Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 by Jason Morgan Ward, and: After the Dream: Black and White Southerners Since 1965 by Timothy J. Minchin and John A. Salmond (review)

The two books under review make important contributions to the growing literature that seeks to reperiodize the civil rights movement. Jason Ward focuses on the origins and evolution of the segregationist movement and argues that it rose not with the infamous campaign of massive resistance sparked by Brown v. Board of Education but by the New Deal. Essentially the "'long civil rights movement'" was matched by a "long segregationist movement" (2). Timothy Minchin and John Salmond look in the opposite direction as they survey what they see as the "last phase of the civil rights movement" and seek to evaluate its effect (ix). Their study begins at the point where Ward's story ends, the year 1965, and concludes with the election of Barak Obama.

Defending White Democracy starts in the mid 1930s when a smattering of elite southerners, such as Eugene Talmadge of Georgia, Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina, and Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, began warning that a Communist-inspired cabal of New Deal reformers, black civil rights advocates, and labor organizers posed a new threat to the South's racial status quo. Fears for the future of Jim Crow intensified during World War II as a result of campaigns to end the poll tax, the presence of black soldiers in Southern communities, and federal efforts to prevent workplace discrimination. With vivid examples, such as the search for the imaginary "Eleanor Clubs," which supposedly were instigating revolution among black servants, Ward effectively captures the extent of white anxiety over the wartime federal intrusion into Southern race relations.

Jim Crow defenders responded to these challenges during and immediately after World War II with violence and with a rhetoric that "conflated white supremacy with authentic Americanism," portrayed the New Deal as "the domestic wing of a worldwide totalitarian offensive," and equated FEPC "antidiscrimination orders with Nazi racial policies" (63, 64, 81). According to Ward, this period also saw the origins of a shift from the embarrassing excesses of hard-line white supremacy to what was hoped to be a more appealing legal and constitutional defense of segregation that linked "states' rights to civil liberties and Deep South insurgency to a broader conservative countermovement" (107).

As the civil rights movement hit its stride in the 1950s, segregationists drew upon this new approach when developing school equalization schemes and other forms of what they called responsible segregation, including antimask and anticross burning legislation. Ward argues that the massive resistance of the late fifties and sixties was not a spontaneous uprising but was built upon three decades of evolving tactics and arguments designed to appeal to national audiences. In the congressional fight against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregationists relied on what they hoped was this more effective oppositional strategy that avoided racial arguments and appealed for conservative support nationwide by attacking the legislation as evidence of big government's assault on individualism and the free enterprise system.

Although Ward promises to include rank and file efforts to block racial change, his focus is primarily on political elites as well as journalists and writers like John Temple Graves, Stuart Omer Landry, and William D. Workman, who helped shape and defend the segregationist movement. Also, he readily acknowledges the difficulty in uniting Southerners behind responsible segregation. Still, Ward makes a good case for looking for roots of massive resistance in the thirties, for the important changes in the segregationist tactics and rhetoric, and for links between the white resistance and modern conservatism.

In popular lore, the civil rights movement peaked and then rapidly diminished after 1965 with its...