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đŸȘ” The Threshold

Segregationists framed their stance as defending their own liberties, not denying others'

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tagsja-picks, define, xref, question, definitional_content, trade, singleton, category/definitional-content
aliases@kruse_white_2005, loc. 31

4 min read

Segregationists framed their stance as defending their own liberties, not denying others’

Evidence

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. Until now, because of the tendency to focus on the reactionary leaders of massive resistance, segregationists have largely been understood simply as the opposition to the civil rights movement. They have been framed as a group focused solely on suppressing the rights of others, whether that be the larger cause of “civil rights” or any number of individual entitlements, such as the rights of blacks to vote, assemble, speak, protest, or own property. Segregationists, of course, did stand against those things, and often with bloody and brutal consequences. But, like all people, they did not think of themselves in terms of what they opposed but rather in terms of what they supported. The conventional wisdom has held that they were only fighting against the rights of others. But, in their own minds, segregationists were instead fighting for rights of their own—such as the “right” to select their neighbors, their employees, and their children’s classmates, the “right” to do as they pleased with their private property and personal businesses, and, perhaps most important, the “right” to remain free from what they saw as dangerous encroachments by the federal government. To be sure, all of these positive “rights” were grounded in a negative system of discrimination and racism. In the minds of segregationists, however, such rights existed all the same. Indeed, from their perspective, it was clearly they who defended individual freedom, while the “so-called civil rights activists” aligned themselves with a powerful central state, demanded increased governmental regulation of local affairs, and waged a sustained assault on the individual economic, social, and political prerogatives of others. The true goal of desegregation, these white southerners insisted, was not to end the system of racial oppression in the South, but to install a new system that oppressed them instead. As this study demonstrates, southern whites fundamentally understood their support of segregation as a defense of their own liberties, rather than a denial of others’. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 31

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Defines the book’s core interpretive frame: segregation as self-understood defense of ‘rights’ like neighborhood, property, and local autonomy, which is the very ideology this reader is tracking through its reinvention.
  • XREF: Directly connects to this reader’s study of how segregationist ideology gets reinvented as ‘color-blind’ conservative language of rights, property, and anti-federal-government resentment. — connects to: Federal courts tolerated self-deceiving denials of de facto segregation. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”
, 44; Antibusing activists were civic suburban parents, not ideologues — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”
, 33; Segregationist organizing rebranded itself as defending home and community, not white supremacy. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of
, 131 (+13 more)
  • QUESTION: The claim that this self-conception predates the civil rights era or only crystallized under desegregation pressure is worth chasing as the book unfolds.

Broader Connections

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