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The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South
Suburban sprawl transformed the political culture of the American South as much as the civil rights movement did during the second half of the twentieth century. The Silent Majority provides the first regionwide account of the suburbanization of the South from the perspective of corporate leaders, political activists, and especially of the ordinary families who lived in booming Sunbelt metropolises such as Atlanta, Charlotte, and Richmond.
Matthew Lassiter examines crucial battles over racial integration, court-ordered busing, and housing segregation to explain how the South moved from the era of Jim Crow fully into the mainstream of national currents. During the 1960s and 1970s, the grassroots mobilization of the suburban homeowners and school parents who embraced Richard Nixon's label of the Silent Majority reshaped southern and national politics and helped to set in motion the center-right shift that has dominated the United States ever since.
The Silent Majority traces the emergence of a "color-blind" ideology in the white middle-class suburbs that defended residential segregation and neighborhood schools as the natural outcomes of market forces and individual meritocracy rather than the unconstitutional products of discriminatory public policies. Connecting local and national stories, and reintegrating southern and American history, The Silent Majority is critical reading for those interested in urban and suburban studies, political and social history, the civil rights movement, public policy, and the intersection of race and class in modern America.
Matthew Lassiter examines crucial battles over racial integration, court-ordered busing, and housing segregation to explain how the South moved from the era of Jim Crow fully into the mainstream of national currents. During the 1960s and 1970s, the grassroots mobilization of the suburban homeowners and school parents who embraced Richard Nixon's label of the Silent Majority reshaped southern and national politics and helped to set in motion the center-right shift that has dominated the United States ever since.
The Silent Majority traces the emergence of a "color-blind" ideology in the white middle-class suburbs that defended residential segregation and neighborhood schools as the natural outcomes of market forces and individual meritocracy rather than the unconstitutional products of discriminatory public policies. Connecting local and national stories, and reintegrating southern and American history, The Silent Majority is critical reading for those interested in urban and suburban studies, political and social history, the civil rights movement, public policy, and the intersection of race and class in modern America.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 17, 2025
Excellent and important contribution to the literature of conservatism in the 1960s and beyond. Lassiter argues convincingly that the established understanding of Nixon's "Southern Strategy" advanced and articulated by Kevin Phillips needs to be supplemented and corrected with an emphasis on the importance of a grassroots Suburban Strategy perfected in suburbs such as those of Charlotte, North Carolina (Lassiter's primary source of the material.) Should be read along Darren Dochuck's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, which expands the geographical picture and places a greater emphasis on the evangelical element. But no overview of late Sixties/Seventies politics can afford to ignore Lassiter's work.
December 10, 2022
I want to spend a little time reviewing this book, which is challenging and illuminating in so many ways (if a bit of a dense read). Lassiter reframes our understanding of civil rights-era politics and really the entire second half of 20th century US political history by arguing that suburbanization, and the creation of the "silent majority" of middle class homeowners, was the defining structural change of the politics of the era, one which national politicians like Nixon responded to more than created. This is outstanding ground-up political history that argues for the "nationalization" of US politics, or the end of a distinctly southern political history and its replacement with sunbelt suburban politics as the dominant national mode. Lassiter shoots down a number of flawed interpretations of this time period as he develops this argument, which I largely agree with.
(Atlanta) The story starts in sunbelt cities in the South and a reframing of civil rights era politics. You may think of the politics of that era as integrationists v segregationists, but Lassiter argues that as a middle class was built up in the suburbs of cities like Atlanta, and these cities tried to attract businesses and gov't contracts from around the country, the dominant political force became an alliance btw the business elite and the white middle class that prioritized maintaining open quality public education over the hardcore massive resistance stance of the segregationists. These middle class suburbanites were ok with limited, one-way integration of schools (better black students coming to white schools) and other public spaces as long as African-Americans were kept largely separate from their neighborhoods (which city governments all around the country achieved through redlining, highway construction, zoning laws, and other deliberate methods). Lassiter shows that these MC people revolted against the segregationists in favor of limited compliance with school integration mandates. They drew the line at busing, as they wanted to protect their neighborhood schools. Their power was increased dramatically after Baker v Carr in 1962, which struck down the county-vote system that gave more electoral power to rural countries (which were more hardcore segregationist). This "revolt of the center" helped finish off open segregationist politics, but ironically stymied any effort to address more structural issues of space, poverty, and opportunity in Atlanta. Atlanta proceeded with some integration of schools but remained dramatically segregated by neighborhood/suburb, and the urban core experienced massive white flight. The white suburban majority was the driving force of these changes, representing a middle ground for limited reform in between the segregationists and civil rights advocates, helping to sink both of their agendas.
(Charlotte) Charlotte was a similar sunbelt city that went a different direction. When its municipal gov't finally decided to conform to court-ordered integration, they mostly swapped students from poor/middle class white and black neighborhoods, exempting the rich island suburbs like Island Park. This actually prompted a class-based revolt from white and black middle/working class people that demanded a more equitable sharing of the desegregation burden. The result, after grassroots campaigns, was a more even-handed plan that actually achieved significant school integration, if not neighborhood integration. However, the courts and conservative lawsuits undermined this integration in favor of a color-blind system that ignored systemic racial inequality. The larger point Lassiter is getting at is that integration was really the tip of the iceberg in terms of rectifying historical racial injustices, and that the focus on integration, while merited and important, shifted attention from those deeper injustices. His work also critiques the idea of "color-blindness," which in this era was a convenient ideology of individual merit that ignored the stifling of opportunity for black people over the past, well, forever of US history.
(So. Strategy) Building from these city-level arguments, Lassiter argues that the southern strategy concept of national politics in the 60s and 70s is flat wrong. From Thurmond's Dixiecrat revolt to massive resistance to Nixon's race-baiting in the 1970 midterms, appeals to open segregationism or racial backlash largely failed to garner majority white support in the south, and they were especially weak in the sunbelt suburbs where open racism was mostly taboo. Lassiter convincingly shows that when Nixon tried Kevin Phillips' southern strategy in 1970, it failed and handed easy wins to the Democrats, who ran in the more centrist lane. Nixon's strategy, along with the "New Democrats" like Carter, was really the suburban strategy: an appeal to the exploding demographic of mostly white people who cared about neighborhood schools, crime, quality of life stuff, and who tended to be culturally moderate. They were not opposed to integration but didn't want to give up anything to achieve it, so they wanted it to be slow and partial. Nixon appealed to this group with his law and order rhetoric, advocacy of compliance with civil rights law (but no further than the basic demands), denunciation of leftist cultural revolts, and rhetorical defense of the ordinary, hard-working American. Because suburbanization was happening everywhere, regional differences were starting to become less significant, enabling the suburban strategy to work on a national basis.
(Suburban synthesis) This book shows how suburbanization transformed US politics by essentially creating a "suburban lane" that candidates want to run in. Suburbanization is the new center of gravity politics: it's a huge portion of the population, it's proportionately wealthier, and people there vote at high rates. The new suburban consensus has mixed effects though. On the positive side, it could be argued that the suburban synthesis killed off Jim Crow and has helped keep open appeals to racism taboo (the Trump era may be changing that). It seems, like the old liberal synthesis, to have a moderating effect on US politics, punishing the party that strays too much to the extremes. However, it also relies heavily on meritocratic mythology that ignores historical racism and the mapping of inequality onto the city and suburban landscape. Suburbanites want to feel like the house, good schools, and peaceful neighborhoods they live in are something they earned 100% without structural advantage, and they want politicians to protect what they have and feed this mythology. That makes stronger efforts at achieving justice much harder, to the endless lament of progressives. This book helps explain why and how these dynamics came to be.
Lassiter leans pretty hard on the idea that the suburban synthesis doesn't favor one party or the other and that southern politics is basically just national politics now. I agree with the former but not the latter, at least not completely. The south has remained pretty solidly Republican, and I think that's tied both to race and suburbanization (as Lassiter would agree). Yes, Dems have occasionally won parts of the South back, but it remains a Republican stronghold that has been disturbingly attracted to the racial demagoguery of Trump and others. However (and Lassiter's argument would predict this), the southern states that are building large cities with huge suburbs are becoming more like purple states (see Georgia, Virginia). The larger point here is whither go the suburbs go the nation, electorally.
This book also left me feeling ambivalent about busing. In one sense, activists and judges were right that if schools weren't integrated they might not succeed, in large part because white people brought more resources to the table to make those schools good. What we have seen since then is that all-minority schools in urban cores really struggle because of weak tax bases; this was part of the idea of the courts mandating that there be no majority-minority schools in cities. That also kind of miffed me, as there's nothing wrong with a majority-minority institution, and black schools were often shut down to achieve these balances, removing important communal institutions from these places (black institutions like the Negro Leagues were often destroyed by integration, which tended to be done with white priorities in mind." I can also see the suburban side of this question: it would be disconcerting to move to a neighborhood in large part for the schools and then have your kid bussed somewhere else; a lot of anti-busing sentiment was racist, but a lot was more reasonable and fair. My big takeaway here is that busing was a way to avoid deeper questions of race, space, and inequality and that the real point is that schools should be adequately funded no matter where they are and what their students look like. The Supreme Court, however, in cases like Rodriguez v San Antonio, has also undermined this basic principle of fairness by ruling that municipalities don't have to have equitable spending per pupil in different schools, ensuring that neighborhood wealth will drive school quality and fundamentally robbing poor students of anything approaching equal opportunity (this makes me mad, obviously).
Ok, long review, but I thought this book was really compelling if not an easy read. It's 330 pages but feels longer (Sorry Dr. Lassiter). But if you are a historian or history teacher, it's really important stuff to know. It definitely reframed my understanding of the second half of 20th century US history.
(Atlanta) The story starts in sunbelt cities in the South and a reframing of civil rights era politics. You may think of the politics of that era as integrationists v segregationists, but Lassiter argues that as a middle class was built up in the suburbs of cities like Atlanta, and these cities tried to attract businesses and gov't contracts from around the country, the dominant political force became an alliance btw the business elite and the white middle class that prioritized maintaining open quality public education over the hardcore massive resistance stance of the segregationists. These middle class suburbanites were ok with limited, one-way integration of schools (better black students coming to white schools) and other public spaces as long as African-Americans were kept largely separate from their neighborhoods (which city governments all around the country achieved through redlining, highway construction, zoning laws, and other deliberate methods). Lassiter shows that these MC people revolted against the segregationists in favor of limited compliance with school integration mandates. They drew the line at busing, as they wanted to protect their neighborhood schools. Their power was increased dramatically after Baker v Carr in 1962, which struck down the county-vote system that gave more electoral power to rural countries (which were more hardcore segregationist). This "revolt of the center" helped finish off open segregationist politics, but ironically stymied any effort to address more structural issues of space, poverty, and opportunity in Atlanta. Atlanta proceeded with some integration of schools but remained dramatically segregated by neighborhood/suburb, and the urban core experienced massive white flight. The white suburban majority was the driving force of these changes, representing a middle ground for limited reform in between the segregationists and civil rights advocates, helping to sink both of their agendas.
(Charlotte) Charlotte was a similar sunbelt city that went a different direction. When its municipal gov't finally decided to conform to court-ordered integration, they mostly swapped students from poor/middle class white and black neighborhoods, exempting the rich island suburbs like Island Park. This actually prompted a class-based revolt from white and black middle/working class people that demanded a more equitable sharing of the desegregation burden. The result, after grassroots campaigns, was a more even-handed plan that actually achieved significant school integration, if not neighborhood integration. However, the courts and conservative lawsuits undermined this integration in favor of a color-blind system that ignored systemic racial inequality. The larger point Lassiter is getting at is that integration was really the tip of the iceberg in terms of rectifying historical racial injustices, and that the focus on integration, while merited and important, shifted attention from those deeper injustices. His work also critiques the idea of "color-blindness," which in this era was a convenient ideology of individual merit that ignored the stifling of opportunity for black people over the past, well, forever of US history.
(So. Strategy) Building from these city-level arguments, Lassiter argues that the southern strategy concept of national politics in the 60s and 70s is flat wrong. From Thurmond's Dixiecrat revolt to massive resistance to Nixon's race-baiting in the 1970 midterms, appeals to open segregationism or racial backlash largely failed to garner majority white support in the south, and they were especially weak in the sunbelt suburbs where open racism was mostly taboo. Lassiter convincingly shows that when Nixon tried Kevin Phillips' southern strategy in 1970, it failed and handed easy wins to the Democrats, who ran in the more centrist lane. Nixon's strategy, along with the "New Democrats" like Carter, was really the suburban strategy: an appeal to the exploding demographic of mostly white people who cared about neighborhood schools, crime, quality of life stuff, and who tended to be culturally moderate. They were not opposed to integration but didn't want to give up anything to achieve it, so they wanted it to be slow and partial. Nixon appealed to this group with his law and order rhetoric, advocacy of compliance with civil rights law (but no further than the basic demands), denunciation of leftist cultural revolts, and rhetorical defense of the ordinary, hard-working American. Because suburbanization was happening everywhere, regional differences were starting to become less significant, enabling the suburban strategy to work on a national basis.
(Suburban synthesis) This book shows how suburbanization transformed US politics by essentially creating a "suburban lane" that candidates want to run in. Suburbanization is the new center of gravity politics: it's a huge portion of the population, it's proportionately wealthier, and people there vote at high rates. The new suburban consensus has mixed effects though. On the positive side, it could be argued that the suburban synthesis killed off Jim Crow and has helped keep open appeals to racism taboo (the Trump era may be changing that). It seems, like the old liberal synthesis, to have a moderating effect on US politics, punishing the party that strays too much to the extremes. However, it also relies heavily on meritocratic mythology that ignores historical racism and the mapping of inequality onto the city and suburban landscape. Suburbanites want to feel like the house, good schools, and peaceful neighborhoods they live in are something they earned 100% without structural advantage, and they want politicians to protect what they have and feed this mythology. That makes stronger efforts at achieving justice much harder, to the endless lament of progressives. This book helps explain why and how these dynamics came to be.
Lassiter leans pretty hard on the idea that the suburban synthesis doesn't favor one party or the other and that southern politics is basically just national politics now. I agree with the former but not the latter, at least not completely. The south has remained pretty solidly Republican, and I think that's tied both to race and suburbanization (as Lassiter would agree). Yes, Dems have occasionally won parts of the South back, but it remains a Republican stronghold that has been disturbingly attracted to the racial demagoguery of Trump and others. However (and Lassiter's argument would predict this), the southern states that are building large cities with huge suburbs are becoming more like purple states (see Georgia, Virginia). The larger point here is whither go the suburbs go the nation, electorally.
This book also left me feeling ambivalent about busing. In one sense, activists and judges were right that if schools weren't integrated they might not succeed, in large part because white people brought more resources to the table to make those schools good. What we have seen since then is that all-minority schools in urban cores really struggle because of weak tax bases; this was part of the idea of the courts mandating that there be no majority-minority schools in cities. That also kind of miffed me, as there's nothing wrong with a majority-minority institution, and black schools were often shut down to achieve these balances, removing important communal institutions from these places (black institutions like the Negro Leagues were often destroyed by integration, which tended to be done with white priorities in mind." I can also see the suburban side of this question: it would be disconcerting to move to a neighborhood in large part for the schools and then have your kid bussed somewhere else; a lot of anti-busing sentiment was racist, but a lot was more reasonable and fair. My big takeaway here is that busing was a way to avoid deeper questions of race, space, and inequality and that the real point is that schools should be adequately funded no matter where they are and what their students look like. The Supreme Court, however, in cases like Rodriguez v San Antonio, has also undermined this basic principle of fairness by ruling that municipalities don't have to have equitable spending per pupil in different schools, ensuring that neighborhood wealth will drive school quality and fundamentally robbing poor students of anything approaching equal opportunity (this makes me mad, obviously).
Ok, long review, but I thought this book was really compelling if not an easy read. It's 330 pages but feels longer (Sorry Dr. Lassiter). But if you are a historian or history teacher, it's really important stuff to know. It definitely reframed my understanding of the second half of 20th century US history.
October 21, 2025
Maybe just me, but these people all had strong enough opinions to be activists, so can they still be moderates?
Read
September 30, 2015Great new history of the "sunbelt" and its role in the transformation of the American political landscape.
January 15, 2017
The author spend a lot of time trying to setup the introduction that I felt as the title suggested that main subject was discussed later. The book is divided into three parts and the third part is what the title suggested. The first part were important to get the reader to understand the most important factor of the story, but it took long because of the way the book is titled.
July 25, 2022
Reading alongside Kruse's White Flight. Great pairing. In Reviews of American History, March 2007, David L. Chappell wrote a piece called "Did Racists Create the Suburban Nation?" Those who are interested in Lassiter's book would also likely benefit from this review.
December 31, 2020
In the scrambling after 2016, political liberals began to search history to see if an answer could be found as to why Trump won and how we all could've been so blind to it.
Maybe not liberals, maybe just me. But I did see a bunch of pundits and writers and late show hosts excavate the rhetoric and tactics of past politics threading a line such that Trump becomes not some anomaly, but an assurance. One of those threads was Nixon's use of "The Silent Majority." He also used "Forgotten Americans" in much the way Trump does. Also saw a bunch of people revisiting Nixon's Southern Strategy, both explicit and codes appeals to racism.
This isn't a book about Trump in any way, of course. But the contextualization matters regardless. And everything is about Trump anyhow these days. Anyway, Lassiter makes a compelling case that the Southern Strategy was actually bad politics, that what Nixon built was a suburban coalition which decried any explicit racial appeals. "The color-blind and class-driven discourse popularized in the Sunbelt South helped create a suburban blueprint that ultimately resonated from the "conservative" subdivisions of southern California to the "liberal" townships of New England: a bipartisan political language of private property values, individual taxpayer rights, children's educational privilege, family residential security, and white racial innocence."
God, it's like the manifesto of the HOA I grew up in.
This book wasn't quite what I expected, about half of it details internecine fights over the busing riots/rebellions of the 1970s, but the last few chapters get to the heart of the matter, that busing kids post-Brown vs Board of Education was downstream of housing policy, and that a bloc of suburban voters since then (Nixon's Silent Majority) have been a potent force, for good and ill.
It's a coalition that gave Nixon a landslide in 1972, and gave Democrats a landslide in 2018. And I'm utterly fucking terrified that without placating this bloc, any meaningful, necessary reforms on a host of issues are imperiled or will be at best toothless.
Maybe not liberals, maybe just me. But I did see a bunch of pundits and writers and late show hosts excavate the rhetoric and tactics of past politics threading a line such that Trump becomes not some anomaly, but an assurance. One of those threads was Nixon's use of "The Silent Majority." He also used "Forgotten Americans" in much the way Trump does. Also saw a bunch of people revisiting Nixon's Southern Strategy, both explicit and codes appeals to racism.
This isn't a book about Trump in any way, of course. But the contextualization matters regardless. And everything is about Trump anyhow these days. Anyway, Lassiter makes a compelling case that the Southern Strategy was actually bad politics, that what Nixon built was a suburban coalition which decried any explicit racial appeals. "The color-blind and class-driven discourse popularized in the Sunbelt South helped create a suburban blueprint that ultimately resonated from the "conservative" subdivisions of southern California to the "liberal" townships of New England: a bipartisan political language of private property values, individual taxpayer rights, children's educational privilege, family residential security, and white racial innocence."
God, it's like the manifesto of the HOA I grew up in.
This book wasn't quite what I expected, about half of it details internecine fights over the busing riots/rebellions of the 1970s, but the last few chapters get to the heart of the matter, that busing kids post-Brown vs Board of Education was downstream of housing policy, and that a bloc of suburban voters since then (Nixon's Silent Majority) have been a potent force, for good and ill.
It's a coalition that gave Nixon a landslide in 1972, and gave Democrats a landslide in 2018. And I'm utterly fucking terrified that without placating this bloc, any meaningful, necessary reforms on a host of issues are imperiled or will be at best toothless.
November 19, 2012
I love this monograph! Lassiter effectively connects the grassroots movements of white, middle-class suburbans in Atlanta and Charlotte to the conservative shift in American national political discourse, revising the previous and popular "top-down" historical explanation for this shift. This work challenges and complicates many accepted historical understandings and all points are thoroughly connected...giving the sense that these well-supported truths (by the work of previous historians, yet largely by a significant amount of primary sources such as newspapers, legal transcripts, interviews, and speeches) should be obvious to Americans, speaking to the strength of The Silent Majority.
Strongly recommend for anyone interested in the Right's response to the Civil Rights Movement/Freedom Struggle, a perspective of history sadly understudied and clearly not understood by the majority of Americans. Allows significant insight into our current political climate!
Strongly recommend for anyone interested in the Right's response to the Civil Rights Movement/Freedom Struggle, a perspective of history sadly understudied and clearly not understood by the majority of Americans. Allows significant insight into our current political climate!
June 26, 2015
The first 60 pages or so were slow going.
Lassiter does a great job of examining how grassroots movements involving the integration and desegregation of school influenced the "silent majority" in the cities of Atlanta, Charlotte, and Richmond. Most fascinating is his conclusions regarding the political legacy of the Sunbelt region. Well worth the read to gain insight on the behaviors of southern middle-class whites during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Lassiter does a great job of examining how grassroots movements involving the integration and desegregation of school influenced the "silent majority" in the cities of Atlanta, Charlotte, and Richmond. Most fascinating is his conclusions regarding the political legacy of the Sunbelt region. Well worth the read to gain insight on the behaviors of southern middle-class whites during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
May 1, 2012
An engaging study of the school desegregation/busing debate in Charlotte, NC, during the 1970s. Lassiter is particularly interested in the spatial aspects of segregation (both racial and economic), and manages to blend numerical data analysis with individual accounts.
November 8, 2007
my brother's book--long and wordy but good
August 2, 2010
Interesting look at the formation of the New Right and changes in Southern politics--nice dismantling of the "southern strategy" idea.
October 21, 2010
Fairly interesting study of the suburbanization of the Sun Belt and the South. Good chapter on Atlanta and its move to its present status as "capital of the South."
April 4, 2012
A little overwrought but excellent insight
August 29, 2015
This was one of the most important political science books I have ever read. It's quite important now. More could be said, but I'm tired.
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