Maarten Zwiers. Senator James Eastland

In recent years, the scholarship on the massive resistance era has focused on adding depth and nuance to the story of various white responses to desegregation. Segregationists—and the responses they fashioned in the context of a sea of post–World War II protests, litigation, and legislation—became more complex if not necessarily more sympathetic figures, reacting locally, regionally, and nationally in different ways and at different times to class, gender, and racial upheaval. While some of these whites detonated bombs or looked the other way when townsfolk did, others ran for office making unrealistic promises of perpetual segregation; still others moved toward moderation, exchanging a dollop of reform for a promise to slow down the pace of the next wave of change. The larger point emerging out of much of this work is that whites consumed and responded to the changing nature of southern society in different ways, a small percentage even reacting heroically in support of a more equitable South.

Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Desegregation · Economic history · Geography · Legislation · Moderation · Pace · Political economy · Political science · Resistance (ecology) · Scholarship · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society