The Silent Majority

The South did not move easily from Jim Crow to the 21st Century. Social and political forces clashed publicly and violently in places like Birmingham and the Deep South throughout the Civil Rights Era. But in his new book “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South” (Princeton University Press/2005) Matthew Lassiter argues that suburban sprawl transformed the political culture of the South and had a more profound effect on issues of racial integration than any top-down political strategy. Host Frank Stasio speaks with Lassiter, an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan, about his argument that instead of a unified South, the segregationist period of resistance to court-ordered integration was the result of a unified nation, and not a white supremacist southern leadership. Listener Call-In. (50:00)

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