than real-world consequence. Every stealth politician was an individualized combination of purposefulness and inadvertence, even without conceptualizing such stylistic considerations. The important thing is that all of these leaders were breaking with the central tradition of Southern history, and they must have understood the value of “quiet” and “practical” politics as they traveled their forward course in “de facto stealthness,” without outward pandering to either of their conflicted racial constituencies. For example, adept stealth politicians—without a lot of articulated theorizing—went to black churches on Sunday and white civic clubs throughout the week, keeping their conversations appropriate for each place; in their public demeanor, they dealt with both majority and minority issues in acceptable, communitarian manner.
As we make clear throughout, the purpose here is not to sanctify stealth leaders; they were politicians of mixed personalities, motives, and actions. Our purpose is to emphasize the difficult essence of stealth politics and the challenge of stealth leadership. Stealthy practitioners were aware that they had to craft a biracial majority for electoral victory. Then, after getting elected, they had to attempt an equally daunting assignment, pursuing moderate to progressive public service, being responsive to all citizens, without unraveling their tenuous and volatile constituency. It was a tricky assignment; that is what politics is about, whether in Selma or San Francisco. The difference back then was that Southern politicking labored under a heavy and perverse hand of black-white history.
Obviously, stealth politics defied moral posturing and dramatic public coordination, and it failed then and now to elicit interest among national media and professional scholars. But this different politicking helped incorporate and implement the usually cited forces of Southern change during the past half-century.
The Mixed Civic Nature of Stealth Reconstruction
As has been noted, this is not a thesis of public magnificence like the heroic civil rights movement.
For the most part, the new breed of Southern political leadership was interested in conventional issues such as national defense, education, agriculture, and their own careers; their stealth politics has to be understood as a civic endeavor within the primacy of broader concerns.
It would be quite a stretch to champion these leaders and their work as heroic or revolutionary—they were, after all, practical political people. There was no common soul or grand collective purpose among our politicians, just their individual political personalities and everyday operations based on a mixture of selfish and unselfish character. Few had been on the front lines or in the march for equality in their areas and states; many nurtured sentiment, but no burning passion, for the heroic drama; most did not enter public life until the 1970s, and when they did, it was not for reasons of racial justice. We’ll not claim for them a place among the icons of the civil rights movement. Instead, we characterize them simply as “stealth politicians” who, variously motivated, helped reconstruct Southern politics.
However, we do view stealthy biracial leadership and politics as a broad civic phenomenon that went beyond the personalized motives and actions of crass politicians. While some leaders contributed to this movement in individualized pursuit of individualized objectives, many others did so for philosophical and purposive reasons related to American democracy. They were as a group relatively progressive Southerners; so we prefer to envision stealth politics as an incremental, conflicted mixture—a purposeful/inadvertent, public/private, personal/interpersonal dynamic—and as an overall positive process whereby some leaders and activists really made things better in everyday life for most Southerners, who were caught in the black-white crossfire of their region’s historical dilemma.
The Inevitable Demise of Stealth Leadership
Ironically, the racial progress of the past several decades wrought the inevitable demise of stealth leadership in the South. These leaders were transformational but transient; in a way, they may have fallen victims of their own success in helping change Southern politics.
In the 1970s, stealth politicians proceeded quietly and practically. The key challenge back then was to deal tactically and tactfully with the mainstream conservative constituency of white voters in the Democratic Party primary—coalitional blacks were just coming of age in the normal political process, and Republicans were no more than a vocal nuisance. Then, in the 1980s, it became possible for stealth leaders to pursue moderate politics more aggressively and successfully. However, these positive, evolving developments simultaneously sowed the seeds of decline for such leadership in the 1990s. As time passed, the large, conservative, white constituency began splitting off and casting its votes elsewhere; blacks became more politically mature, independent, and assertive; and Republicans became more powerful in exposing and defeating stealthy leaders in the general election. Certainly, too, enhanced media coverage and advances in campaigning injected powerful new elements of transparency and volatility into the process, making quiet biracial maneuvering less feasible and effective.
Browder notes, for example, that things changed dramatically between his entry into the political arena in 1982 and his exit in 1996:
When I first ran for office and served in the Alabama legislature, it was relatively easy to please my majority-white constituents, keep my black friends satisfied, and hold the Republicans at bay. But in my last campaign, for the U.S. Senate, nobody was very happy. I know that I changed some over the course of my career, and there’s a big difference between the Alabama House and the U.S. Senate. But much of this was due to the new racial order that made “stealthy” politicking impossible.
The shift from old-style Southern politics to new-order Southern politics undermined a fundamental quality and asset—stealthness—of biracial politics. Thereafter, stealth leaders found their course more demanding and conflicted, and they became increasingly irrelevant in Southern politics. They had helped achieve substantial transformation stealthily, and much more remained to be done; but most of them realized, in appropriate quietness and practicality, that the future belonged to new leaders with different visions and styles in an altered environment of Southern democracy. Stealth leadership and politics were essentially over, in unremarked dissipation, as a new Southern political order signaled the end of stealth reconstruction.
To summarize this part of the theoretical discussion, we believe that the consequence of collective stealth efforts represents an important, distinct, supplementary movement of reconstructive and progressive evolution. Arguably, stealth leaders accomplished Southern change in a way and to an extent that was beyond the reach of federal officials, laws, and troops. While righteous souls and racial ogres dominate the pages of history books, the stealthy reconstructionists helped bring black voters into Southern elections, helped end racist control of the Southern political establishment, helped moderate Southern governance, and, in a roundabout way, helped nudge the South toward a real two-party system.
In offering our proposition, we realize that this thesis asks the reader to reconsider decades of unquestioned truisms about Southern politics and history. Frankly, any honest depiction of the South’s racial past—as we will attempt in the next few pages—poses formidable, legitimate questions regarding our high notions of stealth service.
Stealth Leaders and the Race Game of Southern History
In some ways, the South can claim to be the original, intellectual heart of the “Great Experiment” of American democracy. Even today, many Southerners pride themselves as America’s real and true patriots. However, from the beginning the South steered its own regional course, a distinct culture of white supremacy in an America that at least preached idealistic principles of equality. Historically, the white leaders and people of this region have engaged in a race game of perverse politics designed to provide themselves the blessings of democracy while oppressing, exploiting, and discriminating against their fellow human beings of African origin and heritage. Gaming the system for racial advantage was not the singular, continuous, consuming passion for most Southerners, but slavery warped the Southern political system from the start and race forever lurked in the background and foreground of Southern political life.
The unsavory realities of Southern politics derive from that accursed aspect of the American story. In embracing slavery, this part of the New World launched long-term, systemic developments that would confound