Strategic accommodation: Civil rights opponents in Mississippi and their impact on American racial politics, 1953--1972

This study examines the opponents of civil rights advancement in Mississippi from 1953 to 1972. It considers the methods and processes whereby white leaders abandoned the rhetoric and tactics of resistance to lead a strategic accommodation to racial desegregation and African-American political involvement. Acting with a mix of motivations, the total effect of this elite's actions was to preserve as much as possible white social and political privilege.;It is important to place this accommodation in its larger political context, chiefly, the remarkable rise of American conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century. The budding national conservative movement aided the process of accommodation by giving southern civil rights opponents a new language and ideological framework with which to express their frustration with the social and political changes that were transforming the South. At the same time, southern accommodationist leaders advanced conservative ideas and policies through their increasingly subtle and sophisticated assault on the legal and political principles that supported liberal civil rights efforts. By the early 1970's, the fruits of this merger could be seen in a newly revitalized southern Republican Party and an American public that was deeply divided over the meaning and future of civil rights reform.;This work has implications for the study of both the civil rights movement and modern American conservatism. First, to the extent that scholars have explored civil rights opponents, they have largely focused on white southerners' "massive resistance" to racial desegregation. Nowhere was this resistance fiercer than in Mississippi. This study shows, however, that even in Mississippi, strategic-minded leaders were eager to abandon the tactics of resistance in favor of subtler, more effective policies of cooptation and accommodation. Second, scholarship of modern conservatism has generally followed a top-down approach that has examined conservative leaders at the national level. Studies that have looked at conservative politics at the state and local levels have focused on suburban settings, mostly in the American West. This study maintains, however, that to understand national conservative success, it is crucial that we begin with civil rights opponents in the deep South.