(Un)Furl That Banner: The Response of White Southerners to the Civil War Centennial of 1961-1965

Abstract

BY THE LATE 1950s THE AMERICAN SOUTH HAD REACHED ANOTHER crossroads in its eventful history. De jure segregation, a cornerstone of southern life in the first half of the twentieth century, was under attack. Powerful instruments of change such as economic modernization, federal intervention, and a burgeoning black-led civil rights movement had begun to weaken the grip that segregation exerted on the lives of local people. In recent years some historians have added the agency of white southerners to the list of factors involved in the destruction of Jim Crow. Important interest groups in white society, these scholars argue, reached the conclusion that massive resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court's integration decision in Brown v. Board of Education was counterproductive. Growing numbers of businessmen, parents, religious leaders, and politicians believed that the violence and intimidation accompanying opposition to court-ordered school desegregation were corrosive of regional stability and economic development. At the very least some white southerners were willing to accept token or gradual integration as the price of progress. (1) The starting point for this essay is that more research must be done on southern whites before we are in a position to evaluate precisely the extent of, and reasons for, local white input into the demise of segregation. Historians have devoted a good deal of energy to probing the activities of the civil rights movement, particularly at the state and community levels. As a result of this work, few members of the academy would deny that the movement played the principal role in destroying the Jim Crow system--both by destabilizing segregation at the grass roots and by prompting federal intervention to guarantee equal rights under the law. To recognize the movement as the primary agent for change, however, is not necessarily to come to a full understanding of why most southern whites eventually accepted that segregation would have to go. After all, at the end of the 1950s there was nothing inevitable about the end of Jim Crow. Significant numbers of die-hard segregationists, particularly in the old plantation districts of the upper and lower South, were determined to maintain the practice, even in the wake of federal intervention during the 1957 Little Rock crisis and the first wave of student sit-ins in 1960. Had these people succeeded in monopolizing white opinion in the region, two key consequences would have ensued. First, the movement would have triggered an even more violent response from southern whites than it actually did. Second, local whites would never have complied with the federal civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. With whites forming the majority of the South's population and with Washington's readiness and capacity to exert its power in the region perennially limited, even grudging acquiescence to this legislation was a critical precondition for the success of the movement. Put another way, to explain why the civil rights movement was ultimately so successful in the 1960s, we need a deeper understanding of the motives and actions of white southerners. (2) The Civil War Centennial provides a useful window into the mind-set of the white South during the watershed years of the civil rights movement, 1961 to 1965. (3) As C. Vann Woodward once observed, the legitimacy of the racial order in the 1950s rested upon assumptions that constituted a veritable credo of the region. (4) What some scholars call historical memory was thus a fundamental prop of an oppressive social system that was grounded as solidly in culture as it was in politics and economic relationships. (5) Southern whites responded negatively to Brown for many reasons, but among them was their familiarity with a distinctive narrative that had coalesced around the turn of the century. Their sense of racial superiority and personal identity owed much to their understanding of the region's past. …