The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006)
Published in 2006 by Princeton University Press in the “Politics and Society in Modern America” series. Winner of the 2007 Lillian Smith Book Award presented by the Southern Regional Council. Read Lassiter’s discussion of why he wrote The Silent Majority in this History News Network feature. Listen to Lassiter’s talk on the main themes of the Silent Majority at this forum sponsored by UVA’s Miller Center.
Book Jacket: Suburban sprawl transformed the political culture of the American South as much as the civil rights movement did during the second half of the twentieth century. The Silent Majority provides the first regionwide account of the suburbanization of the South from the perspective of corporate leaders, political activists, and especially of the ordinary families who lived in booming Sunbelt metropolises such as Atlanta, Charlotte, and Richmond.
Matthew Lassiter examines crucial battles over racial integration, court-ordered busing, and housing segregation to explain how the South moved from the era of Jim Crow fully into the mainstream of national currents. During the 1960s and 1970s, the grassroots mobilization of the suburban homeowners and school parents who embraced Richard Nixon’s label of the Silent Majority reshaped southern and national politics and helped to set in motion the center-right shift that has dominated the United States ever since.
The Silent Majority traces the emergence of a “color-blind” ideology in the white middle-class suburbs that defended residential segregation and neighborhood schools as the natural outcomes of market forces and individual meritocracy rather than the unconstitutional products of discriminatory public policies. Connecting local and national stories, and reintegrating southern and American history, The Silent Majorityis critical reading for those interested in urban and suburban studies, political and social history, the civil rights movement, public policy, and the intersection of race and class in modern America.
The Silent Majority–Select Reviews and Media Coverage
“Author Uses City as Integration Model,” Charlotte Observer (April 24, 2006)
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (April 30, 2006)
“Politics as Usual: How the Republicans Came to Rule the South” Boston Review (May/June 2006)
“White Blight,” In These Times (Sept. 12, 2006)
Journal of American History (Dec. 2006)
“Southern Unexceptionalism,” H-Net/H-Pol (April 2007)
“Interpreting Some Overlooked Stories from the South,” New York Times (May 1, 2007)
Political Science Quarterly (Spring 2007)
“Is There Still a South? And Does it Matter?” Dissent (Summer 2007)
“LR in Black and White,” Arkansas Times (Sept. 20, 2007)
“Race and the Politics of Suburbanization,” Journal of Urban History (March 2009)
Lassiter also discussed The Silent Majority in features on NPR/WUNC “The State of Things” (April 5, 2006), NPR/WFAE “Charlotte Talks” (April 2006), and NPR/KWMU’s “St. Louis on the Air” (Oct. 1, 2007).
Essays and articles drawn from The Silent Majority
“Searching for Respect: From ‘New South’ to ‘World Class’ at the Crossroads of the Carolinas,” in Charlotte, N.C.: The Global Evolution of a New South City, ed. William Graves and Heather A. Smith (University of Georgia Press, 2010), 24-49.
“Socioeconomic Integration in the Suburbs: From Reactionary Populism to Class Fairness in Metropolitan Charlotte,” in The New Suburban History (University of Chicago Press, 2006), ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, 120-143.
“The Suburban Origins of ‘Color-Blind’ Conservatism: Middle-Class Consciousness in the Charlotte Busing Crisis,” Journal of Urban History (May 2004), 549-582.
*Republished by the Organization of American Historians in The Best American History Essays 2006, ed. Joyce Appleby (Palgrave, 2006).
“Suburban Strategies: The Volatile Center in Postwar Political Culture,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Julian E. Zelizer, Meg Jacobs, and William Novak (Princeton University Press, 2003), 327-49.