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Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South
Princeton University Press
August 2007
On Sale: August 15, 2007
416 pages
ISBN: 0691133891
EAN: 9780691133898
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Suburban sprawl transformed the political culture of the
American South as much as the civil rights movement did
during the second half of the twentieth century. The Silent
Majority provides the first regionwide account of the
suburbanization of the South from the perspective of
corporate leaders, political activists, and especially of
the ordinary families who lived in booming Sunbelt
metropolises such as Atlanta, Charlotte, and Richmond. Matthew Lassiter examines crucial battles over racial
integration, court-ordered busing, and housing segregation
to explain how the South moved from the era of Jim Crow
fully into the mainstream of national currents. During the
1960s and 1970s, the grassroots mobilization of the suburban
homeowners and school parents who embraced Richard Nixon's
label of the Silent Majority reshaped southern and national
politics and helped to set in motion the center-right shift
that has dominated the United States ever since. The Silent Majority traces the emergence of a "color-blind"
ideology in the white middle-class suburbs that defended
residential segregation and neighborhood schools as the
natural outcomes of market forces and individual meritocracy
rather than the unconstitutional products of discriminatory
public policies. Connecting local and national stories, and
reintegrating southern and American history, The Silent
Majority is critical reading for those interested in urban
and suburban studies, political and social history, the
civil rights movement, public policy, and the intersection
of race and class in modern America.
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