White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism

by Kevin M. Kruse

Combined, the two cases, Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U. S. and Willis v. Pickrick, formed the first challenge to the Civil Rights Act.

the Gold-water Republican “represented old Southern Democrat segregationist ideals,” but he smartly “presented these views in a vocabulary of couched euphemisms and respectable synonyms.”

same as Maddox on race, except in a slicker way. He uses code names such as ‘property rights,’ which means ‘we ain’t gonna serve no niggers.’ ”

the rise of southern Republicanism, in the person of Bo Callaway and others like him, was largely due to the white backlash against the Civil Rights Act. No one understood this fact more than President Lyndon Johnson. Upon signing the landmark legislation, he famously told an aide that he had just “delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

By 2002 the nearly completely black character of Atlanta’s public school system was unmistakable. Of the city’s 93 schools, 54 had just 1 or 2 white students enrolled, while another 21 had no white students at all.

“Andy Young,” the reporter noted, “is doing for Atlanta what Reagan has done for America: he’s making rich white people feel good again.”16

No one understood the secessionist mentality of these suburbanites better than the new breed of politicians who represented them.

the late 1960s and early 1970s, staunchly conservative politicians rose to “defend” the suburbs around Atlanta from federal interference in local affairs in general and liberal solutions to racial problems in particular.

their politics were nothing new to the South, their party was. Throughout the once-Democratic region, a new generation of conserv...

The new suburban Republicans succeeded because they understood and articulated the secessionist attitude of their constituents.

The 1968 presidential election was the first in American history in which votes from the suburbs outnumbered the votes of either rural or urban areas, and the Republican Party did its best to capitalize on the demographic changes.

Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond, an archsegregationist who ran for president as the Dixiecrat candidate in 1948, to switch to the GOP in 1964 and then offer strong support for Nixon’s candidacy

Nixon’s “southern strategy” was not an appeal to the rural and working-class whites who supported Wallace and Thurmond. It was, instead, an appeal to middle-class suburbanites.

More than anyone else in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich embodied the politics of the suburban Sunbelt, especially suburban conservatives’ embrace of privatization, free enterprise, and local autonomy, as well as their antipathy to the federal government, public services, and the tax policies designed to support both.

Recognizing the legacies of white flight would be a first step in reducing the steady tensions between the cities and suburbs and help bring together a nation that with every year seems ever more polarized by race, region, and class. Before that can happen, however, white Americans must stop running away from their past.