White South and the Red Menace

George Lewis explores the various and subtle ways that white southern segregationists used anticommunist rhetoric to undermine the civil rights movement. He examines the thoughts, traditions, and actions of those southerners from the end of the Second World War to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the period when the movement put the South's segregated society under immense pressure. In response, the white South dug in its heels. Under the banner of ""Massive Resistance,"" segregationists developed an array of weapons to defend their way of life. While they practiced traditional southern tactics - calling opponents ""outsiders"" and occasionally employing mob violence - they made sophisticated use of the pervasive Cold War climate of the 1950s and 1960s, labeling their opponents ""reds"" and accusing them of being led, run, and financed by communists. However, Lewis shows that segregationists were not monolithic reactionaries but rather intelligent, dynamic, and multifaceted in their defense of white supremacy. He discusses the critical distinction between those who cynically exploited the issue of communism and those who genuinely believed in the threat, and he emphasizes that the majority of segregationists chose their red-baiting targets with clinical accuracy for maximum effect. Others refused to red-bait altogether for fear of detracting from their own favored resistance strategies, such as promoting racial science or putting up complex legal barricades. Many segregationists showed an acute awareness of their increasingly perilous position. Looking at the South in general and at the states of Virginia and North Carolina in particular, Lewis shows that the border states were keenly aware of their need to attract northern investment and could not indulge in the openly racist policies of their Deep South counterparts. As a result, their resistance became more cunning and their racism more covert. Based on oral histories and the papers of southern politicians, journalists, and activists, this finely nuanced history shows how anticommunism intersected with other weapons in the arsenal of Massive Resistance.

George Lewis, a lecturer in American history at the University of Leicester, has published articles in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography and the Journal of American Studies.