White Southerners' Alienation and Civil Rights: The Response to Corporate Liberalism, 1956-1965

Abstract

MOST IMPORTANT, INTERNAL HISTORICAL EVENT IN THE PAST ten years, White House aide George E. Reedy wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, has been the change in race relations in the United States.' It was during this period that the federal government used unprecedented power and influence to strive for equal opportunity for the nation's racial minorities. These efforts, however, brought forth a bitter response from those Americans who believed they had reason to distrust the power of the federal government and who objected principally to government intrusion in the area of human relations. This was particularly so in the South. Class status, power, and privilege were inextricably tied to race and caste in southern society. But nationwide critical response to the civil rights revolution embodied fundamental social and political attitudes that went far beyond the bromides of racist doctrine. These views departed from a consensus that placed great faith in bureaucratic structures and managerial methods of conflict resolution. They often seemed to emanate from those Americans who felt increasingly powerless before a national political structure that operated through the mechanisms of administrative bureaucracy. These grass-roots Americans also suspected that the national corporate culture was devoid of meaningful values or spiritual underpinning. The attempts by the federal government to harness business corporations, labor unions, civic groups, and the media to resolution of the civil rights issue revealed both estrangement at the local level and the inability of managerial culture successfully to address that alienation.