In the 1960s, Mississippi was the heart of white southern resistance to the civil-rights movement. To many, it was a backward-looking society of racist authoritarianism and violence that was sorely out of step with modern liberal America. White Mississippians, however, had a different vision of themselves and their country, one so persuasive that by 1980 they had become important players in Ronald Reagan's newly ascendant Republican Party.In this ambitious reassessment of racial politics in the deep South, Joseph Crespino reveals how Mississippi leaders strategically accommodated themselves to the demands of civil-rights activists and the federal government seeking to end Jim Crow, and in so doing contributed to a vibrant conservative countermovement. Crespino explains how white Mississippians linked their fight to preserve Jim Crow with other conservative causes--with evangelical Christians worried about liberalism infecting their churches, with cold warriors concerned about the Communist threat, and with parents worried about where and with whom their children were schooled. Crespino reveals important divisions among Mississippi whites, offering the most nuanced portrayal yet of how conservative southerners bridged the gap between the politics of Jim Crow and that of the modern Republican South.This book lends new insight into how white Mississippians gave rise to a broad, popular reaction against modern liberalism that recast American politics in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

List of Illustrations and Tables ix Abbreviations xiii Acknowledgments xv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Practical Segregation 18 CHAPTER TWO: The Limits of Resistance 49 CHAPTER THREE: "The Heartland of Conservative America" 75 CHAPTER FOUR: Racial Troubleshooting 108 CHAPTER FIVE: The Ambivalence of White Christians 144 CHAPTER SIX: The Irony of School Desegregation 173 CHAPTER SEVEN: Southern Strategies in Mississippi 205 CHAPTER EIGHT: Mississippi Kulturkampf 237 CONCLUSION 267 Notes 279 Index 343