Synopses & Reviews
Review
"With all the talk in recent years about the long civil rights movement, we now have an essential corollary to that enterprise--a study of the civil rights countermovement that pushes back into the decades before the massive resistance era. Ward provides an elegant and incisive examination of the forces that shaped white reaction in this critical period in the political life of the South and the nation."--Joseph Crespino, Emory University, author of
In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution
Review
"Although white opposition to the modern civil rights movement has often been characterized as a 'backlash' that was purely reactive in its origins and crudely reactionary in its aims, Jason Ward ably demonstrates that southern whites worked to create new and innovative forms of resistance decades before the postwar struggle over segregation."--Kevin M. Kruse, Princeton University, author of
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
Review
"Revealing the deep roots of Southern racial politics, Jason Morgan Ward has written an essential primer on how the white supremacists of the 1930s evolved into today's modern conservatives. This book is an important grassroots civil rights history, offering brilliant insights into why Americans are still fighting over race, rights, and the size and scope of government."--Daniel J. Sharfstein, Vanderbilt University, author of
The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America, winner of the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
Synopsis
After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. Journalists profiled the rise of a segregationist movement committed to preserving the southern way of life through a campaign of massive resistance. In
Defending White Democracy, Jason Morgan Ward reconsiders the origins of this white resistance, arguing that southern conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, in the era before World War II, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South.
As Ward shows, years before segregationist became a badge of honor for civil rights opponents, many white southerners resisted racial change at every turn--launching a preemptive campaign aimed at preserving a social order that they saw as under siege. By the time of the
Brown decision, segregationists had amassed an arsenal of tested tactics and arguments to deploy against the civil rights movement in the coming battles. Connecting the racial controversies of the New Deal era to the more familiar confrontations of the 1950s and 1960s, Ward uncovers a parallel history of segregationist opposition that mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement and raises troubling questions about the enduring influence of segregation's defenders.
Synopsis
After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. However, Jason Morgan Ward argues that southern conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South. Ward uncovers a parallel history of segregationist opposition that mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement.
About the Author
Jason Morgan Ward is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University.