White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism

Abstract

White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. By Kevin M. Kruse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 352p. 18.95 paper.The South is a region of many myths, and Kevin Kruse takes on one of the most durable of them: Atlanta as the “city too busy to hate.” Kruse finds that Atlanta, like many other southern and northern cities in the postwar era, was a city in which “race and residence stood at the forefront of [Atlanta's] racial politics” (p. 42). He traces the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Mayor William Hartsfield's biracial, elite-controlled regime to manage the struggle between whites and blacks over urban space. White flight, the decades-long movement of whites to the Atlanta suburbs, was not only the result of this struggle over space; it was also the source of a new form of southern white conservatism based on whites' resentful exit from the urban South. For political scientists, this book is a reminder of the “long civil rights movement,” that began in the 1940s, before the Brown decision, and extended throughout the 1970s. At the local level, the Civil Rights movement was a struggle over politics that earlier political scientists would be quick to understand and appreciate: a struggle over who gets what, when, where, and how. By taking an in-depth yet rigorous look at southern politics that goes beyond the limitations of National Election Study data or roll-call votes, the book provides valuable historical context to recent works on the transformation of southern politics.