Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965.

Abstract

More than a decade ago civil rights scholars began to make a case for a “long civil rights movement,” beginning before the 1950s and rooted in the activism and political changes of the New Deal and World War II eras. If we imagine this movement originating in the 1930s and 1940s, we might then reasonably ask: What about the segregationists? How did they respond to this civil rights revolution? Jason Morgan Ward's Defending White Democracy addresses these questions and argues for a parallel “long segregationist movement” that formed two decades prior to the marches, boycotts, and court decisions of the 1950s. In six chapters Ward charts the rise of a segregationist counterrevolution. This movement began in the 1930s with isolated criticisms of New Deal programs. The critical moments, however, came during World War II, with segregationists reacting to evidence and rumors of black protest and activism and an increasing federal presence in the South. By the 1950s, with mounting civil rights protests and the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling against segregated schools, an already established segregationist movement was in transition. Many political elites were replacing an openly racist rhetoric of white supremacy with a toned-down language focused on segregation and on legal and constitutional defenses of Jim Crow. Ward suggests that these changes may have facilitated southern conservatives' entry into a national conservative movement in the post–civil rights era.