Southern Political Development in Comparative Perspective

What is the State? It is the Democratic party.... Whenever there were political questions involved, ... we looked to the interests of the party, because they are the interests of the State. —Judge Thomas J. Semmes, delegate at Louisiana's constitutional convention (1898)

The conversion of the South into a democracy in the sense that the mass of people vote and have a hand in their governance poses one of the most staggering tasks for statesmanship in the modern world. —Valdimer Orlando Key, Jr. (1949)

On January 11, 1961, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes desegregated the University of Georgia in Athens. Their first afternoon of classes complete, Hunter settled in her dorm room, while Holmes returned to an off-campus residence. Much of the campus—and the state capitol in nearby Atlanta—was abuzz with talk of that night's scheduled disturbance. Politicians from north Georgia pleaded with Governor Ernest Vandiver to dispatch the state highway patrol to ensure that the court-ordered desegregation occurred peacefully. Advisers from south Georgia disagreed; some secretly helped riot leaders in their bid to make the campus unsafe for Hunter and Holmes and safe again for white supremacy. By ten o'clock, a crowd of some two thousand students and locals set upon Hunter's dormitory, where they hurled bricks and bottles and set fires nearby. After Athens cops fended off the crowd with tear gas and fire hoses, state troopers arrived—two hours after police requested help from the vacillating governor. National papers showed U.S. marshals rushing a distraught Hunter to safety. North Georgia politicians were chagrined by the disorder; those from south Georgia fumed at the state's capitulation.

On a late September morning in 1962, U.S. marshals escorted James Meredith across the University of Mississippi campus to the Lyceum—the school's main administrative building—where a taciturn registrar awaited. Oxford's air still stung with tear gas; stray bullets had pockmarked the statues of Confederate fallen. The group proceeded down a bloodstained corridor past exhausted U.S. marshals slumped against the walls, gas masks still strapped to their jaws. A pitched battle had just resulted in two deaths and hundreds of injuries. Alternately encouraged, discouraged, and repressed by confused state and county law enforcement, two thousand rampaging white supremacists had attacked the marshals. U.S. troops numbering 31,000—more than were stationed in South Korea—detained hundreds of civilians and restored order. Mississippi's "occupation" had begun.

Four months later, aspiring architect Harvey Gantt, stepping dapper out of a Buick sedan, strolled confidently across the campus of South Carolina's Clemson College in his dark pinstripe suit, checked coat, and hat. As he did, jostling and commotion ensued. The first stirrings of a riot here in America's last bastion of segregation? No, just shutterbugs jockeying for position. A polite meeting with the registrar, a quick press conference, a few curious onlookers.... Where was the angry white mob? Northern journalists left dejected. State politicians had foiled white supremacists' planned disorder. The New York Times cried, "Bravo, Clemson.... What a contrast to Mississippi!" President Kennedy applauded, too, and discussed doubling South Carolina's defense contracts.

These confrontations among black insurgents, white crowds, state authorities, and federal officials varied greatly, ranging from the breakdown of order in Mississippi to South Carolina's much-lauded "integration with dignity?' This book situates these crises as important moments in a much longer process—the democratization of southern authoritarian enclaves. Having begun in the 1940s, these transitions from authoritarian rule concluded by the early 1970s in the successful democratization of the eleven states of the former Confederacy. However, statesmen had converted them in sharply different ways. They differed in their ability to minimize outside interference with their dismantling of disfranchisement and "Jim Crow" social practices, to make peace with national Democrats, and to attract business investment. In part because they beat different paths out of Dixie, these states today differ in their politics and economics. Apprehending the contemporary South means coming to terms with the legacies of its democratizations.

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In the 1890s leaders of the eleven states of the old Confederacy founded stable, one-party authoritarian enclaves under the "Democratic" banner. Having secured a conditional autonomy from the central state and the national party, these rulers curtailed electorates, harassed and repressed opposition parties, and created and regulated racially separate—and significantly unfree—civic spheres. State-sponsored violence enforced these elements in a system that ensured cheap agricultural labor and white supremacy. These regimes were effectively conflations of the state apparatus with those institutions regulating political ambition. The state apparatus oversaw the hegemonic Democratic party, while the party staffed, exploited, and guided local, county, and state governments. Given the strength of these regimes, their most serious challenges would emanate from without, not within. Enclaves capitalized on their influence in Congress and the national Democratic party—as well as national indifference—to shield themselves from those who might violate their "sovereignty"' For a half-century, they succeeded.

Beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court's abolition of the "white only" Democratic primary in 1944, black insurgents, mostly in the South, inspired, compelled, and capitalized on federal judicial...