Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Boyd, Tim

Titel

The 1966 Election in Georgia and the Ambiguity of the White Backlash

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of southern history, 2009-05, Vol.75 (2), p.305-340

Ort / Verlag

Houston: Southern Historical Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2009

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• (D-Ga.), June 2, 1966 WHEN KEN MEHLMAN, THE CHAIRMAN OF THE REPUBLICAN National Committee, told the NAACP in 2005 that his party's use of the "southern strategy" to polarize voters along racial lines had been "wrong," some observers questioned the sincerity of this belated request for forgiveness.1 Few, however, questioned the basic premise of Mehlman's remarks: namely, that the Republican Party had achieved its reemergence in the South and return to majority status in the nation by exploiting the white backlash against the civil rights movement. According to the dominant popular and scholarly opinions, this backlash turned the South into a bastion of conservative Republicanism, and these southern Republicans in turn became the driving force in shaping the national political agenda.2 In several of the best and most recent works on the postwar South, the continuing centrality of this interpretation is clearly evident.