Segregation and the Southern Business Elite

Abstract

As World War II quickened the pace of southern industrialization and urbanization, so political, racial, and cultural change came to seem inevitable. Southern liberals were confident that segregation would gradually crumble in the path of economic progress. It would, they believed, become an expensive anachronism in a modernized economy and would be eventually abandoned by southern business men. Political scientists like V. O. Key, Jr., consequently expected that the political forces of southern liberalism would be immeasurably strengthened. Other social scientists predicted that distinctive southern folkways would be eroded as the agrarian base of traditional southern culture disappeared. Racial change has come to the South of course since then, but not in the gradual and peaceful way that moderates hoped for, nor with quite the liberal political consequences they wanted. The books under review help explain why the hopes of the 1940s were not fulfilled.