Research Center in Montgomery, cautions about some sensitive ramifications of historical re-conceptualization; he particularly warns against the depiction of “white-hat” Caucasians supplanting African Americans as the heroes of the civil rights movement. But having stated that concern, he sees this project as an important part of contemporary public dialogue:
I think just the idea that the quiet, accommodating laborer in the vineyard contributed in substantive and substantial ways to the evolution of civil rights and Southern politics gives comfort and encouragement and hope today. The need for such service is as great now, if not greater, because the issues of Southern society are so much more subtle and complex.
Our stealth thesis, then, is an unconventional pronouncement and conceptual model that merits further consideration and investigation. We hope that the candid reflections in this chapter add credence and context to our contention, and in the pages to follow we will provide empirical evidence supporting our theoretical concept.
More specifically, we will address several important questions about stealth leadership, politics, and reconstruction during that era, hoping to raise constructive issues for the future:
1 For openers, a broad, four-part question about stealth leadership in general: Who were these stealth leaders? What did they do? What was the context of their election and service? Were they consciously playing stealth politics? And why did they do it?
2 How did their stealth politics differ from and relate to traditional Southern politics?
3 What, specifically and exactly, did they do, stealthily, in their campaigns and what was the stealthy nature of their public service?
4 How did they balance their stealth politics to appeal to black voters without alienating white constituents?
5 How did their stealth politics pay off in terms of black and white support? And public policy?
6 What were the downsides of stealth politicking?
7 Did these stealth leaders ever feel that they were exploiting black people? Or deceiving white people? And did they ever feel that they were being used—and—abused in the process?
8 What about the black activists—how did they play in this stealth process?
9 Did these stealth leaders and activists actually change Southern politics?
10 Does this stealth phenomenon still work—and what does that tell us about the future of Southern and national politics?
Before dealing with these important questions, however, we need to back up and establish historical background for the Civil Rights Revolution and Stealth Reconstruction.
2
The South’s Enduring Dilemma and Changing Politics
Certainly, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, the race game referenced in the previous chapter defined the South—despite its endearing charms—as a perverse, contorted regional political subculture. “Southern politics” usually meant “white Southern politics” and African Americans were nonexistent in most discussions. Mainstream analysis of the time fretted about whether whites could ever be persuaded to accept Negro participation in governance (or how Negroes could force themselves into the democratic process); few could have foreseen the unlikely phenomenon that we now suggest as a realistic course for addressing the Southern rendition of an American dilemma.
In this chapter, we will discuss the South’s stubborn systemic racial problems and changing politics as historical prelude to our hypothetical stealth transformation.[1]
Systemic Problems of Leadership, Race, and Poverty
According to V. O. Key Jr.—a native Texan and perhaps the most insightful analyst of Southern politics at mid-twentieth century—the fundamental flaw of Southern history was a systemic failure of Southern political parties and leadership to address its conjoined problems of race and poverty. As he so famously articulated the thesis in Southern Politics in State and Nation:
When all the exceptions are considered, when all the justifications are made, and when all the invidious comparisons are drawn, those of the South and those who love the South are left with the cold, hard fact that the South as a whole has developed no system or practice of political organization and leadership adequate to cope with its problems.[2]
W. J. Cash, parallel with Key in the anthology of Southern historiography, had pitched similar, more colorful ideas about Southern politics in The Mind of the South. The North Carolinian particularly targeted the racist one-partyism of his native region:
The world knows the story of the Democratic Party in the South; how, once violence had opened the way to political action, this party became the institutionalized incarnation of the will to White Supremacy. How, indeed, it ceased to be a party in the South and became the party of the South, a kind of confraternity having in its keeping the whole corpus of Southern loyalties, and so irresistibly commanding the allegiance of faithful whites that to doubt it, to question it in any detail was ipso facto to stand branded as a renegade to race, to country, to God, and to Southern Womanhood.[3]
Key accurately stated, at the dawn of the heroic drama, a daunting challenge for Southern political leaders:
Obviously, the conversion of the South into a democracy in the sense that the mass of people vote and have a hand in their governance poses one of the most staggering tasks for statesmanship in the western world. The suffrage problems of the South can claim a closer kinship with those of India, of South Africa, or of the Dutch East Indies than with those of, say, Minnesota. Political leadership in the State of New York or California or Ohio simmers down to matters of the rankest simplicity alongside those that must be dealt with in Georgia or Mississippi or Alabama.[4]
As events would demonstrate, the systemic problems of leadership and race (overlapped and exacerbated by poverty) would inflict harsh damage throughout this region for decades to come.
An Intractable Divide Between Whites and Blacks
Even as the civil rights movement shifted into full swing, expert analysts sometimes despaired of success because of the South’s intractable segregation and dysfunctional leadership. Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, after extensively and statistically portraying both sides of the region’s populace in Negroes and the New Southern Politics, worried about the future of Southern democracy. They even referenced the possibility of a racial holocaust:
In the South today the white leader who contemplates a tentative step toward accommodating Negro demands can expect to be labeled a “nigger-lover”; the Negro who cooperates with white leaders can expect to be labeled an “Uncle Tom.” Indeed, we seriously wonder whether a viable political system in the South will be possible, granted the extreme polarization of opinion, without one race being dominated by the other.[5]
Although civil rights leaders, grassroots demonstrators, and the federal government scored effective assaults on the Southern way of life, political developments during those times clearly reflected a worsening racial situation and suggested dismal prospects for bringing blacks and whites together.
In their retrospective look at Southern politics and society of the late 1960s, Earl Black and Merle Black articulated the situation thusly:
The changing civil rights agenda, widespread white opposition to significant reforms concerning the intermediate color line, and the new black militancy had profound consequences for the major civil rights organizations . . .
Just as black Southerners were beginning to participate in electoral politics in significant numbers, prospects appeared remote for successful biracial coalitions built upon