Resistance Rhetoric

Paper Summary:

This paper maintains that, although historians argue that resistance rhetoric was highly entwined with anti-Communist sentiment in the context of the history of Southern desegregation, this correlation appears to be more academic than realistic. The paper further maintains that anti-Communism was used as a false rhetoric to shift the conversation away from the real issue, the difficulty southerners had with changing their way of life. The paper then concludes that, when most southerners realized that change was inevitable, they engaged in the rhetoric of gradualism backed by various delay tactics and token efforts at integration.

From the Paper:

"To the credit of Webb (2005), he acknowledges that the use of Cold War themes in resistance rhetoric needs to be understood beyond the concurrent development of the Cold War and the resistance movement. He asserts that southerners needed a different way to depict a regional struggle against segregation and to remove the issue of race from the debate. Therefore, they leveraged the Cold War to represent their opposition as a national struggle against a foreign enemy."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Lassiter, Matthew D. and Lewis, Andrew B. The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998.
• Webb, Clive. Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Woods, Jeff. Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2004.

More papers on Resistance Rhetoric:

• Analytical Essay # 135938 : "Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government"
• Research Paper # 145427 : "The Ripple Effects of American Independence"
• Analytical Essay # 58499 : "Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"

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