White resistance to integration consolidated as working-class panic gave way to middle-class remonstrance

Evidence

From their home on Altoona Place, a traveling businessman named Donald McLean and his wife Alma saw the “Moving Day” arrivals as the start of a larger “conspiracy.” To stop the supposed threat, the McLeans lashed out at the traditional scapegoats, real-estate agents. In May 1952 they filed a suit asking Fulton County Superior Court to enjoin eleven realty firms, both black and white, from “listing or selling to colored persons any additional property” in the neighborhood, on the grounds that such actions were destroying local property values. … Compared with the section “taken over” on Moving Day, this new area was slightly more middle class. Every single home was owner-occupied and nearly every homeowner held a white-collar job. The McLeans’ neighbors on Altoona Place, for instance, included a claims examiner, a supervisor for Atlanta Newspapers, a Hormel salesman, an inspector at the Fort McPherson army base, an accountant for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an auditor with the army, a career military man, and two business superintendents. (The only exceptions to the middle-class character of the block stood at the very ends—a painter and a foreman for Southeastern Meat and Poultry.) Just as Mozley Park had witnessed a gentrification of the white resistance from Ashby Street, so too did the McLeans’ lawsuit represent another small step up the social ladder of respectability. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 163

Categorization

• XREF: Restraint given up by homeowners but sustained via the street’s own past — relates to claims process of white-flight attenuation traced; also connects to the reader’s standing work on moral-panic migration and ideological reinvention. — connects to: Residential desegregation fractured white working-class solidarity into defensive individualism — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 191; Housing scarcity and residential transition drove working-class whites into organized racism — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 104; Intransigent white resisters destroyed compromise efforts and sped neighborhood transition — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 221 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Residential desegregation fractured white working-class solidarity into defensive individualism #corroborates (0.86) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 191
• Desegregation taught working-class whites that self-interest trumps community loyalty #expands (0.83) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 191
• Housing scarcity and residential transition drove working-class whites into organized racism #corroborates (0.82) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 104
• White homeowners performed community solidarity as a defensive strategy against desegregation #exemplifies (0.81) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 190
• White racial solidarity was an ideology masking the origins of the white working class #complicates (0.78) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 426
• Racial ideology in America concealed class divisions among whites #expands (0.76) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 409
• Intransigent white resisters destroyed compromise efforts and sped neighborhood transition #qualifies (0.75) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 221
• Working-class anxieties about upper-class rejection dampen support for equalitarian movements #expands (0.74) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2243
• Racial progress coexists with persistent white supremacist structuring #qualifies (0.73) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 76