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

"In this narrative account of school desegregation in Alabama, I uncover critical changes in segregationist strategy which allowed whites to engage in a long resistance movement, well after most historians consider 'massive resistance' to have ended. Using a malleable language of 'law and order' in their efforts to thwart desegregation litigation--including the landmark Lee v. Macon County Board of Education case--whites learned to protect what rights and privilege they could by crafting superficially race-neutral legislation designed to withstand court scrutiny. Scholars have explained how whites framed their flight to suburbs and private schools as protecting their right to associate with those of their own choosing, but I reveal here an even more damaging and enduring fight to protect white money. Using the lessons learned in the school desegregation battle, legislators in Alabama in the 1970s erected barriers to white taxation that continue to cripple public education in heavily black areas. And theyhave, more recently, achieved their longtime goal of funding racially exclusive private schools. In ongoing litigation, politicians who enacted these laws, and white communities which continue to secede from county school systems, insist that their motivations have nothing to do with race. Those who read this book will know better"--
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.