Abstract
During the winter of 1970, President Richard Nixon received a letter of protest and despair from Dr. Robert M. Diggs, a public school parent who lived in an upper-middle-class suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina. Two years earlier, the Republican president had overwhelmingly carried the suburban Charlotte vote, and Diggs began by introducing himself as a “concerned member of the silent majority which has possibly remained silent too long.” The source of his confusion and anger, sentiments also conveyed in thousands of similar letters sent by his neighbors, was the court-ordered desegregation plan that called for busing throughout Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s countywide school system, including the two-way exchange of students from the black neighborhoods of the central city and the white subdivisions on the metropolitan fringe. How could it be possible in America, the physician wondered, for a federal judge to punish affluent communities simply because their residents worked hard, bought homes in respectable neighborhoods, and sought to rear their children in a safe environment? Without “neighborhood schools,” Diggs warned, the educational and moral standards of the middle class would rapidly deteriorate, and it seemed only reasonable that citizens showing “initiative and ambition should not be penalized for possessing these qualities.” In closing, the white father from an all-white suburb pledged that his family priorities and busing anxieties had “nothing to do with race or integration.”
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Notes
Charlotte Observer, July 12, 1975. On the busing literature, see Gary Orfield, Must We Bus?: Segregated Schools and National Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1978)
J. Harvie Wilkinson III, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)
Robert A. Pratt, The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954–89 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992)
Richard A. Pride and J. David Woodard, The Burden of Busing: The Politics of Desegregation in Nashville, Tennessee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985)
Jeffrey A. Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation: The Metropolitan Remedy in Delaware (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980)
Eleanor P. Wolf, Trial and Error: The Detroit School Segregation Case (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1981)
David J. Armor, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
James Bolner and Robert Shanley, Busing: The Political and Judicial Process (New York: Praeger, 1974)
Nicolaus Mills, ed., Busing U.S.A. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1979)
Paul R. Dimond, Beyond Busing: Inside the Challenge to Urban Segregation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985)
Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984)
Lino A. Graglia, Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976)
R. Stephen Browning, ed., From Brown to Bradley: School Desegregation, 1954–1974 (Cincinnati, OH: Jefferson Law Book Company, 1975)
Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton, and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, eds., Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: New Press, 1996).
Davison M. Douglas, ed., School Busing: Constitutional and Political Developments, vols. 1–2 (New York: Garland, 1994).
Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995)
Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996).
Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001)
Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981)
David R. Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982)
Numan V. Bartley, The New South: 1945–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995)
Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)
Black and Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Arnold R. Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953–66,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 522–50; Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction Against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 551–86
Gary Gerstle, “Race and the Myth of the Liberal Consensus,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 579–86
Ronald P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)
Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)
J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Knopf, 1985).
My central historiographical point is that much of the new grassroots political history focuses too narrowly on blue-collar Reagan Democrats or white-collar conservative ideologues. The “color-blind” ideology that percolated in the Charlotte suburbs overlapped with Republican conservatism but expanded far beyond a right-wing base, and it ought to be understood as part of an emerging bipartisan defense of suburban autonomy and middle-class residential privilege not simply from within a teleological narrative of the New Right. For an example of this kind of class-based, postpartisan analysis of the ethos of the suburban Sunbelt, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990)
David L. Kirp, John P. Dwyer, and Larry A. Rosenthal, Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
For community studies of the Charlotte busing crisis, see Davison M. Douglas, Reading, Writing, and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)
Frye Gaillard, The Dream Long Deferred (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
Paul Leonard, “Research Report,” March 1970, folder 5, box 9, Leonard, “A Working Paper: Charlotte, An Equalization of Power Through Unified Action,” April 22, 1970, folder 19, box 3; Julius L. Chambers Papers, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Library (hereinafter Chambers Papers), “Transcript of Hearing,” March 10, 1969, pp. 29a-64a, “Transcript of Hearing,” March 13, 1969, pp. 173a-219a, U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, 402 U.S. 1, No. 281 (hereinafter Swann Records). Also see Charlotte Observer, June 26, 1968, July 7, 1970, June 10, July 6, 1971; Thomas W. Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
On populism and class, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
Jennifer L. Hochschild, The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).
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© 2006 Edited by Joyce Appleby for the Organization of American Historians
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Lassiter, M.D. (2006). The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind” Conservatism: Middle-Class Consciousness in the Charlotte Busing Crisis. In: Appleby, J. (eds) The Best American History Essays 2006. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06580-3_11
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