The forgotten story of how southern white supremacy and resistance to
desegregation helped give birth to the modern conservative movement
During the civil rights era, Atlanta thought of itself as "The City Too
Busy to Hate," a rare place in the South where the races lived and
thrived together. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, so
many whites fled the city for the suburbs that Atlanta earned a new
nickname: "The City Too Busy Moving to Hate."
In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse
explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and
elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms,
White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the meaning of
white resistance. In the end, Kruse finds that segregationist
resistance, which failed to stop the civil rights movement, nevertheless
managed to preserve the world of segregation and even perfect it in
subtler and stronger forms.
Challenging the conventional wisdom that white flight meant nothing more
than a literal movement of whites to the suburbs, this book argues that
it represented a more important transformation in the political ideology
of those involved. In a provocative revision of postwar American
history, Kruse demonstrates that traditional elements of modern
conservatism, such as hostility to the federal government and faith in
free enterprise, underwent important transformations during the postwar
struggle over segregation. Likewise, white resistance gave birth to
several new conservative causes, like the tax revolt, tuition vouchers,
and privatization of public services. Tracing the journey of southern
conservatives from white supremacy to white suburbia, Kruse locates the
origins of modern American politics.
