| During the three decades after World War II, the American South moved from racial segregation to desegregation in its public schools, from Democratic control to two-party competition in the political arena, and from an urban/rural society toward an increasingly middle-class and suburban one. The persistent politicization of public education, along with explosive patterns of metropolitan growth, underlay the shift of regional power from the Black Belt to the Sunbelt. After the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, African-American demands for equal and integrated schools precipitated battles over "massive resistance" which divided white southerners along class and geographic lines. While diehard rural segregationists insisted that an absolute defense of racial caste was more important than maintaining public schools, middle-class moderates in the urban and upper South led a qualified revolt to preserve public education. Eventually, grassroots organizations of ordinary parents forged a new desegregation consensus of legal but minimal compliance. By defeating massive resistance through appeals to self-interest, rather than reflection on the ethical imperatives of integration and equality, white moderates guaranteed the repoliticization rather than the depoliticization of public education, as black families repeatedly returned to the federal courts to seek the promise of Brown.;By the early 1970s, rapid suburban expansion and growing Republican strength in the metropolitan South greatly complicated the arrival of comprehensive desegregation through court-ordered busing. As southern distinctiveness waned, and middle-class suburbanites became powerful swing voters in regional and national politics, the mobilization of the "Silent Majority" heralded a center-right, "color-blind" conservatism which would have profound consequences for the urban core. While southern cities such as Charlotte eventually achieved a successfully desegregated school system despite intense anti-busing resistance, sprawling metropolises such as Atlanta could not bridge residential segregation exacerbated by explosive growth. Throughout the civil rights era, ordinary Southerners fought for quality education from all points on the spectrum. The ambivalent legacies of these grassroots struggles suggest that while legal segregation may have constituted an "American dilemma," it remains to be seen whether or not the class and race stratification between central cities and outlying suburbs does as well. |
