Race, Sex, Class and the Status Quo Society: Developing Racial, Political and Religious Attitudes in 1940s Alabama

Abstract

The racial unrest that exploded in the 1960s American South and the subsequent political tendencies which have characterized the region did not arise from thin air nor were they unrelated to each other. They actually had deep roots in the region's historical and psychological experience. The 1940s were particularly important in the South's evolution in this regard. Focusing on Alabama, this article explores racial, sexual and political developments in the Deep South during that decade. The state furnished a clear example of what can be called a ‘status quo society’ in America – a society in which conventional definitions of what constituted ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, and ‘moderate’ political behaviour were shifted a full degree to the right. In Alabama an interrelated status quo in racial, class, gender, ethnic/patriotic, and religious relations buttressed a highly stratified and extremely conservative society. Challenges to this status quo during the 1940s, and the ways in which they were dealt with, would have enduring consequences for a South then in the midst of switching its partisan political allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican and to a broader nation which would find itself, in succeeding years, in the grips of an affiliated Republican ascendancy.