“The Price of Union; The Undefeatable South”

Nicholas Lemann writes for the New Yorker.

The civil-rights revolution, too, can be thought of as a bargain, not simply a victory: the nation has become Southernized just as much as the South has become nationalized. Political conservatism, the traditional creed of the white South, went from being presumed dead in 1964 to being a powerful force in national politics. During the past half century, the country has had more Presidents from the former Confederacy than from the former Union. Racial prejudice and conflict have been understood as American, not Southern, problems….

Ari Berman’s “Give Us the Ballot” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a history of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, makes for an excellent extended example of the mechanisms by which race in the South becomes race in the nation. The Voting Rights Act followed the better-known Civil Rights Act by a year. It is properly understood as part of a wave of legislation that represents the political triumph of the civil-rights movement, but Berman, like most people, finds a precipitating event in the murder, in June, 1964, in Neshoba County, Mississippi, of three young civil-rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

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