Respectable segregationism paired capitalism rhetoric with veiled mob violence

Evidence

Unlike earlier groups which had resorted to violence, Wallace promised that the WECC would seek to use capitalism and conversation to solve the problem. If whites would purchase homes from blacks and help them “find homes in the Negro district,” he argued, they could effectively “remove all Negroes from the West End.” After that, the neighborhood could be permanently protected by a “Great White Wall” of racially restrictive covenants written into the deeds of neighborhood houses. … “I put some of our ladies to work making chain telephone calls, and in no time we mobilize quite a crowd around the house where the nigger is trying to move in,” he explained to a confidant. “Then I step in and have a little private talk with the nigger. I tell him he has a perfect legal right to move in, and that I will try to protect him. But at the same time I tell him I doubt if I can control more than a small part of the mob, and that if he does move in he’ll be endangering his whole family.” — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 132

Categorization

• XREF: The fake-legal-rights + mob-threat technique is a striking mechanism echoing how authorities weaponize plausible deniability, present in this book’s chain of chapters. — connects to: Desegregation pressure forced segregationists to reinvent themselves as respectable homeowners — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 106; Respectable segregationists framed exclusion of blacks as a symmetry of individual choice — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 372; Color-blind rhetoric revived segregationism by condemning discussion of racism as itself racist — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 1162 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Respectable segregationists framed exclusion of blacks as a symmetry of individual choice #expands (0.85) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 372
• Color-blind rhetoric revived segregationism by condemning discussion of racism as itself racist #expands (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1162
• American racism shifted from constitutionalized segregation to privatized preference-driven apartness #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 365
• Eliminating slavery and legal segregation removed ideological underpinnings of categorical racism #contradicts (0.70)
• Mob attitudes are bourgeois convictions stripped of their hypocrisy #qualifies (0.70) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 793