has truly been a remarkable one. Founded in 1960 by a small group of committed leaders to support the Kennedy-Johnson presidential ticket, the organization has steadily grown in size, reputation, and influence to become one of the most effective voices in Alabama politics today. Indeed, few political groups can match ADC’s record of success when it comes to bringing about fair and equitable representation of blacks.
Check our record. In Alabama blacks constitute 25 percent of the state’s population. Black officials are well represented on most governing bodies in Alabama today. This is due largely to a comprehensive legislative and legal strategy that ADC embarked upon over the years. When ADC was founded in 1960, there were less than 10 black elected officials. In 2002, Alabama has more than 800 black elected officials statewide. Presently, black officials compromise 25 percent of the state legislature; 24 percent of the county commissions; 24 percent of local school boards; 25 percent of the state school board; and 20 percent of the membership on city councils. Black representation on the State Democratic Executive Committee stands at over 40 percent, due largely to ADC’s active recruitment and influence. Also during the last two Democratic National Conventions Alabama had one of the highest percentages of black delegates in attendance, when compared to other states.
Although getting blacks elected to every chamber in government has been one of ADC’s goals, the organization’s history has been marked by consistent, widespread support for hundreds of white candidates who have been sensitive to the needs of blacks and poor people. ADC is proud of the fact that few Democratic officials have assumed office in this state without directly or indirectly being influenced by the work and policies of the organization.
In short, ADC’s organized network of voting members, coupled with civic pressure, has brought about significant social change. The State Democratic Party changed its racist slogan. Recalcitrant candidates stopped using racial slurs in their campaigns and began to court and respect the black vote. Without question, ADC has made politicians behave, mainly by holding to three basic operating principles: 1) there is nothing that is politically right that is morally wrong; 2) there is political strength through unity; and 3) of all crimes, the worst one politically is ingratitude.[54]
These scholarly and personal accounts—coming mainly from Southerners of both races—demonstrate that the South is a substantially different society from the old days.
White Culture and Black Politics in a Changing South
Unfortunately, the academic community has been deficient in explaining these historical developments beyond general analysis and statistical tables. It is very difficult for scholars, writing from above and afar, to explore critical human aspects—such as the personalized comments of John Lewis, Fred Gray, J. L. Chestnut Jr., John Fleming, and Frye Gaillard in the previous section—that help us make sense of positive change in the latter part of the century.
Consequently, current analysts often miss essential insights into what really happened, how, and why over the past half-century. Surely, the cooling clash of heroes-versus-villains did not magically cleanse the Southern way of life; laws and decrees by themselves did not soften the tone of Southern political discourse; and certainly the surge of black voters, in-migration from other regions, and other societal factors did not automatically translate into new styles of politics and public service in the South. Nor can we accept—as applicable across the region—case studies about the public politics of a relatively few New South leaders and black elected officials of that period.
Comprehending Southern change may require us to reconsider standard historical generalizations about Southern politics. We may have to step back, away from the pronouncements of Cash and Key, away from the stark, white-black drama of the movement portrayed by activist scholars and the media. While those works were valuable for the time, they produced a single-minded, deterministic picture that obscured meaningful patterns and potential for an alternative future. We need to view the South as a more complex region than was depicted in earlier research.
One first step toward understanding the changed South is to revisit earlier assessments of Southern culture and public life in the 1950s and 1960s. More recent scholarship has attempted such reconsideration and provides differing perspective and evidence about the white Southern mindset and black activities back then. Apparently, despite the heat of those times, the white South was not as rigidly, universally, or permanently resistant to racial change as had been assumed in mainstream accounts of the heroic struggle; and, in the other camp, as the national drama abated, black Southerners were ready to proceed in more practical pursuits.
Conflicted Complexities of the Southern White Populace
Way back in the 1960s, Lewis Killian and Charles Grigg had suggested, through the discerning eyes of Southern sociologists, that Old South society was less monolithic than normally suspected and depicted.[55] Now, contemporary research is demonstrating that Southerners of that era, while comfortable with their regional racial arrangement, were a mixed lot when it came to attitudes about the civil rights movement and the future of Southern life.
Matthew D. Lassiter is one of a growing breed of young historians revisiting conventional interpretations of Southern society.[56] The University of Michigan professor grew up in middle-class, suburban Atlanta; he says that his people, his parents and grandparents, have been ignored in most historical analysis. “There were a few white Southerners who were liberals, a larger number throwing the rocks with the rioters, and the vast group in the middle were left out of the story.”[57]
Perhaps the most exhaustive and useful acknowledgment of the nuanced political world of white Southerners back then is Jason Sokol’s recent historiography of that period, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–75. Sokol—who, ironically, was born and grew up in Massachusetts, attended Oberlin College and the University of California, Berkeley, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York—has documented, in sober yet fascinating manner, the ambiguities and antagonisms afflicting most Southerners of that time. After examining historical records, letters, and publications of the civil rights era, Sokol concluded that many whites generally and purposefully lived their lives outside the whirlwind of the heroic drama:
Most white Southerners identified neither with the civil rights movement nor with its violent resisters. They were fearful, silent, and often inert. The prominent events of the era—the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 student sit-ins, the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, the Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965, for example—often had less meaning than the changes in the texture of day-to-day life.[58]
Furthermore, they found various ways to muddle through the experience that completely altered their world:
When the civil rights movement tore through the Southern landscape in the 1950s and 1960s, it challenged the attitudes of millions, undermined their customs, and upended their ways of life . . . In the end, few escaped its long reach. Some white Southerners attested to liberating experiences that forever altered their racial attitudes and behavior. Others found new ways to resist racial equality. Many more clung to any sense of normalcy they could salvage, at times willfully ignorant of the tumult around them.[59]
Sokol pronounced the South’s race troubles as a white problem; however, he presented a picture of white Southern society of the 1950s and 1960s that was not nearly as monolithic or hardcore racist as had been depicted in the literature of the earlier era. Furthermore, preaching the possibilities of “white liberation,” “biracial reconciliation,” and “regional redemption,” Sokol described, without condescension, a white Southern populace trying to deal with the uncertain contours of fundamental change:
The South in the 1970s was a society remarkably similar to that of Jim Crow times in some respects, yet fundamentally transformed in others. Even for those who resisted, change continued to seep into life. At times its arrival was sudden; more often it was halting and gradual, and came in fits and starts. When tranquility settled over the sites of the civil rights movement,