Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama's Schools

The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama's Schools

Bagley, Joseph

Hardcover

Series: Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South, Book 26

20th Century United States HistoryGeneral EducationSocial Movements

ISBN10: 0820354198
ISBN13: 9780820354194
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: Dec 15 2018
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

In The Politics of White Rights, Joseph Bagley recounts the history of school desegregation litigation in Alabama, focusing on the malleability and durability of white resistance. He argues that the litigious battles of 1954-73 taught Alabama's segregationists how to fashion a more subtle defense of white privilege, placing them in the vanguard of a new conservatism oriented toward the Sunbelt, not the South.

Scholars have recently begun uncovering the ways in which segregationists abandoned violent backlash and overt economic reprisal and learned how to rearticulate their resistance and blind others to their racial motivations. Bagley is most interested in a creedal commitment to maintaining law and order, which lay at the heart of this transition. Before it was a buzz phrase meant to conjure up fears of urban black violence, law and order represented a politics that allowed self-styled white moderates to begrudgingly accept token desegregation and to begin to stake their own claims to constitutional rights without forcing them to repudiate segregation or white supremacy.

Federal courts have, as recently as 2014, agreed that Alabama's property tax system is crippling black education. Bagley argues that this is because, in the late 1960s, the politics of law and order became a politics of white rights, which supported not only white flight to suburbs and private schools but also nominally color-blind changes in the state's tax code. These changes were designed to shield white money from the needs of increasingly black public education. Activists and courts have been powerless to do anything about them, because twenty years of desperate litigious combat finally taught Alabama lawmakers how to erect constitutional bulwarks that could withstand a legal assault.

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