arrangements—and perhaps implicit collusion—with national politicians eager to promote their nationalistic dreams. During the Constitutional period, there was contentious debate over slavery, but the Southern states convinced the founding fathers to accommodate the regional slave economy as part of their entry into the new nation. Slavery endured through decades of fitful argument—adamantly and morally defended on the floor of Congress by John C. Calhoun as “the peculiar institution of the South.”[26] Then, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, white Southerners negotiated an opportunistic new deal with national Democrats that excluded freed blacks from the political process as long as the South delivered total electoral support to the national party in Washington. Even after the Civil War and Reconstruction, states throughout the region continued Old South ways by legally disenfranchising blacks. As Alabama’s constitutional convention president said in 1901, “It is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this state.”[27] Regional white rule continued until the civil rights era, when the national government finally eliminated official sanction of discrimination.
Unfortunately then, throughout most of its history, the South’s leadership and “peculiar” political system have revolved around the unsavory realities of white supremacy and racial segregation. While Southern leaders historically pursued broad issues of national and local import, race usually lurked in the background and routinely intruded into conventional politics.
Within this racial context, we employ the terms “stealth leadership” and “stealth politics” to refer to individual leaders quietly performing biracial political roles for generally positive purposes, and “stealth reconstruction” is an incremental, collective, fundamental victory of civic progress over cynical politics in the broader race game of Southern history.
However, the stealth thesis and terminology can conjure mixed images of politicians and black-white relations; indeed, the very word that we use—“stealth”—evokes shadowy connotations from Southern politics, past and present. Our hypothetical version of stealth leadership is positive, but our designated stealth leaders were practical politicians who politicked in the real world. And in the real world of Southern politics, misdirected stealthness could just as well entail deception, fraud, and abuse of the public trust. And quiet, practical politics, when pursued for unvirtuous purposes, when exacerbated with financial considerations, and when enveloped in an environment of heated, ingrained societal division, could powerfully warp the electoral process and corrode responsive, responsible government.
So there’s no denying that our stealth leaders were ungracefully mired—either in deed or through association or by appearance—in the racial politics of Southern history. We generalize that most Southern leaders—white and black—have played the game of racial politics in some manner and to some degree. Our stealth leaders, awkwardly mired in that game, had to navigate a difficult, politically conflicted course during the era under study. Few ever talked about it, and it’s still not a popular subject of conversation. But the routine pursuit of power, policies, and other political goodies in this region during those times often involved racial considerations. We presume that most of the practitioners did some specific things that they would prefer history not record; that they allied with some people who did unseemly things as a matter of general practice; and that they hung around a political house of ill-repute.
The crucial difference between traditional Southern officials and our designated stealth leaders is that, routine pursuits and career interests aside, (a) traditional politicians readily and openly played the game for racial advantage within a historical environment of white supremacy and segregation, while (b) stealth politicians quietly and deliberatively played the game mainly to improve black-white relations and normalize racial aspects of Southern democracy.
Stealth politicians had to navigate a difficult, sometimes wayward course. Even our case-studied and surveyed leaders—oriented to racial, economic, and social progress—allow that they sometimes struggled with the challenges and compromises dictated in their regionalized calling. As will be evidenced throughout this book, certain aspects of service by public official Browder and his stealth colleagues seem uncomfortably similar to the cynical activities of traditional Southern politicos and new race-gamers. Coauthor Browder notes that since he was a professional political scientist and campaign consultant prior to entering politics, he was better prepared than most for dealing with this part of Southern politics; however, the continuing, constant, almost casual demands of racial politics were increasingly burdensome. He says that an inner-voice nagged him during those times: “I often wondered . . . Am I a ‘good guy’ fighting the right causes? Or am I becoming just another Southern political hack?”
Thus we readily acknowledge the unsavory downside of traditional Southern politics in which our touted stealth politicians were embedded. We hope the reader eventually will agree that, considered within the nature of their situations, these stealthy leaders pursued acceptable compromise between “doing what’s right” and “doing what works” during those historic times.
To conclude this cautionary discussion, we have acknowledged some broad unseemly tendencies and unsavory realities of Southern politics, and we have admitted the sometimes shadowy environs and ways of our stealthy politicians.
However, in our opinion, significant credit goes to those practical political leaders and activists—white and black—who helped restructure Southern elections and governance in moderate, progressive directions. They crafted a more savory and seemly politics, and the South did undergo fundamental political change during that period. Their stealthy service may have been tentative and transient, but during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s these politicians and activists helped close the curtain on the Old South, and they contributed greatly to the more positive aspects of a new system in this century.
An Amendment to the Race Game and Southern History
We present this thesis as a timely and critical amendment to the traditional race game and more recent Southern politics. As pointed out in the introduction, most Americans, and even Southerners themselves, have only a hazy understanding of black-white political relations in this region in response to the civil rights movement. Furthermore, scholars have ignored important realities of quiet, practical, biracial politics in the South during the rest of the twentieth century. As the 2008 presidential campaign so clearly and painfully demonstrated, public misunderstanding, ignorance, and raw sensitivities about the past woefully handicap any attempt to resolve America’s continuing racial dilemma in the twenty-first century. We believe that our research will begin filling this gaping hole in Southern and national political history.
Gerald Johnson, longtime Auburn political scientist and a Browder ally, agrees that the stealth project is a provocative, daunting, but worthy effort.
Following the provision of legal rights for black minorities in the South, what remained, and still remains to some degree in some areas, was and is the implementation of those rights. No doubt, the accommodation of mutual interests through relatively quiet quid pro quo arrangements played a positive role in this process. The attempt, however difficult, modest, and limited, to construct and tell in formal terms this untold part of history is a powerful addition to both the civil rights literature and the literature of Southern politics.[28]
Actually, according to Dr. Johnson, “Stealth Reconstruction” is simply re-conceptualization of an age-old process of accommodating marginal groups for very practical reasons. However, in this case, the accommodations are different in scope because they deal positively with a newly enfranchised set of players—black minorities—in the context of sweeping social, cultural, historic, economic, and political change:
I suspect that members of every community in the South knew about and can tell about some quiet accommodators who helped make things work during that period. But, I further suspect, most of the common talk is about the uglier aspects of the process, not to its contributions to the continuing evolution and development of the civil rights struggle and to Southern politics. Thus, “Stealth Reconstruction” can help us better understand the political history of this region.
Dr.