Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 - Hardcover

Ward, Jason Morgan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807835137 ISBN 13: 9780807835135

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011

Synopsis

After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. Journalists profiled the rise of a segregationist movement committed to preserving the "southern way of life" through a campaign of massive resistance. In Defending White Democracy, Jason Morgan Ward reconsiders the origins of this white resistance, arguing that southern conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, in the era before World War II, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South.As Ward shows, years before "segregationist" became a badge of honor for civil rights opponents, many white southerners resisted racial change at every turn--launching a preemptive campaign aimed at preserving a social order that they saw as under siege. By the time of the Brown decision, segregationists had amassed an arsenal of tested tactics and arguments to dep

About this title

Book Description

"With all the talk in recent years about the long civil rights movement, we now have an essential corollary to that enterprise--a study of the civil rights countermovement that pushes back into the decades before the massive resistance era. Ward provides an elegant and incisive examination of the forces that shaped white reaction in this critical period in the political life of the South and the nation."--Joseph Crespino, Emory University, author of In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution

From the Inside Flap

After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. However, Ward argues that southern conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South. Ward uncovers a parallel history of segregationist opposition that mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0807835137
• ISBN 13: 9780807835135
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264