Georgia’s caste system was accepted as permanent even by many blacks by the 1940s.

Evidence

With the dawn of the 1940s, Talmadge and the politics of rural racism seemed permanently cemented in the state. “By the World War II years,” historian Numan Bartley has observed, “Georgia’s segregated social system had hardened into a rigid caste structure accepted by virtually all whites and substantial numbers of blacks as the ordained and proper way of doing things.” Even the unwieldy county unit system had assumed a sense of permanence. In the words of Herman Talmadge, Eugene’s son and heir apparent, the system represented a time-honored tradition dating “back before the Christian era when people had similar tribe representation.” It was, he hinted, the way things were meant to be. Together, the two institutions protected Talmadge and his associates so thoroughly that in 1949 a shrewd observer of the state boiled Georgia’s politics down to one term—“Talmadgism.” — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 58