The Rise of the Suburban South: The Silent Majority and the Politics of Education, 1945-1975

Matthew Lassiter

This presentation is excerpted from two chapters of the larger project funded by the NAE/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, entitled The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. The forthcoming book charts the political mobilization of middle-class white southerners in response to a series of educational crises, from massive resistance to the Brown decision during the 1950s to the battles over court-ordered busing in the 1970s. Despite the frequent pronouncements by the federal judiciary that public opinion would have no impact on the constitutional mandate to desegregate public schools, ordinary citizens who organized in ad-hoc alliances repeatedly demonstrated the powerful role that local communities would play in forging the metropolitan landscape that supplanted the Jim Crow South. White-collar parents who lived in the newest postwar subdivisions participated in an innovative brand of populist politics that rippled throughout the Sunbelt South and paralleled national dynamics, the collective awakening of a self-conscious “Silent Majority” based in homeowner’s organizations, parent-teacher associations, neighborhood groups, shopping malls, church gatherings, and of course voting booths. On a spatial landscape of rapid metropolitan growth and increasing residential segregation, the new suburban blueprint replaced the caste-based framework of the southern past with a class-based ideology that converged with national patterns, a political outlook revolving around middle-class consumer privilege, hyper-individualist meritocracy, and a “color-blind” philosophy that rejected any collective responsibility for the burdens of history. In response to the grassroots mobilization of the “Silent Majority,” all three branches of the federal government adopted explicit policies of suburban protectionism that guaranteed the spatial containment of the “urban crisis,” and the Atlanta model of metropolitan fragmentation triumphed over the Charlotte model of metropolitan desegregation. The crisis over court-ordered busing polarized the New South city of Charlotte, North Carolina, for five long years, and played a central role in convincing the Nixon administration to embrace the anti-busing agenda of the suburban populists in the “Silent Majority.” My presentation focuses on the initial stage in the Charlotte saga: the mobilization of tens of thousands of white families in an anti-busing organization called the Concerned Parents Association, which demanded the maintenance of “freedom of choice” and “neighborhood schools” and attempted to organize a massive boycott of the unprecedented two-way busing plan that exchanged students between inner-city and suburban schools. The Concerned Parents Association adopted an explicitly class-conscious, scrupulously “color-blind” platform that accepted the one-way assimilation of black students into suburban schools, but fiercely defended the privileges of middle-class families who attended the excellent public schools located in their residentially segregated neighborhoods. These white parents rejected the affirmative action remedy promoted by the NAACP and endorsed by the district court, and they refused to accept the proposition that prosperous families in the placid suburbs bore any responsibility for the federal and municipal policies that created both the suburbs and the ghetto. Charlotte eventually achieved the most thoroughly and fairly integrated public school system in the nation, primarily because the metropolitan school district discouraged “white flight” and forced the community to broker a resolution based on class integration as well as racial stability. But the legacies of Charlotte’s anti-busing movement profoundly reshaped national politics and ultimately subverted the city’s proudest accomplishment, by pioneering a "color-blind" language of middle-class privilege, taxpayer ideology, individual meritocracy, and populist opposition toward collective remedies and redistributive liberalism.

About Matthew Lassiter

Matt Lassiter is an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan. I received my B.A. from Furman University in 1992, and my Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1999. While at UVA, I co-edited (with NAE/Spencer fellow Andrew Lewis) a book of essays on the role of white Virginians during the crisis of massive resistance, The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Univ. Press of Virginia, 1998). My appointment at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2000 followed a two-year tenure as visiting assistant professor of history at Bowdoin College in Maine. At U-M, I teach courses in 20th-Century U.S. History, especially urban and metropolitan studies and the political culture of Cold War America. With the assistance of the NAE/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, I spent the 2001-02 academic year revising the manuscript The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South, which is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.