Prometheus 6

title:  White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
Kevin M. Kruse
asin:  0691133867
Binding: Paperback
List price: $18.95 USD

White Flight, Atlanta and The Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin M. Kruse reports the reaction of mainstream white southerners to the events of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and onward. It focuses on Atlanta, GA because there were certain unique aspects to its development, but the same themes run through Atlanta's social history as though the rest of the ex-Confederacy's social history.

The book begins with an overview that gives you the general flavor of politics and culture in the Georgia. It then goes on to describe the development of the moderate coalition that gave Atlanta its reputation. The white community was represented by business and politicians and the Black community, after the all-white primary system was declared unconstitutional, was represented by voting politicians, professionals and clergy. That voting part was important. It was the basis for the limited respect Black people ultimately did receive; Mayor Hartsfield basically felt since Blacks were going to vote, it might as well be for him. As for the leadership of the Black community in Atlanta

...They recognized that their partners from the white elite had little genuine concern for civil rights. “Businessmen were pathetically slow in Atlanta when it came to using their refined mechanisms, so good for making money, to achieve some purpose in life beyond dollars and cents,” remembered the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. “On the issue of racial discrimination, there was no white leadership at all.” At the same time, black leaders understood that, whatever their faults, the white elite represented their best chance for change. Although Hartsfield may not have appreciated it, the black community was, indeed, using the white members of the coalition as much as the whites were using them.

Having set the stage, Prof. Kruse explains the wave of white history of which the white flight phenomenon is only the foam. I would like to say that one chapter or another is especially critical because it would make writing this review easier. Unfortunately (?) all of them add to one's understanding of how the central ideas undergirding modern Conservatism evolved. You just have to keep in mind that these chapter-long narratives aren't quite as sequential as they seem when laid out in print. They interpenetrate to a great degree.

I do keep coming back to two chapters in particular, though. The second chapter, From Radicalism to “Respectability”: Race, Residence and Segregationist Strategy, traces the history of several white segregationist organizations that, in their sequential efforts to “defend” white neighborhoods against “invasion” by Blacks, changed the rhetoric of segregationism without changing its goals one whit. There was The Columbians, Inc., the nations' first neo-Nazi organization, who recruited the, shall we say, less well to do among the white populace. They patrolled the streets, “arresting” and beating any Black person they found in a white neighborhood, then turned the miscreant over to the police for public drunkenness. There was the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, which by leaving the more outre rhetoric for The Columbians, Inc., recruited more white collar and government official types. This was handy when The Columbians ran afoul of law...the Klan simply pressed those of their members that were police into neighborhood defense. However, the Klan, too, went too far in usurping the police powers of the state. The city of Atlanta actually enacted an anti-mask law the same year its founding Grand Dragon died.

So they got all the Klan members together to form a new, maskless organization...the West End Cooperative Corporation.

Although the WECC built upon the legacy of its white supremacist predecessors in a number of ways, it differed from them considerably in one important aspect—its public image. With their outlandish costumes and crude displays of violence, both the Columbians and the Klan had been ridiculed by Atlanta's moderate establishment as racial extremists who stood outside the circle of respectable life, as rabble-rousers looking for trouble. The WECC members, in contrast, self-consciously presented themselves as honest homeowners confronted with a “social problem” not of their making. In doing so, the organization successfully shifted the terms of the debate from one that stressed the defense of white supremacy to one that stressed the defense of home, neighborhood and community.

The other chapter that stays with me is the fourth, The Abandonment of Public Space: Desegregation, Privatization, and the Tax Revolt. It seems that because they refuse to be in the same space as a Black person, white Atlantans simply stopped using any public space that allowed Blacks any access at all. They then complained that their taxes were being stolen to pay for benefits to Black people alone...an accusation their own actions forced to be true.

White Flight, Atlanta and The Making of Modern Conservatism also answered a question that troubled me for a while: how did a culture that declare the absolutely collective massive resistance movement morph into the worshipers of individuality we see today? It turns out it didn't...they professed individuality but they all made the same decision, to leave the city for the suburbs, distance from the Blacks and closeness to like-minded people.

Prof. Kruse sets out to reconstruct and display the white segregationist mindset of the day because, as he says in the introduction, “If we truly seek to understand segregationists—not to excuse or absolve them, but to understand them—then we must first understand how they understood themselves.” In my opinion, he succeeds remarkably well, showing the cause of their actions in their own words and the effects of their actions in the political world. In the process he shows how camouflaging their intent became necessary to achieve their goals.