The Southern Fault Line

Résumé du livre

"The white South has always been of two minds on the desirability of democracy. Throughout U.S. history some white Southerners were vigorous proponents of the American democratic project. Others thought that participation in governing was more of a privilege granted only to those who proved themselves worthy through education and wealth. Blacks, treated as chattel property, were at first omitted from the discussion, but when emancipated joined the pro-democracy side of the debate. For most of Southern history, the division was geographic-upland small farmers inhabiting the Appalachian regions supporting the democratic project and the lowland planters and slaveholders opposing it. It reflected a politics of class, poor uplanders versus well-off planters. In this book, I use historical narratives based on my classically Southern family to explore this division, and what happened to it. Because my Alabama lineage incorporates both uplanders and planters, I am able to use their stories to map out more fully this division, trace it through history, and explore its impacts on the politics and history of the South. I carry the narrative of the two Souths up through the 1960s, when I personally observed the last throes of Jim Crow and the final attempts to revive an interracial Populist coalition of North Alabama whites and Blacks in the cities and on the former plantations. The attempt failed, overwhelmed by the intense politics of racial demagoguery as the civil rights movement reached its apogee"--