Before Massive Resistance: The New Deal Roots of the White South's Backlash Against Brown
Historian Jason Morgan Ward on Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge's response to the New Deal
The story about white resistance to school desegregation usually begins in 1954. The common narrative goes like this…
When the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, many white southerners responded with defiance, delay, and outright noncompliance. Southern states adopted strategies and implemented politics to avoid integration. Once it became clear in the late 1960s that these southern states could no longer maintain their dual school systems, many white parents simply abandoned their public schools and opened private segregation academies.
But the political foundations of the white resistance against integration were laid in the decades before Brown. To understand the white response to school integration, we must go back to the 1930s and the political conflicts surrounding President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
In Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965, historian Jason Morgan Ward traces how southern segregationists built a defense of white supremacy decades before the civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s. According to Ward, a white backlash against Black civil rights had been building since the 1930s and can be traced to a slowly unfolding southern reaction against the New Deal.
What happened in Georgia provides a good case study.
Governor Eugene Talmadge and the New Deal
In the early 1930s, most (if not all) of Georgia’s political leaders supported President Roosevelt and his New Deal programming. The economic shock of the Great Depression, federal relief funds, and a wave of infrastructure spending created strong incentives to cooperate with Washington.
But, by the mid 1930s, Governor Eugene Talmadge had turned against the president by attacking the New Deal. Talmadge began warning white voters that the New Deal threatened white supremacy and the South’s racial order.
Ward described Talmadge’s actions this way:
When he lashed out at the president and his Georgia allies with provocative racial warnings, Talmadge connected the rise of the New Deal to the decline of Jim Crow. While few prominent southern politicians were ready to take that leap with him, Talmadge and other militant white supremacists foreshadowed a broader confrontation between southern racial conservatives and the national Democratic Party.
According to Talmadge, Roosevelt’s New Deal policies were not simply economic supports to alleviate the pain caused by the Depression. Talmadge viewed the New Deal as federal social reform dressed up as economic policy. In this sense, Talmadge viewed the New Deal as a radical threat to white society.
By providing expanded opportunities of Black Americans, the New Deal could, Talmadge argued, weaken the southern racial hierarchy and put white political dominance in danger.
A Divided White South
Talmadge’s views were not adopted by everyone. Many white southerners continued to support Roosevelt’s policies. The New Deal, however, did create divisions within the South’s white leadership about what to do about active federal intervention into state affairs.
After Roosevelt won re-election in 1936, this broader confrontation picked up steam. Ward argued that:
Serious devision arose among white southerners over the New Deal and its implications for the region. The scattered racial confrontations of the New Deal years convinced more than a few white southerns that they would have to fight to maintain their racially exclusive brand of democracy.
Form some white voters, federal policy raised unsettling questions about the future of Jim Crow. In the case of Georgia’s governor and his supporters:
Talmadge allies charged early and often that the New Deal imported “social equality” to Georgia… [and thus] white supremacy’s survival, Talmadge warned, was at stake.
In other words, some southern segregationists viewed Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition as a threat to the white supremacist hierarchy of the American South. White political elites like Talmadge benefited from the racial wedge segregation created between lower class whites and the Black population—a wedge that was threatened by the economic and social supports offered by the New Deal.
The Politics of White Democracy
Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge and those that supported him framed their defense of segregation in ideological terms. They claimed to be defending what they called white democracy. According to southern segregationists, Jim Crow was not simply a structure for maintaining segregation. It was a radicalized version of democracy in which political power belong exclusively to the South’s white citizens.
If federal New Deal policies weakened segregation, Talmadge argued, then the white South’s entire political order would collapse. So, according to Ward’s analysis, the South’s massive resistance to Black advancement didn’t just spring up overnight in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Rather, it was rooted in a 1930s movement to support white political control and authority.
Why This History Still Matters
White resistance to school desegregation did not appear suddenly in the aftermath of Brown. The ideological framework that drove post-Brown stonewalling against integration was built in the decades leading up to Supreme Court’s decision. All throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, many southern segregationists warned that any kind of federal intervention threatened white supremacy and the South’s racial hierarchy.
When the Supreme Court acted against school segregation in 1954, southern white political elites marshaled the anti-federal government rhetoric people like Eugene Talmadge has used throughout the 1930s to justify their refusal to desegregate schools. As such, public education became one of the central—if not the central—battlegrounds in a much larger struggle over the future of southern society.
More to come soon.
References
Ward, Jason Morgan. Defending white democracy: The making of a segregationist movement and the remaking of racial politics, 1936-1965. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.