The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. By Matthew D. Lassiter. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. xviii, 390 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-691-09255-9.)

Matthew D. Lassiter has written an important book reinterpreting postwar politics in the sun belt South. Focusing on the school desegregation and school busing crises of the 1960s and 1970s, Lassiter offers an analysis of the dynamic intersection of southern race relations, metropolitan growth, and regional convergence with national patterns. Emerging sun belt metropolises such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, stood at the intersection of southern change. Downtown business elites sought to manage the integration crisis while maintaining metropolitan growth and racial separation. The suburbanization of southern whites and northern transplants, supported by government planning and growth policies, provided a base for bottom-up, grass-roots campaigns challenging racial liberalism and school busing. Middle-class parents saw spatial sprawl as an escape from school integration, and they advanced a color-blind policy in support of neighborhood schools. Court decisions and school boards pushing new desegregation methods to implement the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, such as busing, energized the "silent majority" of the sun belt suburbs. In building this explanatory model, Lassiter disputes the traditional top-down explanation of the South's political realignment with the Republican party—generally attributed to Richard M. Nixon's so-called southern strategy. Rather, he argues, political change stemmed from grass-roots "suburban strategies"—primarily the locally developed policy alternatives, responses, and outcomes of the southern school battles.

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      A new politics of race, class, and space transformed the postwar South. Building on extensive archival and newspaper research, Lassiter explores the diverse metropolitan responses to Supreme Court mandates to desegregate schools. In the late 1950s, in the wake of massive southern resistance and school closings in some places, a coalition of white, mostly women activists in Atlanta pioneered an open-schools movement built on racial moderation and minimal desegregation, followed a decade later by one-way busing that had little impact on white northern suburbs. In Charlotte, a city under court order to integrate, white and black parents ultimately fashioned a two-way busing plan that became a national model in the 1970s. In Richmond, Virginia, a court order invalidated an earlier attempt to achieve integration through a consolidation of city and county schools. In Raleigh, North Carolina, measures including scatter-site low-income housing, a city-county school merger, and crosstown busing achieved integrated schooling, but in Memphis, Tennessee, litigation and citizen movements left segregated schools in place. Forced busing became a national issue by 1972, and new court action cut short remedies such as busing to achieve school integration. As the solid South fragmented over civil rights and schooling, centrist New South Democrats emerged to challenge New Right Republicans, especially at the state level.

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      This short review cannot do full justice to the complexity of Lassiter's interpretive model or the fullness of his argument. This is a powerful book on a powerful subject. It should have a lasting impact on the way historians think about modern southern politics, urbanization, civil rights, and race relations.

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