Note: A shortened version of this review ran in The Post and Courier on Jan. 15.
BY ADAM PARKER
Jan. 2, 2012
DEFENDING WHITE DEMOCRACY: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965. By Jason Morgan Ward. University of North Carolina Press. 272 pages. $34.95.
The 300-year-old history of race in America has been traced by several generations of scholars, in phases according to the period in which those scholars lived and the sources on which they relied. The “civil rights movement,” which has been understood, roughly, as the integrationist and political enfranchisement efforts of the 1950s and 1960s, has received the most attention, but a new generation of historians is challenging standard assumptions about civil rights chronology, cause and effect, leadership and much more.
Jason Morgan Ward’s excellent study of white resistance to the fight for racial equality, “Defending White Democracy,” convincingly describes two essential aspects of 20th century civil rights efforts. The “movement” actually began much earlier than 1954, a typical marker because of the Brown v. Board decision. Ward’s account begins with the New Deal in the 1930s and the resulting shift in party allegiance among African Americans, though this is as arbitrary a beginning as any. Ward easily could have started with the onset of Jim Crow after Reconstruction, or the Emancipation Proclamation, or the 1802 banning of the transatlantic slave trade or the first shipment of captive Africans to the New World. From the time this terrible market in human beings was first established there has been resistance. But the New Deal is certainly an interesting milestone that marked a dramatic shift in social and economic forces, as well as the nationalization of racial politics, Ward shows.
The other aspect of the civil rights movement that the author highlights is the organized response to change (increasingly inevitable as the years went by) on the part of whites. White supremacy was the status quo in the South until World War II, when the federal government began to insist on integrated military units. The strategy of “supremacy” therefore became one of “segregation,” Ward writes. Eventually “segregation” gave way to “equalization.” But no matter the terminology or occasionally softened rhetoric, the goal was to keep the races separate, the prevailing worry was “mongrelization,” and the preferred political tactic was to couch racist policies in a “states’ rights” argument.
In a meticulously researched study of the civil rights’ countermovement, Ward shows how Southern whites in South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi rallied their masses and fought back against historical currents that, ultimately, could not be stopped. It is remarkable (and to a 21st century ear, horrifying) to read what the segregationists said publicly. The quoted rhetoric, full of vitriol and fury, is the language of desperation and fear, and it’s extremely unsettling. But Ward does a great service in focusing on the white side of the civil rights equation. It is too often given short shrift. In fact, whites were very careful about their strategies, chosen leaders and legislative efforts, all designed to stymie large forces of change that threatened to overwhelm like an ocean wave.
The problem with ocean waves, especially large ones, is that they inevitably recede. Ward’s fine survey includes a discernable subtext. Issues that rattled the masses in yesteryear don’t disappear entirely; they merely take on new form.
As history is reassessed by younger scholars, our understanding is enhanced. New information is brought to light, connections are made where none existed before and events are contextualized in ways that a greater distance of years makes clearer, or at least richer. Ward’s “Defending White Democracy,” which accomplishes each of these feats, is a welcomed addition to the canon.
