Response to Bullock et al.'s Review of Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction

The research task, accordingly, was to construct wide-ranging case studies of legislative proposals, based on the explicit selection criteria laid out in chapter 2, and to examine these instances for evidence of the book’s theorized patterns of southern influence and racial anxiety in a narrative form that would allow readers to evaluate our evidence. In any event, caution is warranted in drawing parallels, as between racist backlashes a generation after achieving major legislative advances in the civil and political rights of African Americans; this emphasis risks conflating the politically relevant “South” with the “white South”—a conflation that the reviewers persuasively demonstrate can only hinder our understanding of contemporary southern politics. Precisely because southerners of all backgrounds continue to have the opportunity to engage in politics and forge coalitions, the post–civil rights situation today may be compared to the “experiment, testing, and uncertainty” that C. Vann Woodward identified in the era of “forgotten alternatives” before the suppression of the Populists and disenfranchisement of black voters.