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THE SOUTHERN “MINORITY” & THE SILENT MAJORITY 6As massive resistance gained momentum in the late 1950s, segregationist organizations seemed to sprout up overnight. The Brown decision shook activists out of their complacency and, in a few cases, their careers. After the Supreme Court decision, Citizens’ Council founder Robert Patterson left his job managing a Mississippi Delta plantation to fight integration full-time. Describing his segregationist epiphany a few years later, the former World War II paratrooper and college football star claimed that the Brown decision compelled him “to lay down my life to prevent mongrelization.” Patterson’s racial revelation and his success as an organizer captured the attention of journalists clamoring to explain the Deep South’s rebellion to the nation.1 Foreveryovernight activist who rallied to the cause in the late 1950s was a veteran who took a longer view of the civil rights struggle. Looking back on three decades of racial battles, another Citizens’ Council leader argued that the South had been “surrendering on the installment plan” since the New Deal. Like most Southern politicians of his generation, Georgia kingmaker Roy V. Harris cut his teeth masterminding campaigns for “straightout New Dealers.” In the late 1940s, the powerful state legislator threw his considerable political weight behind theTalmadge machine. Like the elder Talmadge, Harris used his own tabloid, the Augusta Courier, to fan the flames of racial reaction.Yet, despite his significant clout, Harris struggled in vain to rally Georgia behind the Dixiecrats in 1948. “Our leaders failed us in this hour of crisis and surrendered just a little bit more,” Harris griped a decade later. “They shouted, ‘Stay in the party and fight out your battles within the party.’” By the end of the 1950s, the lifelong Democrat and acting president of the Citizens’ Councils of America had little patience for blind loyalty.2 Harris offered a timeline of racial betrayal for southern whites unable to shake old allegiances. The Democratic Party had abandoned the “two- 152 | The Southern “Minority” & the Silent Majority thirds rule” at the 1936 national convention in favor of a simple majority vote for presidential nominees. That obscure yet ominous move eliminated the South’s veto power over the nomination process and spurred the earliest forecasts of southern defection. Like Dixiecrat propagandists before him, Harris identified 1936 as the beginning of the end for the “white man’s party.” For those who deemed “white democracy” synonymous with one-party rule, the racial skirmishes of the New Deal era destroyed the rationale for a Solid South. By 1960, racial conservatives had battled civil rights for more than two decades, and neither party platform gave Harris any reason for optimism. Democratic and Republican presidential candidates no longer offered white southerners anything, Harris lamented, besides a choice of “which you prefer to officiate at your hanging.” White southerners needed to “teach both parties a lesson” by asserting their political independence. “We must recognize that we are a minority bloc,” Harris declared, “and we must wield the balance of power.”3 During the 1950s, prominent segregationists such as Harris embraced a contradictory but compelling rhetoric of power politics. They lamented their political marginalization, yet believed they could chart a path back to national influence. For inspiration, racial conservatives looked no further than the source of their frustration. If civil rights activists could push reform with pressure politics, they reasoned, then a unified “bloc” of white southerners could employ similar tactics to derail civil rights measures. Indeed, the notion that a cabal of activists could dictate national policy appealed to southern elites who temporarily enforced conformity through state agencies and watchdog groups but failed to engineer a grassroots revolt . “Massive resistance” evoked an image of white southern unity, but committed segregationists recognized that the broad-based countermovement implied by the term did not exist. The regional coordination and racial unity that segregationists proclaimed in the Southern Manifesto belied the difficulty of uniting southern conservatives behind a coordinated plan of action.While they claimed to represent a unified regional majority, segregationists simultaneously embraced their “minority” status.4 Ultimately, the sympathies of a national majority determined which “minority” would hold sway—civil rights advocates or their southern opponents. On this count, segregationists believed they held a distinct advantage . White northerners, they argued, had more in common with their southern counterparts than with civil rights activists. Segregationists’ success relied on their ability to outlast the civil rights surge and exploit a brewing national backlash. In the meantime, southern conservatives continued to proclaim regional unity, quash...

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