White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism.

Ferguson, Karen

Kruse, Kevin M. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

In 1963, James Baldwin wrote that "the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations." While African Americans have consistently struggled to escape the fixed racial binary to which Baldwin refers, whites have just as surely reacted to these tremors by working indefatigably to restore their separation from and superiority over blacks. As a number of American urban historians have pointed out, this process of black assertion and white reaction utterly transformed the demography of American cities after the Second World War as blacks flocked to them and whites fled from them. In his book, Kevin Kruse analyzes the ideology accompanying white flight and its ongoing impact on American politics.

Kruse traces a direct line between obscure neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan terrorists operating against residential desegregation in post World War II Atlanta, to the leaders of the conservative movement that dominates every level of American politics today, many of whom, including Newt Gingrich, have represented metropolitan Atlanta constituencies. In doing so, he puts to rest assertions that this movement is race blind or egalitarian. Instead, he demonstrates its roots in white reaction to and ultimate defection from the desegregating cities of the 1950s and 1960s and the "politics of suburban secession" that developed along with this exodus. In a beautifully written, clearly structured, and deeply researched narrative, Kruse lays out the historical processes that led to the development of modern conservatism. This political evolution resulted from the white fight against desegregation, first in neighborhoods, then in public schools, and finally in public facilities. Perceiving the civil rights movement as a fundamental threat to their rights as homeowners, taxpayers, businesspeople, and citizens, a growing number of white Atlantans began to subscribe to an explicit ideology of individualism, privatization, freedom of association, and distrust of the federal government to bolster their ongoing white supremacy.

Kruse's examination of this anti-desegregation ideology does much to explain the current state of American cities. Deeply resenting civil-rights activism that resulted in the court-mandated desegregation of "their" public recreation facilities, schools, and transportation system, for example, white Atlantans in large numbers abandoned these services, not only by ceding them to blacks, but also by refusing to support them with their tax dollars and turning to their own white-only private institutions. Suburbanization, according to Kruse, was the end result of this racialized secessionist movement from the city and its services. He thus makes an important point about the pyrrhic victories of the civil rights movement in American cities. What did this courageous, decades-long movement for racial equality achieve if it led to the white abandonment of the public sphere to African Americans, white flight from "black" cities to "white" suburbs, and white suburbanites' rejection of any connection or responsibility to city dwellers, especially if it meant higher taxes or expanded government services? Ruefully, Kruse concludes that white flight represented not the defeat, but the ultimate victory of the segregationists.

In focusing on Atlanta, Kruse made a canny choice for developing his argument for a nationwide process. Long characterized by city elites as the "city too busy to hate," Atlanta has had a nationwide reputation for racial moderation and economic progress, especially when compared to other cities in the South. Kruse topples this myth in two ways. First, by focusing on grassroots whites rather than the elite, he demonstrates that a growing majority of Atlanta's whites were vociferously opposed to desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. Starting with the working class, which was most affected by black "incursion" into formerly white neighborhoods and segregated public facilities, white opposition snowballed eventually to include even the city's putatively progressive business elite once black activism affected their bottom line. Second, he demonstrates the growing sophistication of the politics of white flight, especially in the context of postwar racial liberalism. Atlanta's grassroots anti-desegregationists learned as early as the 1950s to move away from the increasingly disreputable rhetoric of overt racism to a race-neutral language of individual rights, democracy, and Americanism, the power and logic of which ultimately appealed to white suburban interests nationwide. Certainly this strategy obscured the racist origins and ongoing racialized objectives of the politics of suburban secession, but perhaps it is wrong to accuse its architects of duplicity when they wrap their agenda in the flag. After all, as I am sure James Baldwin would ask, what could be a more American story than this one?

Karen Ferguson

Simon Fraser University