Davidson insightfully foresaw the developing, historical necessity for biracial politics, but his recommendations, reflecting research during the late 1960s and political developments of the early 1970s, relied on questionable strategies, tactics, and agents of change. He insisted that the coalition would have to be a movement of class-based radicalism, significantly departing from elitist liberalism. He incorporated into his plan a combination of strikes, political rallies, disruption, and harassment of corporate and governmental routine, and above all, grassroots education and propaganda.[17] He included lower-income whites and organized labor as key class partners, and he specifically targeted middle and upper-class progressives—“university people, ‘whistle blowers’ within the white-collar institutions, the traditional racial liberals, the growing middle-income supporters of tenants unions, the largely middle-class feminists, and the equally middle-class peace groups, environmentalists, and other liberal-radical reformers.”[18]
What Davidson failed to envision (and what King never lived to see) was the elusive, limited, but requisite capacity of real-world politics in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Direct, radical, coalitional action in a thousand different places—even when buttressed with voting rights laws and court decrees and all the other allies of progressive change—would likely fall short unless the movement engaged a special breed of political leaders/activists with stylistic skills and substantive agendas throughout the Southern region.
In effect, King’s inspirational ideas and Davidson’s empirical notions sorely needed “practical men of action” as described— gender-insensitively—by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. We don’t want to digress needlessly, but Hoffer’s classic essay adds solid theoretical foundation for our proposition about stealth politics.
What the classification attempts to suggest is that the readying of the ground for a mass movement is done best by men whose chief claim to excellence is their skill in the use of the spoken or written word; that the hatching of an actual movement requires the temperament and the talents of the fanatic; and that the final consolidation of the movement is largely the work of practical men of action. . .[19]
It is usually an advantage to a movement, and perhaps a prerequisite for its endurance, that these roles should be played by different men succeeding each other as conditions require.[20]
We’ll skip through Hoffer’s polemic against fanaticism and focus on the language pertinent to our thesis. The part of the essay that interests us is his assertion about the role of “practical men of action,” whose appearance represents the end of the dynamic phase and the beginning of a working new order. In fact, Hoffer claimed, “only the entrance of a practical man of action can save the achievements of the movement.”[21] Men of thought, he continued, don’t work well together, but camaraderie is an easy, indispensable, unifying agent for men of action. Among their many practical motivations, according to Hoffer, these operatives are interested in furthering their own careers as well as institutionalizing the movement; their tactics, while less than revolutionary, are often functionally successful.[22] It is difficult to draw from King’s call to action, Davidson’s insistence on biracial coalitions, and Hoffer’s provocative essay any specific directives for stealth politics. However, we think that their discussions about “strategy for change,” “cooperative majorities,” and “practical men of action” provide a particularly appropriate foundation for our thesis about stealth leaders, politics, and reconstruction. Practical men and women of both races would assume critical importance in strategically and cooperatively consolidating Southern change during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
A huge, vibrant body of literature attests to the more heroic actions of celebrated persons in the movement. However, we are interested in those quiet, practical, biracial leaders who collectively played a timely and similarly vital role. Unfortunately, history records virtually nothing about their backgrounds, their attitudes, and their activities. Therefore they are our focus, and in this project we will define and document their stealthy role in the transformation of Southern politics in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Preliminary Testimony to the Reality of Stealthness
Stealthness can be viewed as having positively addressed black issues and concerns, most commonly without pronounced intent or obvious plan, and in a way that avoided unduly antagonizing the white majority. Certainly, it would be easy to deny stealthness or to label this element of Southern politics as opportunistic pandering or ideological deception or cowardly hiding from the electorate. Stealth leaders, as a group, clearly avoided exposure. They were more progressive than conservative politicians in their region, and they were less progressive than liberal politicians from other parts of the country. They have been criticized from the right and from the left as “closet this” or “closet that.” In truth, they can most accurately be described as practical, moderate leaders politicking in a society still burdened with vestiges of segregation.
As preliminary testimony to this phenomenon, coauthor and former public official Glen Browder describes his stealth politics in simple, retrospective terms:
I got into politics because I was concerned about American democracy. I knew that in order to pursue my personal democratic interests I had to be an effective, responsive, and responsible public official in terms of broad concerns of importance to my base white constituency and to those of the black minority. So, over the course of my career, I publicly concentrated on political reform, fiscal responsibility, and national security issues. At the same time, I diligently but less-publicly focused on race and racism. I worked very hard and quietly to secure enough black support to get elected in majority-white areas; I sincerely tried to be fair, moderate, and progressive in my politics; and I didn’t talk much publicly about any of this stuff.
More direct are the remarks of Dr. Joe L. Reed, one of the most important black leaders in Alabama during the past half-century. Reed has provided leadership during the post-heroic period as a Montgomery city councilman, executive chairman of the Alabama Democratic Conference, vice chair of the Alabama State Democratic Executive Committee, and associate executive secretary of the Alabama Education Association. More pertinently, he has been a premier architect of what we have labeled stealth politics; when necessary, he has worked quietly and practically with Browder, U.S. Senator Howell Heflin, and countless other white political leaders over the past several decades. Reed passionately stated the history, reality, and logic of stealthness in an in-depth discussion in Montgomery.
We absolutely did play stealth politics! Throughout history, and especially in the days following the civil rights movement, we worked quietly with white friends. That quiet politics of accommodation was the only way we could accomplish anything during those times. You sure couldn’t go to the top of the mountain and tell everything you knew and what you were doing with white politicians. There were some of them that we wanted to give awards to but we never could because it would have killed them if it got out about what they were doing for blacks.[23]
Equally corroborative are the words of Dr. Richard Arrington Jr., who, along with Reed, has played a dominant role in Alabama political history of the past half-century. Arrington was the first African American mayor of Birmingham, where he presided from 1979 to 1999. He is generally credited with founding the powerful Jefferson County Citizens Coalition and he played a lead role in creating the Alabama New South Coalition, which now rivals the Alabama Democratic Conference in state politics. Arrington said that stealth politics worked hand-in-hand with the civil rights movement.
I find the characterization of “Stealth Reconstruction” provocative, informative, and realistic. And I agree that quiet, effective, biracial cooperation was a cornerstone of much of the heralded and hard-won racial transitions in Southern attitudes and politics. Without it, the courageous and well-recorded acts of the modern civil rights movement would have had a much more difficult course. In fact, my own political