untimely subjects: white trash and the making of racial innocence in the postwar south

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American Quarterly, Volume 67, Number 1, March 2015, pp. 55-79 (Article)

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| 55White Trash and the Making of Racial Innocence in the Postwar South

2015 The American Studies Association

Untimely Subjects: White Trash and the Making of Racial Innocence in the Postwar South

Kirstine Taylor

“White trash” . . . gaze longingly at you from under a mat of uncultivative hair, from behind bushy, unshaven and unwashed face. With shapeless mouths agape, exposing rows of yellow teeth, their expression is a cross between a leer and the smile of a lunatic.

—Billy Ballyhoo, “I’d Rather Die,” Chicago Defender (1935)

Let no Southerner anywhere be unaware that from this sick spasm of a little group of ugly Alabamans will flow long consequences of measureless ill. For this handful—for which there is an old and ugly term, “white trash”—has put its coarse hands upon far more than its wretched victims . . . the so-called “Freedom Riders” [who were] to end segregation in transportation. The mob has thrust its ignorant and destructive fingers into the desperately thin fabric of civility and decent compromise . . . [of ] the true Southerners.

— William White, “White Trash Help Other Extremists,” Atlanta Constitution (1961)

The preceding depictions of white trash appear a mere quarter century apart and refer to similarly poor, rural white southerners, yet describe subjects marked by very different sets of racial transgression. In 1935

white trash were characterized by a palpable set of physical, behavioral, and mental deficiencies that were routinely leveraged against African Americans of the same period: stunted mental capacities, dirty and disfigured appearance, and the suggestion of sexual deviance. By the 1960s these markers of biologi-cal contamination and inferiority began to be overshadowed by a new set of transgressions. The Atlanta Constitution’s editorial on the mob violence that met the Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Alabama, in the summer of 1961 figures white trash as violent and intractably racist whites who threatened a moderate-minded South attempting to maintain “civility” in the midst of civil rights struggles. By this measure, white trash’s transgression was no longer contamination but ignorance, violence, and racist atavism. White trash had become untimely subjects unable to keep up with New South notions of racial neutrality, compromise, and law-and-order. This article begins by asking what

| 56 American Quarterly

explains the distance traveled from one type of “trash” to the other: How, and in relation to what forces, did white trash, once a category of biological deficiency, come to designate backward white extremism and violence in the postwar South? What does this traveling reveal about shifting conceptions of racial transgression in the civil rights age? And in opposite fashion, what conceptual work did white trash’s transformation perform for the production of transgression’s inverse: notions of white innocence, redemption, and virtue?

Writing in 1963, James Baldwin diagnosed Americans as willfully innocent. “A great deal of one’s energy is expended,” he wrote, “in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see. This is utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all the world over.”1 As Baldwin suggests, it takes a significant amount of will and energy to remain “willfully blind” to and guiltless of the reality of racial oppression because it involves the productive effort of not-seeing.2 Yet it is exactly this not-seeing, this innocence, that Baldwin cau-tions “constitutes the crime” of the nation and its citizenry: “This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”3 Indeed, white Americans’ historied penchant for both knowing that racial inequality exists but construing that inequality as separable from their own racial advantages, their habit of interpreting economic privilege as a matter of individual merit or virtue, and their studied denouncement of the worst southern crimes while ignoring the presence of other forms of racial domination indicate that our national condition has long been marked by a severe disconnection from reality. In this sense, racial innocence is the alchemy by which Americans turn enduring and otherwise visible inequality into re-demptive stories of rights, equal protection, individualism, and progress. It is Americans’ belief in their own blamelessness for the material realities of racism.

White trash offers a productive lens on questions of racial innocence pre-cisely because they, as well as the related categories of crackers, rednecks, and “mean whites,” have at various periods lost their claim to the virtue, property, and innocence long connected to whiteness. In recent years there has been a marked resurgence of joking about white trash in the popular mainstream, as well as a corresponding swell of cultural analyses of such whites. While their identity is worthy of scholarly attention, I am interested in white trash not as a joke, resurgent cultural artifact, or even an internally fraught identity strangely inhabiting both privilege and degradation.4 What is puzzling, and worth inves-tigating, about white trash is its shifting sociopolitical significance over time


in relation to notions of racial innocence. Just as racism itself is an “artifact of geographic, political, and economic interests,” so is our collective blindness to racism a product of geography, politics, and class.5 As the cultural inverse of the “propertied” nature of whiteness—what George Lipsitz, following W. E. B. Du Bois, termed “the possessive investment in whiteness”—white trash have historically been marked in terms of deficit, their whiteness uniquely visible as deficiency.6 But where some understand this classification as itself tragic or racist, I work to reveal it as an important and perhaps necessary marker of racial transgression that enabled the smooth rebuilding of white racial innocence after the celebrated fall of Jim Crow.7

Scholars of race, whiteness, and class have unearthed the long history of racial domination in white elites’ negotiations to curtail the threat of working-class rebellion, break populist uprisings, and hold fast to political and economic power.8 These scholars follow Du Bois, who recognized that in the nation’s historical bargain with white supremacy, even the most poverty-stricken whites received a “psychological wage” in exchange for refuting their class interests with black and other nonwhite labor, such that for the African American, freedom was “God,” to the poor white, a racial “wage,” and for the southern elite, the “control of the poor worker.”9 Using white trash as a lens, I investigate how the historical bargain to shore up political and economic power produces blindness toward—innocence of—that very bargain. Beginning in the 1940s and escalating through the 1960s, white trash, as figures of racial transgression, underwent a significant transformation that smoothed the reentrenchment of racial innocence during the era of Cold War racial liberalism and civil rights. Once figures of suspect racial “purity,” seen as contaminated and primitive, white trash in the postwar period operated as a repository of intractable anti-black violence, mob disorder, and retrogression. Critically, this transformation occurred against and was aided by the bourgeoning “New South” movement spearheaded by southern political moderates, who sought to preserve the benefits of racial stratification without the coarseness of white violence or explicitness of state-mandated segregation. Smoothing the influx of northern capital to ballooning southern economies in the postwar decades, moderates insisted on “law and order” decency and “color-blind” progress in an agree-ment to preserve the racial interests of the New South’s white business elite.

This achievement—the exoneration of the New South from the very racial exclusion their policies enforced—rested partly in articulating white trash as ultimate figures of retrogressive white violence who threatened the emergence of the capital-rich New South. White trash’s movement from racial contaminant to guilty white, I argue, brings into sharp relief the class-inflected transformation


of racial innocence during the critical civil rights years: southern moderates’ commitment to law-and-order (against white trash violence) and New South progress (against white trash backwardness) were together formative of not only the protection of emergent white middle-class interests in the postwar South but also a new kind of racial innocence that has since settled into contemporary national discourses on race.

1890–1930: Antecedents of Postwar Innocence

Let us consider more fully our historical puzzle: through what narratives and negotiations did white trash emerge as a category of southern violence, racism, and backwardness in the civil rights decades, and how was this productive of racial innocence? To gain traction on this question, I work here to spotlight early understandings of white trash, from its usage in the Progressive Era through the early 1940s, when its connection to notions of racial transgression and innocence began to change in important ways.

In its early usage by white elites after the Civil War, the contents of white trash’s racial transgression were found primarily in their perceived “degeneracy” or “primitiveness” rooted in their low class position and proximity to black labor.10 In the Progressive Era South, poor rural whites, and particularly those who labored alongside blacks (and in parts of the region, Mexicans) as tenant farmers and sharecroppers posed a threat to the economic dominance of the agrarian elite and the solidification of the Democratic Party in the South. In the 1890s, C. Vann Woodward notes, the region’s rural “white masses” were beginning to regard former slaves as “a political ally bound to them by eco-nomic ties and common destiny.”11 Populist leaders like Georgia representative Thomas Watson and North Carolina senator Marion Butler called on their poor white supporters to reverse “race hatred, political proscription, lynch law, and terrorism” and foster “tolerance, cooperation, justice and political rights for the Negro” in order to escape what Watson called “the financial despotism which enslaves you both.”12 Yet this cross-racial alliance was not to be. South-ern Democrats, leveraging a stratagem nearly as old as American slavery itself, subjected blacks to violence, segregation, and disfranchisement and subjected poor white populists to “every type of epithet, scurrility, and insult [they] could devise.”13 As the historian Neil Foley puts it, they became a “white scourge,” the “‘trash’ of whiteness” in the making of the Solid South.14

Against the backdrop of Democratic Party dominance, southern progres-sive elites linked white trash’s class position decisively to the problem of racial transgression.15 As with interracial relationships, for progressives, white trash


threatened the purity of white populations, the health of state resources, and the region’s economic viability.16 Labeled “unfit,” “feebleminded,” “degener-ate,” and “racially inferior,” southern Democratic elites directed almost as much attention to poor whites as to blacks, and described both in terms of racial primitiveness. Where the threat of interracial sex was contained through lynching, segregation, and antimiscegenation laws, progressives built eugenic facilities principally to handle the threats posed by “degenerate” whites.17 In 1907 a prominent Virginia eugenicist lamented the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South” for their “dysgenic threats to southern society.”18 By 1927 ten southern states had built eugenic institu-tions to house, sterilize, and segregate those deemed genetically “unfit” from the rest of the white populace.19 This “dysgenic” fear of white trash’s ability to contaminate the otherwise “pure” white populace carried well into the 1930s, when W. L. Funkhouser of the Georgia Medical Association contended that “the South’s ‘poor white trash’ . . . is no doubt the product of the physical and mental unfit,” and called for Georgia to “take stock of this rubbish [and] sterilize all individuals who are not physically, mentally or emotionally capable of normal offspring.”20 In this way, white trash were subject to what Julie Weise calls a “binary, eugenic definition of race embedded in law and culture to preserve the political interests of wealthy elites.”21 Caught up in the region’s eugenicist movement, then, was a sense of racial innocence based on propertied whites’ purity and poor whites’ primitiveness—a move that contained any political threat to the southern Democratic Party and attendant white class interests in the reviled contaminants of black and white trash bodies.

This was all to change beginning in the mid-1940s. Just as eugenic in-stitutions began to wane and Jim Crow came under siege by domestic and international pressures, the metrics on which racial innocence was measured were also in transition. White trash increasingly became associated with the crimes of Jim Crow: violence, lynching, terrorism, and virulent prejudice. Gunnar Myrdal, writing in 1944, exemplifies the messiness of this transforma-tion, describing white trash as “a lower class of Southern whites who are also poor, uneducated, coarse and dirty,” despised by upper-class whites, who are “disposed to regard them as ‘just as bad as niggers,’” and by blacks, “who have called them ‘poor white trash.’”22 At the same time that Myrdal linked white trash with primitiveness, his insistence that their class status explained their prejudice is indicative of the emergence of racial liberalism, which regarded intractable racism as irreconcilable with foundational constitutional values and demanded that government intervene to prevent the manifestation of personal prejudice in state laws and policy.23 Indeed, Myrdal argued that the


resolution of “race relations” depended on white trash’s relinquishment of overtly racist sentiments:

The lower class whites have been the popular strength behind Negro disenfranchisement, and are the audience to which the “nigger-baiting” political demagogue of the South appeals. They create the popular pressure upon the Southern courts to deny Negroes equal justice. They form the active lynching mobs; they are responsible for most of the petty outrages practiced on the Negro group. They are the interested party in economic discrimination against Negroes.24

Myrdal casts poor whites as iconic racist individuals, the face of violent southern exceptionalism.25 Where white trash once were simply primitive, in the 1940s they became also guilty—of inciting political demagoguery, antiblack mob violence, lynchings, and racial “outrages” large and small. This language mir-rors white trash’s popular descriptions in the immediate postwar years as both poor and deeply racist. Recalling the formation of a neo-Nazi group in 1946 that became the forerunner of the resurgent Klan in Atlanta, its founder noted that the organization “welcomed all members of the Whiteman’s community,” but “worked mainly among the underprivileged—those of our brothers and sisters many of the politicians call ‘poor white trash.’”26 Myrdal, like southern-ers themselves, distinguished between upper- and lower-class whites based on overt racial behavior: what made upper-class whites distinct was their role in occupying the higher echelons of southern society, but what made lower-class whites distinct was their passionately racist and violent behavior toward blacks in almost every aspect of life. By contrast, “real” whites do not display such aggressively racist attitudes, nor do they visit overt violence on blacks. In this way, white trash of the immediate postwar years continued to harbor mental deficiencies, but now those deficiencies meant not the “smile of a lunatic” but their irrational commitment to white supremacy and violence that wealthier whites had, at least discursively, escaped.27

1940s–1960s: The Making of Postwar Racial Innocence

Myrdal’s formulation of poor rural whites, while notably in flux, marked the 1940s as a critical moment of change in the life of white trash as it relates to visions of racial transgression and innocence, and the next quarter century saw even greater shifts in these conceptions. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and the growing black civil rights movement, white trash were increasingly cast as iconic southern racists prone to race-based violence, mob disorder, and extremism. In what follows, I trace how—through what forces,


political negotiations, and rhetoric—white trash came to be identified with the incendiary sins of the South in the postwar age, and how this movement helped entrench blindness toward new forms of racial inequality that emerged after the fall of Jim Crow. In brief, I argue that white trash’s transformation was a product of the postwar New South movement.28 The movement’s elite, southern political moderates, worked to preserve racial stratification as the region underwent a significant relocation of economic and political power from agrarian strongholds to capital-rich cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Jacksonville. In conformity with the northern racial values on which south-ern state economies and the new political elite increasingly depended, white trash became the ultimate figures of extralegal white violence in a New South committed to law-and-order, race-neutral state policies, and “color-blind” progress—the very commitments that sanctified white racial innocence in the postwar age.

“A Part of the New America”: Toward the New South

My historicization of white trash as figures of racial guilt draws on recent work on the role that political moderates played in the making of the New South.29 Preferring to focus on the civil rights movement and white “massive resistance” to Brown, relatively few scholars acknowledge these architects of southern postwar policy. When acknowledged, scholars typically treat them as occupying a pragmatic “broad middle ground,” ideologically somewhere between liberal integrationists and hard-line segregationists, who are to be credited with saving public schools from the massive resistance movement, divesting the Black Belt South of political demagoguery, and reawakening the region’s commitment to industry and law-and-order.30 Although many northern liberals applauded them for precisely these commitments, this image of southern moderates misinterprets their actual policy preferences and errs in taking moderates at their word, seeing their opposition to massive resistance, white violence, and state-mandated segregation as evidence of their racial egalitarianism and progressivism.31

Recalling moderates in 1977, the journalist Calvin Trillin more accurately remarked that while these violence-averse segregationists “had never been caught throwing a rock at a Negro,” they also “valued something more than segregation—business.”32 These three preferences—business growth, law-and-order, and segregation—together formed the basis for the emerging New South order and white trash’s place in it. Indeed, these preferences were constitutive of the same political trajectory. As the historian Matthew Lassiter explains,


beginning in the 1940s, the region’s “postindustrial Sunbelt economy emerged as the dominant method of social organization” and the “clear fulcrum of politi-cal power.”33 Nationalized production structures and contracts with northern industry not only introduced a new economic structure to southern states but also prompted a shift in political power from the depleted agrarian strongholds of the Democratic Party to rapidly growing suburban cities.34 In the words of one journalist, southern moderates, in their “efforts to realize the industrial potential of their region . . . have been striving to complete the integration of the Southern economy with the economy of the Federal union.”35

The New South’s growing dependence on northern investors and national markets greatly influenced its advocates’ approach to race, and particularly their response to Brown. By the mid-1950s, as the majority of southern states launched a strident massive resistance movement against school desegrega-tion, which sought to nullify the Supreme Court’s decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power,” and hosted several highly visible episodes of antiblack terrorism connected to civil rights and integration activism, southern moder-ates recognized these developments as threats to the emerging New South economy and political order.36 Defiance of federal courts and spectacular racial violence, they feared, would disrupt the flow of northern investments, interfere with the success of the emergent moderate political elite, and worse still, invite federal intervention in southern school systems. As Governor J. P. Coleman of Mississippi explained on a visit to New York to attract industry to his state in 1956, “We’ve adopted the motto, ‘Anything offensive to industry is offensive to us and must be removed from the picture.’”37 The Mississippi governor, alongside other moderates such as North Carolina’s Luther Hodges, Tennessee’s Frank Clement, Florida’s LeRoy Collins, and even Georgia’s Ernest Vandiver, consciously rejected entrenching massive resistance tactics and racial extremism, viewing them as barriers to securing contracts with northern in-vestors and thus the influx of capital and jobs to their states. In the words of one northern journalist, the “growing middle class” in the South is “a factor of stability, a check on the back-country people, among whom the mob spirit has been endemic.”38

But if the threat of “back-country” mobism was palpable, continued seg-regation itself was not, on the logic of most moderates, a barrier to economic development. By all accounts, white southerners, whether moderates or massive resisters, preferred continued racial separation in the wake of Brown.39 Even as Coleman and his moderate brethren identified the blunter tactics of massive resistance as politically and economically dangerous, they maintained that racial


separation was vital to the stability of the New South and its constituency: middle-class whites who were quickly filling the bourgeoning suburbs of cities like Atlanta and Charlotte. However, the means by which racial separation and stratification was accomplished was certainly a potential problem. If seg-regation was seen to cause public disorder, racial upheaval, and white violence rather than promote growth and stability, moderates worried, states would risk injuring southern state economies. In solidifying the pillars of economic and political power in the New South, southern moderates leveraged a language friendly to racial liberalism popular in the rest of the nation: law-and-order decency, race-neutral state laws, and regional progress. Thus, when Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver announced, in the year after Brown, “the New South, I am confident, wants to be part of the nation—a part of the mainstream of twentieth century life—a part of the new America,” he articulated the primary manifesto of the emergent southern moderate elite: the end of southern ex-ceptionalism and the dawn of regional convergence through the creation of a mainstream, business-minded, lawful, and above all “new” South.

For moderates, just as disastrous as the disruption of northern investment in the region was the potential for national and court scrutiny of the direction of state education policy after Brown. At the same time that moderates recognized that industrial recruitment required “secession from the traditional values of the distinctive South,” they also worked to preserve maximum amounts of racial segregation in schools, thwart civil rights efforts, and preserve states’ rights against “federal intervention.”40 As Ralph McGill, influential editor of the Atlanta Constitution, the largest regional newspaper, put the moderate stance in 1957: “Moderate governors will make the transition. . . . By gently gerrymandering a few school districts they presently can confine the immediate problem of integration to a mere handful of schools. Their states will escape violence. Their school systems will remain strong. Industry will not be fright-ened away.”41 To accomplish all of this, McGill pointed out, moderates had to “hold in check the Old South segregationist sections” while maneuvering to confine desegregation to a small number of schools.42 As Jeff Roche and Anders Walker have separately argued, political moderates sought a path of “restruc-tured” rather than “massive” resistance to school desegregation that centered on pursuing policies like pupil placement and local option school plans. These policies avoided strategies of open defiance to desegregation that, because they were ostensibly race-neutral, left segregation largely intact.43 Indeed, moder-ates were successful in thwarting large-scale integration. Fully five years after North Carolina adopted local-option school policy, for instance, just 0.026


percent of black schoolchildren in the state attended desegregated schools—a figure that was lower than in some solidly massive resistance states and would not rise above 1 percent until after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.44

Far from conflicting projects, New South boosterism, continued segregation, and anti-extremism went hand in hand for southern moderates, and as the next section details, together formed the backdrop to white trash’s transition into a category designating white violence and retrogressive extremism. There, I also underscore the complexity of law-and-order’s discursive meaning in the South at midcentury. Importantly, the scholars Michael Flamm and Vesla Weaver, among others, have worked to expose the rise of law-and-order politics during this period as a product of white discomfiture with black civil rights gains and rising fears of black criminality and rioting—narratives most strongly articu-lated by southerners sympathetic to massive resistance.45 Flamm contends that “conservatives spoke with a cogent ‘moral voice’ on law and order,” forcing liberals to likewise adopt increasingly severe crime policies and signaling the “end to the brief era of liberal ascendancy.”46 Similarly, Weaver argues that southern conservatives developed a rhetoric of black criminality that led to expanded national crime policy. Strikingly, I find that law-and-order politics was not chiefly a construction of southern conservatives and extremists but a product of the New South movement.

“This Is Not My Dixie”: White Trash in the New South

In their effort to shore up white economic and political power in the New South, southern moderates also performed another kind of work, redefining the terms of racial transgression and innocence for a new political reality. White trash’s transformation in the postwar decades, from a category designat-ing contamination and primitiveness to a category designating volatile racial extremism, mob action, and violence, offers a lens into the creation of concep-tions of racial innocence in the making of the New South. As Marek Steedman explains, “The successful defeat of the Jim Crow order by the organized Black community and civil rights activists did not end racial stratification. It did not end, therefore, relative White privilege and the ideological need to justify and explain that privilege.”47 As the guilty, violence-prone corollary to the law-and-order champions of New South progress, white trash helped cement the entrenchment of racial innocence after the fall of Jim Crow. Moderates, seeking to emphasize the lawfulness of their school plans, the orderliness their policies imposed on otherwise mob-dominated desegregation battles, and the economic progress such law-and-order would enable, increasingly conflated


racial guilt with the crude class behavior of rural white trash. Jettisoning white trash as unrepresentative of the region enabled moderates to preserve class-inflected benefits of white supremacy after Jim Crow’s collapse and articulate those benefits as racially innocent, virtuous, and blameless.

To be sure, the argument here is not that white trash and similarly extremist whites were any less violent than they appeared to be or that charges of racism were undeserved; this much is assuredly false. But by crafting white trash as repositories of racial backwardness and violence, political moderates produced fertile ground for the renewal of racial innocence: racial violence and domina-tion in other forms, particularly those designed by moderates themselves, was conceptualized as conforming to national standards of law-and-order, racial neutrality, and pragmatic racial progress largely because what counted as “vio-lence” was displaced onto the regrettable figures of white trash.48

Central in this development was moderates’ ability to recast segregation policy as a matter of law (and law-and-order) versus violence. For instance, when North Carolina governor Luther Hodges sought to implement moderate “pupil placement” school policy in 1956, he consciously articulated the policy as the law-and-order alternative to the segregationist violence concurrently erupting in Clinton, Tennessee, where rioting white students carried signs stating “We Won’t Go to School with Negroes,” and in Mansfield, Texas, where restive white mobs, gathering outside a newly desegregated school, dissipated only when Governor Allen Shivers called in the Texas Rangers and intervened to support the segregationists’ cause.49 Referencing segregationist white violence in other states, Governor Hodges announced that without moderate school policies, “people are inclined to take things into their own hands, disregarding law and order. We don’t want that to happen here! Our plan offers the people a legal and orderly method of handling it to mix races.”50 Pointedly suggesting that white violence and racial trouble “could happen in North Carolina,” the governor suggested that pupil placement, which would help the state maintain large-scale segregation for years with the blessing of federal courts, provided a lawful, and law-and-order, solution to racial extremism and violence.51 North Carolina’s newspapers followed suit, the Durham Sun declaring that “the state will be feeling its way through legal channels rather than with gun and tank,” and the Greenville Daily Reflector pledging that North Carolina would seek “legal solutions” to Brown rather than “confused violence.”52

At every opportunity, moderates sought to recast the South’s decision as one between mob violence and law-and-order acceptance of limited desegregation. A typical example is a political cartoon that the Atlanta Constitution ran at


the height of the Little Rock desegregation crisis in 1957 (fig. 1). In it, the South, represented as an Old Dixie southerner, tears his hair out at the choice between two offerings: “Law,” figured as a book, and “Violence,” figured as a crude wooden club.53 The cartoon ran in late September 1957, after three weeks of standoff between Governor Orval Faubus and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the day after Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect the nine black students as they entered Little Rock Central High School. Ap-pearing alongside images of armed federal troops protecting the school from jeering white bystanders and reports of the Little Rock Nine being driven out of school because of the “bloody” beatings of nearby African Americans and journalists by the “rioting” mob that had gathered outside, the cartoon draws a sharp delineation.54 It reads the Little Rock crisis not as a choice between integration and segregation of Little Rock Central High but as a choice between adherence to law and descent into violence.

Moderates accomplished this in a number of ways. First, they increasingly narrativized spectacles of white mob violence in school desegregation crises and civil rights efforts with white trash guilt. In a column written at the height of the Little Rock desegregation crisis, McGill stressed that the white “mob” behavior should not come to take over the “face of the South.”55 In fact, he notes that a great many southern whites disapproved of the mob violence on display for the nation to see: “In both Little Rock and Nashville, the citizens, white and colored, went about their business as usual. The stores had white and Negro customers. Traffic moved in streets.” Even as McGill stresses the peaceable, law-abiding nature of white southerners, he is clear that these whites support racial segregation without question. He continues: “One could not assume these peaceable white citizens approved of the Supreme Court deci-sion. But they are American citizens and are law-abiding.”56 Rather than view these nonrioting whites as segregationists, McGill recasts them as peaceable, law-abiding citizens.

Similarly, other southern publications were quick to condemn white vio-lence and link it to mobism. As one editorialist in the Moultrie Observer of Georgia bluntly put it, also concerning the Little Rock crisis, “The South is just as strongly opposed to the destruction and mobism as it is to the ill-advised efforts to force integration upon the territory. . . . The roads are but two:

Figure 1.Responding to the Little Rock school crisis, the Old South tears out his hair over the decision between “law” and “violence.” Clifford “Baldy” Baldowski, “Hair-Raising Times,” Atlanta Con-stitution, September 24, 1957. Courtesy PARS International.


Fair and foul. Real Southerners will take the former route and they will help hunt down those who take the detour.”57 The articulation of “real” southern-ers opposing “mobism” is crucial. Echoing northern concerns of mobism in Little Rock, the Arkansas Gazette denounced the actions of its state’s massive resistance forces on law-and-order terms: “The great majority of the people of Little Rock, we know, recognize that the only issue before us now is the preservation of law and order. . . . The people of Little Rock will not, we are confident, allow a tiny, militant minority to take over Central High School and run it under mob rule.”58 This, moderates feared, was disastrous for the South’s image on the domestic and international scenes. Not only would the South inevitably lose the battle for continued segregation, but in the process, the region’s image would suffer “an irredeemable blow.”59 Or, as one editorial put it, “the mob destroys what it would protect.”60 As much as moderates decried white mobs for threatening segregation and southern stability, they also proved to be a useful and often-employed touchstone on which improper and atavistic racism could be displaced. The moderate condemnation of white trash mobism turned on their relation to violence rather than their preference for segregation. Although desegregation was not desirable, these moderates chose neither the massive resisters’ insistence that Brown was unconstitutional nor the violence of white trash mobs. Their position was one of segregation within the limits of law-and-order. By recasting Little Rock as a choice between law and violence, moderate politicians, as well as newspaper commentators like McGill and Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, were able to claim white innocence against the guilt of mob violence. Moreover, by condemning the violence of white trash, they aligned themselves with law-and-order in an otherwise violence-prone South. In this way, white trash became useful objects by which southern moderates could strip themselves of racial blame even as they pursued policies of continued racial stratification.

The rearticulation of segregation as a choice between law and violence can likewise be seen in civil rights struggles. When the Freedom Riders arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, in May 1961, they were greeted by a “howling mob of white supremacists and militant segregationists.”61 As “a male member of one of Montgomery’s oldest families” put it, “The violence stirred up here is the work of white trash. . . . [The rioters are] a bunch of thugs who think they’re going to take over. Well, they’ll never see the day they run this town, we won’t have it.”62 Here, the designation of white trash turns not on opposition to black civil rights gains but on violent “take over” of an otherwise lawful white community. The use of the term mob is also significant and stands in opposi-


tion to other possible formulations of mob activity; it is the “thugs” and “white trash,” not the white middle-class moderates recrafting segregation policy to withstand court scrutiny, who deserve the designation “mob” and who display racial violence. The article’s specification of the commenter’s social positioning is likewise telling; he is a “member of one of Montgomery’s oldest families,” a classification that makes clear that even the oldest (and therefore most “real”) of white southern families are civic-minded, law-abiding, and therefore racially innocent citizens. His exclamation that “white trash” “thugs” will “never see the day they run this town” positions white trash as interlopers—both in the sense of political and social leadership and in terms of acceptance of the developing moderate racial order.

The emergence of the New South hinged on relegating overt and violent racism to the past as much as it did on industrialization, and white trash proved to be obvious and useful vessels in which to deposit such a past. For example, ties to the Old South were often rhetorically conflated with white trash violence and mobism. For this, William White’s column on the entrance of the Freedom Riders to Montgomery in 1961 is worth revisiting in its entirety. He writes:

Let no Southerner anywhere be unaware that from this sick spasm of a little group of Ala-bamans will flow long consequences of measureless ill. For this handful—for which there is an old and ugly term, “white trash”—has put its coarse hands upon far more than its wretched victims, white and Negro, who were the so-called Freedom Riders in the racially mixed bus which was to end segregation in transportation. The mob has thrust its ignorant and destructive fingers into the desperately thin fabric of civility and decent compromise by which true Southerners—the Southern gentlemen, if you will—had so long and so bravely sought to protect the real South from the violent and hateful extremism on the race question being prepared for that South by the real South-haters in the North.63

At work here is the by-now familiar figuration of white trash as violent—an “ignorant” mob that sticks “its coarse hands upon far more than its wretched victims,” the Freedom Riders. That is, it sticks its “ignorant and destructive fingers” into the moral claim of the South itself. White trash are the harbingers of destruction, but White’s lament is more for the South than the Freedom Riders themselves—whose designation as “so-called” calls into question the justness of their cause. Indeed, he contends that white trash behavior is de-structive for the part of the Old South that has survived in the New: southern “civility” and “decent compromise.” In White’s words, this genteel South is the “real South” and is being destroyed by the white trash mob. His column ends with a disavowal that serves as a diagnosis of the problem of untimeliness: “I still expect, in my heart if not in my house, to live and die in Dixie. But this


handful in Montgomery is not my Dixie—nor yet anyone’s Dixie except that ugly handful’s.”64 That is, the problem with white trash is not precisely their own primitiveness and racism but their anachronistic survival into the present to “trash” Old South virtues and New South progress. Virtues once leveraged in support of the “gentility” of slavery were now leveraged in the “civility” of moderate law-and-order politics. If Old South white supremacy traded on the contention that white southerners’ treatment of blacks was paternalistically civil and genteel, then the postwar New South traded on an updated version of this civility in the figure of the white moderate.

The linking of white racial innocence to moderates’ use of law-and-order rhetoric could not have occurred without the third element of black “lawless-ness” and “disorder” with which the moderate South viewed the black civil rights movement and desegregation efforts. In the case of the Freedom Riders, an Atlanta Constitution editorialist describing the scenes of mob violence in Alabama emphasized the disorder inspired by African American protest: “A test of law, and a test of order. For the white American, there is a duty to comply with the law. For the Negro American, there is a duty to maintain order.”65 This lament was typical and reminds us that the linking of white racial inno-cence to moderate law-and-order imperatives existed in relation to visions of both white trash violence and black “disorder.” In this sense, the ideological need for the maintenance of white racial innocence produced a triangulation between (white) law-and-order, (white trash) violence, and (black) disorder.

As the civil rights years progressed, moderates increasingly conflated mas-sive resistance groups of all stripes, from the ostensibly more acceptable White Citizens’ Councils to the ultraviolent Ku Klux Klan, with white trash racial guilt. Citizens’ Council membership spiked in the years after Brown, peaking in membership to 250,000 in the rural South, and with Mississippi alone claiming 80,000 members, in 1956.66 The massive resistance movement is perhaps best remembered for spectacular exhibitions of opposition to any desegregation at all, but the councils primarily depended on political clout in state legislatures and legal arguments like nullification and interposition.67 Contemporary descriptions of the councils reflect this duality, such that even in relation to the councils, white trash were considered those members most likely to incite violence. As one 1956 newspaper article described it:

The key point in the emerging movement [of the councils], and the sole common denomina-tor of its disparate components, is opposition to integration. Whether their unit is actually called a “council” or something else; whether they are stable, influential citizens or “white trash;” whether they have other social or political goals or not—the members agree [on opposition to integration].68


Similarly, another article states: “There is no single name for the Citizens Council Movement. . . . They range in membership from ‘white trash’ with violence in its mind to community leaders who aim to keep in check any ten-dency to ruthlessness.”69 On these formulations, white trash are both conflated with and separate from organized segregationists: where the Citizen’s Councils were made up of “stable” citizens and “community leaders,” white trash made up its most violent, irrational, and “ruthless” members.

By the 1960s white trash were in turn associated with yet another emblem of southern exceptionalist racism, the Ku Klux Klan, which was in marked decline in a majority of southern states by the decade’s end. Both nationally and regionally, the Klan and white trash became nearly synonymous. In a 1966 poll in which respondents were asked who supported the Klan, 23 percent of national respondents, 25 percent of Southern respondents, and 43 percent of African American respondents said “poor white trash.”70 Among southern respondents, this designation came behind only “white southern-ers,” “terrorists,” and “sick people.” Because respondents were asked to list two or three descriptors of who supports the Klan, these categories—Klan supporters, white trash, sick people, terrorists, and white southerners—can be read to overlap significantly in the mind of Americans in both the South and nationally through the 1960s. For a further example of this overlap, consider a 1966 editorial cartoon in which two middle-aged, cardigan-wearing white women stroll past a Klan rally complete with banners proclaiming “KKK” and “white power.” One woman says to another: “Pay no attention—it’s just the white trash back-lash”—that is, the white backlash against the increasingly moderate, law-and-order South. Here the conflation of white trash with Klan racism and vigilante violence is seamless. The image of the two respectable if somewhat dowdy women in the cartoon is equally important; just as white trash emblematized racial guilt of Old Dixie violence, middle-class moderates’ condemnation of antiblack violence fastens racial innocence onto the business-minded, law-and-order whites of the New South.

As much as their relationship to violence, white trash’s low class position was an important touchstone in southern moderates’ effort to solidify the New South’s political and economic order. At times, their class position dropped out of poor whites’ designation as “trash,” but more often these were conceptually related. Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird demonstrates this com-plexity. The “white trash” Ewells, falsely accusing an innocent African American man, Tom Robinson, of rape, resemble the poor, degenerate, and primitive Jeeters of Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel Tobacco Road. They are typical figures of “‘white trash’ who spit and lie and embody the ever-present threat of racist


violence.”71 But Lee’s white trash are also defined as racists of any class for whom “something comes between them and reason.” Atticus Finch tells his son: “As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”72 Here, the ostensibly respect-able white jury that convicts Tom is as much “trash” as the mob that gathers in the town square to lynch him or the dirt-poor Ewell family that levels the false accusation. But although the class designation of “poor” or “po’” had largely fallen out of fashion by midcentury, white trash continued to be understood as poor rural whites whose class position explained their violence, ignorance, and primitive notions of race—all characteristics that made them ill-suited to the economic and political success of the metropolitan New South.

In this way, white trash served as anachronistic survivors of racial primitive-ness problematically present in the New South. Here we witness an internal flip in the life of white racial innocence. Where in the Progressive Era South white trash failed standards of white innocence on a metric of racial purity, in the postwar South white trash took up their place as permanent transgressors of racial innocence because they too passionately insisted on white purity—a measure the New South had disposed of as indicative of the past. White trash and similarly violent whites became those who still, in the face of updated measures of racial innocence and transgression, and under the critical gaze of the nation, insisted on explicit forms of white supremacy, purity, and overt racism of a bygone era. Yet they were also figures through which white in-nocence was partially reformed. The Atlanta Constitution, for example, often used the language of the New South progressivism in its political columns. In one, urging Georgia’s governor to keep public schools open through token desegregation in a limited number of districts, a columnist argued that the “true thinking people of the State of Georgia, who have taken a stand at last, have and will continue to make enemies. But at least ‘old ties’ have been bro-ken and a new light will filter through the state. . . . Our present governor is breathing into the state fresh air, new ideas, [and] progress.”73 The rhetoric of fresh ideas, progress, and new light aligns the moderates’ success in reentrench-ing racial stratification in New South policy with breaking “old ties” to Jim Crow. Without white trash as figures of violent and anachronistic southern exceptionalism to gesture toward as those things that the South was not, the New South political moderates would have had little room with which to reconstruct white racial innocence as a matter of middle-class, law-and-order progress. Viewed this way, white trash performed important reconciliatory


work for the maintenance of material conditions of racial segregation and the desire to reestablish white racial innocence at a time it was thrown into crisis.

There are tendencies among those who study southern moderates to read their commitment to law-and-order desegregation as a virtuous strategy to save public education from the massive resistance movement or to suggest that they were those “reasonable, conscientious, and well-intentioned [whites who] resisted Brown.”74 Conversely, there are those who credit the rise of law-and-order politics itself to the tactics of racial conservatives. But moderates successfully leveraged law-and-order rhetoric to maintain critical aspects of racial stratification in the making of the New South’s political and economic order. And although the moderates’ insistence on law might seem to place them on the right side of history, their rearticulation of segregation as a choice between law and violence masked their ideological commitment to white in-nocence in the Baldwinian sense. By imagining themselves as innocent of the racial guilt that plagued lower-class white trash, southern moderates rendered their law-and-order strategy to solidify the postwar economy, secure a new political elite, and maintain racial stratification as a guiltless endeavor—and themselves, the architects of such a strategy, as racially innocent whites. Seen this way, moderates’ commitment to law-and-order desegregation (the thing that would define their innocence) is better understood as a consolidation of racial violence of a different kind—not through the violence of Jim Crow segregation and atavistic brutality but through the violence of state policies designed to protect racial segregation and exclusion from view or scorn.

Conclusion

In the last two decades, film and other media have begun to embrace white trash as both the subject and object of consumption.75 A cottage industry of books and manuals on “white trash” cooking, etiquette, and culture signifies a new definition of racial innocence for the post–civil rights era. If white trash proved constitutive of the rearticulation of racial innocence in the postwar political order, we might also ask what its resurrection today says about present avowals of a “color-blind” or “postracial” America. What does this history say about the resurgence of white trash in today’s cultural mainstream?

In closing, I suggest that white trash today cuts along constrasting visions of white racial innocence. For some, the term still signifies coarse bigotry, inap-propriate nostalgia for the Confederacy, and a peculiarly southern variant of racial conservatism. On this register, white trash continues to be identified as the remnants left over from the region’s racist and violent past—and remains the


repository of racial guilt once articulated by southern moderates in the postwar decades. But this usage has significantly declined in the post–civil rights era. Just as often, white trash is today treated as white victimization. For some, it is a racist stereotype in its own right that operates just as virulently as antiblack epithets. Matthew Wray and Annalee Newitz, for example, identify the term as “a racist epithet that marks out certain whites as a breed apart.”76 On this register, class-based discrimination recedes from view, and the victimization suffered by white trash reduces to an insistence that racial bigotry can and does target whites as well as blacks.

While the form of racial innocence at work here is clear, less straightforward is a parallel development, in which white trash has become an identity to posi-tively inhabit or defend. In White Trash Etiquette, a humorous “guide” to “trailer park manners” marketed to the demographic of its title, Verne Edstrom begins with a quiz to determine whether the reader is “decent trash” or “some kind of lowlife, like a congressman or CEO.”77 Correctly “trashy” answers include dependence on workers’ compensation and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, sexual promiscuity, haphazard (mostly domestic) violence, and dependence on petty crime for one’s monthly income. In this setting, among a mix of old and updated markers of white trash, there is something “decent” about their economic and cultural position that is missing for the leaders of government and capital. For Edstrom there is romance involved in making visible, through the humorous embrace of white trash identity, today’s eviscer-ated small towns, government corruption or mismanagement, and floundering economy. But these self-consciously trashy whites also make themselves visible in terms of white innocence: as the poor and uneducated refuse of American society that America, they seem to say, forgot were actually white, white trash names an injustice that whites are not meant to suffer.

It is perhaps not surprising that it was only after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, after African Americans (alongside other groups) gained traction in 1970s antidiscrimination law, and after the rise of neoliberal gover-nance, that white trash became an identity for poor whites to self-consciously inhabit.78 On the register offered by both Edstrom and Wray and Newitz, white trash represents an effort to cast racial innocence anew. Suggesting that rights are, in David Roediger’s phrase, “lavished upon Blacks,” today’s white trash fosters an old sense of grievance that they are, and have been, left behind and forgotten as poor whites.79 In reminding us, they cast themselves as the victims of the supposed decline of white status in the post–civil rights era, a reminder that suggests racial innocence operates on altered terms today. Where white trash was once whiteness’s foil—its violent and untimely antithesis—it


operates increasingly as a diagnosis of the alleged decline of whiteness itself, masking and preserving the assumption that whiteness deserves its privilege and its innocence.

Notes The article benefited immensely from the clear-sighted and thoughtful feedback of Jack Turner and

Michael McCann. Naomi Murakawa offered early encouragement to pursue this research, and her instinct for historically grounded work made her an indispensible advisor as it developed. I especially thank my friend and colleague Mark Golub for being an incredible interlocutor on this article from beginning to end. I presented a previous version at the Western Political Science Association Confer-ence, and thank the panel discussant, Marek Steedman, for his notes. My analysis also benefited from the comments of Rebecca Thorpe, Daniel HoSang, Allison Rank, Rachel Sanders, Hannah Walker, Sergio Garcia, and Sarah Dreier. Finally, I thank Mari Yoshihara, Sarah Banet-Weiser, the American Quarterly editorial board, and the anonymous reviewer for their clarifying comments in the review process.

1. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, in James Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (1963; repr., New York: Library of America, 1998), 722.

2. Lawrie Balfour, Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 32. See also Charles W. Mills, “Racial Liberalism,” PMLA 123.5 (2008): 1382; George Shulman, American Prophesy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Jack Turner, Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Daniel Martinez HoSang, Racial Propositions: California Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

3. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 292.4. For these sorts of analyses, see Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); and John Hartigan, Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

5. Lani Guinier, “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma,” Journal of American History 91.1 (2004): 98.

6. Barbara J. Fields, “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 60 (Fall 2001): 51; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). See also Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1707–91.

7. Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, for example, argue that white trash is a racial slur or epithet as well as a class designation (“What Is ‘White Trash?’ Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill [New York: New York University Press, 1997], 170). Shifting focus from classic whiteness studies, I am concerned with white trash not primarily as an identity group or a sideways approach to the question of white class privilege but as a conceptual and discursive category through which to trace the development of racial innocence over time. On white trash identity, see Hartigan, Odd Tribes; and Wray, Not Quite White.

8. See, for instance, Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Com-munity (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1973); C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: Oxford University Press, 196); and Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). More broadly on white southern poverty and notions of the “underclass,” see Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclass from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1993).


9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935; repr., New York: Free Press, 1998), 700, 347.

10. White trash has a long and puzzling history that predates the Civil War, tracing to the antebellum South (Wray, Not Quite White).

11. Woodward, Tom Watson, 222.12. Quoted in ibid., 220.13. On racial slavery as a stratagem to contain the threat posed by an alliance of slaves, black freemen,

and poor whites, see Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom.14. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1997), 6.15. Despite the dominance of the progressive elite’s formulation, the meaning of white trash varied in usage.

Some, for instance, wrote sentimentally of the prospect of “‘po’ white trash” to escape the prejudice of their conditions and achieve “respectability.” For instance, the novelists Ellen Glasgow and Harry Harrison Kroll’s treatment of white trash was highly sentimental. See “The Crompton Family,” New York Times, September 13, 1902; “Class and Caste in Old Virginia,” New York Times, June 26, 1909; H. I. Brock, “Southern Romance Is Dead,” New York Times, April 12, 1925; and August Tucker, “Ambitious Share-Cropper Escapes from the Hoe,” New York Times, October 31, 1937. Others, such as the Georgia-born novelist Erskine Caldwell, worked to reveal the injustice of the region’s severe rural poverty by exposing the full horror of white trash’s “degradation”: incest, sexual aggression, physical disfigurations, mental incapacity, and dirtiness. See Karen A. Keeley, “Poverty, Sterilization, and Eu-genics in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road,” Journal of American Studies 36 (2002): 23–42; and Betsy I. Nies, “Defending Jeeter: Conservative Arguments against Eugenics in the Depression Era South,” in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency in American Mass Culture in the 1930s, ed. Susan Currell and Cristina Cogdell (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 140–63. Lewis Hine’s activist photography arguably also falls into this category: see Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Child-hood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Still others, such as South Carolina’s Coleman Blease and Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo, sought to politically capitalize on the newly reinforced prejudices of white trash and rednecks in the resurgent grassroots populism of the 1910s and 1920s. See Bryant Simon, “The Appeal of Cole Blease of South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 62 (1996): 57–86; Stephen A. West, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1915 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Stephen Cresswell, Red-necks, Redeemers, and Race: Mississippi after Reconstruction (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006); and Chester M. Morgan, Redneck Liberal: Theodore G. Bilbo and the New Deal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985).

16. For the historical link between white innocence and biological notions of racial purity during the Progressive Era, see Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Bernstein, Racial Innocence; and Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

17. Gregory Dorr, “Defective or Disabled? Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (2006): 377. On the connection between segregation, antimiscegenation, and progressivism, see Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Julie Novkov, Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State, 1965–1954 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Marek Steedman, Jim Crow Citizenship: Liberalism and the Southern Defense of Racial Hierarchy (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

18. Quoted in Dorr, “Defective or Disabled,” 375.19. Nies, “Defending Jeeter,” 124.20. Quoted in Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 1.21. Julie Weise, “Mexican Nationalisms, Southern Racisms: Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the U.S.

South, 1908–1939,” American Quarterly 60.3 (2008): 752.22. Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, vol. 2 (New

Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 596.


23. On the emergence of racial liberalism in postwar America, see Guinier, “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy.”

24. Myrdal, American Dilemma, 598.25. “Southern exceptionalism” is the familiar narrative that the South is the perpetual location of American

racist extremism from which the rest of the nation is largely innocent. See Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

26. Quoted in Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 46.

27. On post–civil rights racism as irrationality, see Ian Haney Lopez, “‘Nation of Minorities’: Race, Eth-nicity, and Reactionary Colorblindness,” Stanford Law Review 59 (2007): 985–1064.

28. The present article examines the New South movement in the post–World War II South. The term New South itself has a long history in the region, signifying industrial growth, affiliation with northern corporatism, metropolitan development, flexible labor markets, and modernization. The New South was originally popularized in the postbellum years among nonagrarian white elites and those who blended dedication to industrial “boosterism” with an ethos of “progress.” As Woodward noted, the creed of the New South from the beginning “had the color of a slogan, a rallying cry. It vaguely set apart those whose faith lay in the future from those whose heart was with the past.” See C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), xi. The postbellum New South movement failed to gain regional traction in the agrarian-centered southern economy, but neither the movement’s language nor its general ethos of industry, corporatism, and free (unregulated) markets was lost. Industrial development continued in pockets of the region, and midcentury southern moderates self-consciously seized on the language of the New South and embraced the term with all the heart of a political “rallying cry” that promised to draw a bright line between the past and the future. Postwar moderates were far more successful in securing the economic development, metropolitan growth, and ethos of New South progress than were their postbellum predecessors. Indeed, if Woodward’s Origins of the New South examines the South’s initial but fated postbellum foray into industrialization, Numan V. Bartley’s The New South, 1945–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995) signals its definitive arrival in the mid-twentieth century. On the postbellum New South movement, see Harold E. Davis, Henry Grady’s New South: Atlanta, a Brave and Beautiful City (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (1992; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Woodward, Origins of the New South; and Numan V. Bartley, “In Search of the New South: Southern Politics after Reconstruction,” Reviews in American History 10.4 (1982): 150–63. For critiques of the postbellum New South ethos, see W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially “Of the Meaning of Progress” and “Of the Wings of Atlanta”; and Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Knopf, 1970). On the New South in the midcentury and post–World War II South, see Bartley, New South; James C. Cobb, Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–90 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993); and Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

29. See especially Lassiter, Silent Majority; Jeff Roche, Restructured Resistance: The Sibley Commission and the Politics of Desegregation in Georgia (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1998); Anders Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used “Brown v. Board of Education” to Stall Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

30. Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950’s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1969); Matthew Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis, The Moderate’s Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Clive Webb, Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

31. Robert Kennedy, for instance, “congratulated the state of Georgia for there not being any violence” associated with moderate-led desegregation policy in Atlanta (Ernest Vandiver press release, August 31, 1961, series IV, box 7, folder 7, Ernest Vandiver Papers, University of Georgia). And when North Carolina adopted moderate school policies designed to restrict desegregation to a few select schools, the state was hailed as “courageous,” “invaluable,” and a “Southern peacemaker.” See “North Carolina Sets School Test,” New York Times, July 28, 1957; and Wallace Carroll, “The Price of Turmoil: An Appraisal of the Impact of School Clash on South’s Quest for Industry,” New York Times, October 2, 1959.


32. Calvin Trillin, “Reflections: Remembrance of Moderates Past,” New Yorker, March 21, 1977, 85.33. Lassiter, Silent Majority, 11.34. Robert Mickey, Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep

South, 1944–1972 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). See also the complex theorizations of southern politics’ transformation at midcentury found in the work of Joseph Crespino, Kevin Kruse, and Lisa McGirr, which centralize the role that industry played in the region’s transition to modern conservatism: Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2007); McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2002, repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). See also Elizabeth Jacoway and David Colburn, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

35. Carroll, “Price of Turmoil.”36. Members of the United States Congress, The Southern Manifesto, March 11, 1956, www.pbs.org/wnet/

supremecourt/rights/sources_document2.html.37. Quoted in “Mississippi Offers ‘Anything’ to Industry,” New York Times, April 19, 1957. On Coleman’s

role as a figure of moderate southern politics, see Walker, Ghost of Jim Crow.38. Carroll, “Price of Turmoil.”39. Roche, Restructured Resistance.40. Lassiter, Silent Majority, 11.41. Ralph McGill, “What Is a Moderate?” Atlanta Constitution, October 2, 1957.42. John Popham, “Parley Will Test Moderate View,” New York Times, September 20, 1957.43. Walker’s term for these policy innovations is “strategic constitutionalism” (Roche, Restructured Resistance;

Walker, Ghost of Jim Crow).44. North Carolina repealed formal school segregation laws and adopted local option in 1956. Figures

are from 1961. See Michael Klarman, “Brown, Racial Change, and the Civil Rights Movement,” Virginia Law Review 80.1 (1994): 9. In 1964 Louisiana (0.6 percent) and Virginia (1.6 percent), both massive resistance states, had slightly higher percentages of black students attending previously white schools than North Carolina (0.5 percent). See also Davison Douglas, “The Rhetoric of Moderation: Desegregating the South the Decade after Brown,” Northwestern University Law Review 89 (1993): 95.

45. Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Vesla Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development 21 (Fall 2007): 230–65. In a notable departure from this trajectory, Naomi Murakawa spotlights the role that northern liberals played in the making of law-and-order politics and policy in postwar and post–civil rights America. See Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

46. Flamm, Law and Order, 2, 179.47. Marek Steedman, “‘Walk with Me in White’: Autonomy in a Herrenvolk Democracy,” Du Bois Review

8.2 (2011): 332.48. Scholars that interrogate the production of law (and order) as an altered form of racial violence in the

postwar era include Naomi Murakawa and Mark Golub. See especially Murakawa, First Civil Right; and Mark Golub, “Remembering Massive Resistance to School Desegregation,” Law and History Re-view 31 (August 2013): 491–530. For a theoretical text on the relationship between law and violence, see Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” in Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

49. “Negro Pupils Enter Tennessee School,” New York Times, August 27, 1956; John Popham, “Tennessee Is Hit by New Violence on Segregation,” New York Times, September 4, 1956.

50. Luther Hodges, speech before North Carolina Advisory Committee on Education, April 5, 1956, series 4.2, box 172, folder 2060, Hodges Papers, University of North Carolina.

51. The NAACP, despite filing more cases challenging school segregation in North Carolina in the 1950s than in any other state, was unable to get the state’s combination of local option and pupil placement ruled unconstitutional until the following decade—and even then, much of the state’s school policy held (Davison Douglas, “The Rhetoric of Moderation: Desegregating the South the Decade after Brown,” Northwestern University Law Review 89 [1993]: 95).


52. Quoted in Charles Dunn, “An Exercise of Choice, North Carolina’s Approach to the Segregation-Integration Crisis in Public Education” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1959, 146, 149, series 3, folder 45, Pearsall Papers, University of North Carolina).

53. “Hair-Raising Times,” Atlanta Constitution, September 24, 1957; Luther A. Huston, “Rangers Called in Race Disorder,” New York Times, September 1, 1956; New York Times, “Integration Troubles,” September 2, 1956.

54. Keith Fuller, “Eight Students Driven Out by Fighting,” Atlanta Constitution, September 24, 1957.55. Ralph McGill, “The Face of the South,” Atlanta Constitution, September 12, 1957.56. Ibid.57. Moultrie Observer, “The South Won’t Tolerate.”58. “Editorial Comment of Southern Newspapers on Use of Troops,” New York Times, September 26,

1957.59. Ralph McGill, “The Face of the South,” Atlanta Constitution, September 12, 1957.60. “The South Won’t Tolerate Violent Acts of Mobsters,” Atlanta Constitution, quoted from the Moultrie

Observer, October 5, 1957.61. William R. Clarry, “Montgomery Mood,” Wall Street Journal, May 24, 1961.62. Ibid.63. William S. White, “White Trash Help Other Extremists,” Atlanta Constitution, May 26, 1961.64. Ibid.65. “May Our Children Look Back Proudly on Our Response to Lawful Duty,” Atlanta Constitution, July

3, 1964.66. Lassiter, Silent Majority, 29. “Woman Recounts Little Rock Role,” New York Times, June 15, 1956.67. Bartley, Massive Resistance.68. John Popham, introduction, New York Times, March 13, 1956.69. John Popham, “Parley Will Test Moderate View,” New York Times, September 20, 1957.70. Luis Harris, “Great Majority Condemn Klan,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1966. The Harris poll

supplied respondents with a list of words and asked, “Which two or three do you think best describe the kind of people who support the KKK?” The list of words supplied were terrorists, white southerners, sick people, communists, poor white trash, bad people, bigots, red-blooded Americans, patriots, good people, Negroes, and none or not sure.

71. Martha Merrill Umphrey and Austin Sarat, Reimagining “To Kill a Mockingbird” (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 3.

72. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960; repr., New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 364–65.73. “Pulse of the Public,” Atlanta Constitution, February 15, 1960.74. Walker, Ghost of Jim Crow, 6.75. See, e.g., the casual antics in Michael Addis, Poor White Trash (Marina del Ray, CA: Michael Addis

Productions, 2000); Gregory Thomas Garcia, My Name Is Earl (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Television, 2005–9); and Here Comes Honey BooBoo (Burbank, CA: Authentic Entertainment, 2012–14).

76. Wray and Newitz, White Trash, 2.77. Verne Edstrom, White Trash Etiquette: The Definitive Guide to Upscale Trailer Park Manners (New York:

Broadway, 2006), 1.78. On the rise (and fall) of antidiscrimination law in the 1970s, see Alan Freeman, “Antidiscrimination

Law: The View from 1989,” Tulane Law Review 64 (1989): 1407–41; and Laura Beth Nielsen, Rob-ert Nelson, and Ryon Lancaster, “Individual Justice or Collective Legal Mobilization? Employment Discrimination Litigation in the Post Civil Rights United States,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 7 (June 2010): 175–201. On the rise of neoliberal governance and its relationship to other forms of modern conservatism, see Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-democratization,” Political Theory 34.6 (2006): 690–714.

79. This sense of grievance is indeed old: on the perceptions of white laborers during the Civil War who felt emancipation deprived them of the useful category of “not slave,” David Roediger argues that they “nurtured a sense of grievance based on the notion that they were being exploited as whites and that favor was being, or was about to be, lavished on Blacks” (Wages of Whiteness, 171).

untimely subjects: white trash and the making of racial innocence in the postwar south

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