government largesse.

The politics of race did not disappear. The extension of political participation and competition did not in the long-run produce the liberal, class-based, biracial coalition of lower-income blacks and whites that Key expected. Instead, it produced a political system which pitted an all-white Republican Party against a Democratic Party that secured 90 percent of the African American vote but which to win sufficient white support to gain power had to espouse conservative economic policies.54

This polarization, as Numan Bartley rightly asserts, did not come about because in some immutable fashion “the font of southern racism was [always] poor and working-class whites.” It came about because, confronted by the pressure for racial change in the 1950s, conservative leaders in the South were determined to convince ordinary southern whites that segregation could be preserved. White liberal politicians by contrast were paralyzed by their belief that mass white segregationist sentiment was overwhelming. Because their own commitment to racial change was so limited and their awareness of African American demands so second-hand, they could not devise a strategy for gradual racial change that could deliver substantive change to the African Americans who supported them in the 1950s variant of biracial politics.55

African Americans eschewed politics therefore for direct action. The pincer movement of the civil rights movement from below and the federal government from above imposed immediate and rapid racial change on the South. The calm with which the South reacted to these changes gave lie to the dire warnings of the segregationists. It was, of course, lower-income whites who bore the brunt of the physical reality of desegregation on a day-to-day basis in the South and they did not face it in a major way until the late 1960s, when their own economic future was uncertain. Their frustration with a government that imposed racial change and failed to halt cultural change spilled over into a hostility to government intervention in the economic sphere.

The dream of a liberal biracial politics was over.

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