In American politics, the “ southern strategy ” refers to efforts by the Republican Party and its candidates to win presidential elections since 1964 by appealing to conservative whites (especially white southerners) disaffected with the Democratic Party by its strong embrace of civil rights laws in the 1960s and its racially egalitarian policies since.
It's a Myth I also remember Clinton bragging about being a proud Goldwater Girl.
Lassiter's story begins with Atlanta's school desegregation efforts in the early 1960s. The conventional wisdom says that the city's business elite --- William Hartsfield, Ivan Allen, the Chamber of Commerce --- recognized the importance of peaceful integration, and so they took on the rural advocates of massive resistance.
Lassiter, however, shows how the real leadership came from everyday Atlantans --- such as the housewives who launched Help Our Public Education --- from the city's burgeoning middle class, people who valued quality public education more than continued segregation.
"Any accolades for courageous white leadership during the South's tragic descent into massive resistance," he writes, "must be given to the ordinary fathers and especially the mothers who believed in universal access to public education as the foundation of a democratic and decent society."
But the racial liberalism of the new Sun Belt middle class went only so far. By the late '60s, the civil rights movement was pushing for districtwide busing as the only way to ensure truly equal education.
The first city in the country to experiment with busing on a significant level was Charlotte, and its successful experience was both the high-water mark for racial progressivism and one of the first instances in which the suburban middle class --- the vaunted "
Silent Majority" --- flexed its muscle as a conservative political force.
Southern suburbs had been trending right since Eisenhower's 1952 victory; at the same time, they consistently rejected racial reactionary tickets, such as the 1948 Dixiecrats, the 1964 Goldwater campaign and the 1968 Wallace ticket.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
