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Few historical events lend themselves to such a sharp delineation
between right and wrong as does the civil rights struggle.
Consequently, many historical accounts of white resistance
to civil rights legislation emphasize the ferocity of the
opposition, from the Ole Miss riots to the depredations of
Eugene "Bull" Conner's Birmingham police force to
George Wallace's stand on the schoolhouse steps. While such
hostile episodes frequently occurred in the Jim Crow South,
civil rights adversaries also employed other, less confrontational
but remarkably successful, tactics to deny equal rights to
black Americans. In Delaying the Dream, Keith M.
Finley explores gradations in the opposition by examining
how the region's principal national spokesmen—its United
States senators—addressed themselves to the civil rights
question and developed a concerted plan of action to thwart
legislation: the use of strategic delay.
Prior to World War II, Finley explains, southern senators
recognized the fall of segregation as inevitable and consciously
changed their tactics to delay, rather than prevent, defeat,
enabling them to frustrate civil rights advances for decades.
As public support for civil rights grew, southern senators
transformed their arguments to limit the use of overt racism
and appeal to northerners. They granted minor concessions
on bills only tangentially related to civil rights while emasculating
those with more substantive provisions. They garnered support
by nationalizing their defense of sectional interests and
linked their defense of segregation with constitutional principles
to curry favor with non-southern politicians. While the senators
achieved success at the federal level, Finley shows, they
failed to challenge local racial agitators in the South, allowing
extremism to flourish. The escalation of white assaults on
peaceful protesters in the 1950s and 1960s finally prompted
northerners to question southern claims of tranquility under
Jim Crow. When they did, segregation came under direct attack,
and the principles that had informed strategic delay became
obsolete.
Finley's analysis goes beyond traditional images of the quest
for racial equality--the heroic struggle, the southern extremism,
the filibusters--to reveal another side to the conflict. By
focusing on strategic delay and the senators' foresight in
recognizing the need for this tactic, Delaying the Dream
adds a fresh perspective to the canon on the civil rights
era in modern American history.
Keith M. Finley is assistant director of the Center
for Southeast Louisiana Studies and an instructor of history
at Southeastern Louisiana University. |
