The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.(Book review)

Historian, The, June, 2007 by Kinsella, Timothy K.

The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. By Matthew D. Lassiter. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 390. $35.00.)

The author of this study examines grassroots movements in rapidly growing suburban communities of the postwar South. He argues, through meticulous use of primary sources, that these movements of white, middle-class suburbanites were critical in transforming the political culture of the South and the nation as a whole.

Following the Brown v. Board decision [1954], Southern white supremacists mounted a massive resistance effort against court-mandated school integration by attempting to close public schools. Suburban grassroots movements of racial moderates fought successfully to keep public...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.