we pitch stealth leadership and politics as a calculated, constructive mixture of quietness and endeavor regarding racial challenges and changes of that period. Of course, we like to think of stealth in positive terms; however, it often involved actions of less-inspired politicking.
We define our version of “reconstruction” as addressing traditional challenges and fundamentally changing Southern politics into a normalized system without legalized white supremacy and racial segregation. Race and racism are still problematic in the region, but there’s no longer a systemic “peculiarity” for perversity and contortion.
Those familiar with American history will understand that our idea is a fitting follow-up to earlier, more dramatic attempts of outsiders to reconstruct Southern regional culture. The “Southern way of life” had developed as a massive, hardened, resistant system of totalitarian white supremacy and separation of the races (except for limited interactions of necessity and personal inclination) enduring several centuries, civil war, and the civil rights revolution.
Quick review of the post-Civil War experience provides valuable background for our concept. In the federal government’s experience in the defeated South can be found instructive lessons about the difficulties of attempting fundamental change in a resistant, alien society. After more than a decade of “reconstructed” public institutions—enforced through military occupation—the federal government cut a deal with insurgent resistors and withdrew.
In much the same manner as over a century ago, the Second Reconstruction[3] of the 1950s and 1960s—combining forces of the federal government and civil rights legions—assailed regionally entrenched white supremacy and segregation with great fanfare and significant success. However, the movement seemed to stagnate in the late 1960s, reflecting the reality that transformational reconstruction required more than legal pressure and celebrated heroism. We contend that further evolution required new-style leadership within the resistant establishment of the native society.
Therefore, we consider “stealth reconstruction” an interesting and appropriate analogy for studying and explaining the South of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
An Unconventional and Controversial Thesis
We acknowledge that our idea of “stealth reconstruction” is both different and controversial; it clearly challenges the focus, method, and substance of mainstream political science and historical analysis.
Our challenge is best illustrated by examining one of the most celebrated and comprehensive analyses of reconstructive politics during the past few decades—Richard M. Valelly’s The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement . Valelly’s book—which earned the Ralph J. Bunche award (American Political Science Association) and the V. O. Key Jr., award (Southern Political Science Association)—is a prime case of outstanding scholarship which nevertheless might benefit from our research.
In a unique historical/institutional/political analysis, Valelly compared the two reconstructive endeavors in America’s experience. He showed that the “relative success” of the Second Reconstruction was due to a timely combination of national institutions and local political pressure. Valelly concluded that New Deal Democrats, federal judges, and black Southerners of the twentieth century forced the South into a more normal political environment, fostered black inclusion, and helped rebuild the Southern Democrats as a biracial party. Furthermore, he said, expansion and extension of the Voting Rights Act stabilized those gains in the latter decades of the century.
By the year 2001, the states of Mississippi and Alabama combined had more African American elected officials, 1,628, than the entire United States had had in 1970. Black office-holding was indeed widespread in the South. Black voting, too, was routine. Southern governments’ fiscal allocations for such things as hospitals, libraries, roads, and jobs, responded to the renewal of black suffrage and office-holding.
Glaring problems have emerged, to be sure . . . . Still, as the twenty-first century began the second reconstruction was a thriving concern. It had produced a well-developed, biracial public sphere that was now a fairly normal part of U.S. political life.[4]
Valelly’s book is a broad, powerful, valid, and persuasive analysis. With due respect, however, we fault his research for excluding critical people and actions—our quiet, practical politicians and their biracial politics—in the story of Southern change during the post-movement era. He employed a limited set of institutions/dynamics as change agents; he fixed on black voting/black office-holding as the narrow, singular definition of biracial progress; and apparently he didn’t talk—or didn’t talk candidly—with many Southern white politicians and black activists. He thus missed a developing indigenous phenomenon of biracial politics during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. He failed to recognize or report that during those difficult times some elected officials of one race began to represent constituents of another race. While it was often a strained relationship, these white politicians and black activists helped significantly in “reconstructing” the South.
Valelly may or may not have been aware of such politicking, but if he was it is clear that he did not consider these relationships of any theoretical or constructive consequence. We can find no serious discussion of positive white-black transaction in his chapters on post-movement developments. The only pertinent reference is disparaging speculation about the possibility of “an unhealthy relationship between black voters and paternalistic white politicians doling out crumbs of public largesse to their clients.”[5] This dismissive, offhand remark fails to convey the important role of biracial political relationships during this critical period, leaving us with an incomplete story of Southern reconstruction in the past half-century. Just as importantly, it leaves us to begin the twenty-first century with a flawed comprehension of our racial legacy.
Unfortunately, this tonal deficiency is standard practice in the conventional literature, a situation which we consider unacceptable at this stage of our academic disciplines. It is time to heed the advice of Sokol, Eagles, Feldman, Scher, and Barker/Jones/Tate about the focus, method, and substantive analysis of Southern politics and history. Thus we offer our unconventional, controversial analysis. We argue that our stealth leaders forsook the region’s historic race-game for a variety of personal and political reasons. They tried to address minority black interests, without antagonizing the white majority, in their electoral campaigns and public service. It took a risktaking yet disciplined and committed politician and cooperative allies to attempt the personal and political venture of bridging the Southern racial divide. In an almost impossible time and environment, our reconstruction crew provided such leadership, working pretty much alone, with necessarily quiet purpose, helping their areas deal with historic problems and working to build a new, viable democratic politics. In doing so, they helped end racist vestiges of Old South Democracy, they helped moderate the tone of regional public discourse, and they collectively and substantially contributed to the normalization of Southern politics.
Of course, the very idea of stealth reconstruction, along with certain expressions and references, may offend some readers. Some likely will object to our focus on white politicians; some may complain that stealth politics was no more than unprincipled compromise; and some could assert that the South has not attained their broad, bold vision of progressive society. However, our conception of stealth leadership, politics, and reconstruction is a realistic, constructive amendment to Southern history. We do not claim that we have found the single most important or best agent and course of change; but we think that our stealth alliances represent much more than flaccid, irrelevant, opportunistic accommodation.
To generalize about our new perspective, then, we envision “stealth reconstruction” to incorporate quiet, practical, biracial leaders, their individualized practice of new-Southern political ways, and fundamental change during a particularly interesting period in this region of the country. Stealth reconstruction was a transitional adjustment to an evolving civil rights struggle, and it assisted in the riddance of stubborn racial legacies and the relative moderation and normalization of the Southern political system during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
We, the authors, have personally practiced stealth politics