Southern Politics Revisited

The growth of the Republican Party in the South frequently is described as the product of an intentional, top-down strategy that used racial tensions to push white Southerners out of the Democratic Party into the GOP. This conventional account is called into question by a new book by Matthew Lassiter, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.

In The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006), Lassiter argues that the South's political realignment resulted from the grassroots mobilization of white suburban Southerners in places like Atlanta, Charlotte and Richmond. White southerners in these cities developed a "color-blind" ideology that "defended residential segregation and neighborhood schools as the natural outcome of market forces and individual meritocracy rather than the unconstitutional products of discriminatory public policies." In Lassiter's telling, this trend emerged not from overt race-baiting, but from the confluence of population shifts, metropolitan growth and waning political support for policies that promoted racial integration.

Click here to hear Lassiter discuss his book on The State of Things, a public affairs show on WUNC Radio, the NPR affiliate in Chapel Hill.