Silencing White Dissent: Political Manhood in Birmingham, Alabama, 1956-1961
Moments of political and social upheaval transform and constrict definitions of gender and morality in frightening ways and by disquieting means. Studies on the rise of Nazi Germany and Apartheid in South Africa illuminate the brevity with which a your'e either for us or against us" mentality can overwhelm a society to reconstruct the requisites for manhood and alter what is deemed admissible for the greater good." The manifestations of a radicalized society, the effects of extremism, reveal themselves but the processes behind polarization, the initial assertions of an us" and a them," are often difficult to uncover.By exploring white Birmingham's confrontation with the civil rights movement between 1956 and 1961, my paper examines the political and social milieu in which throngs of white men turned toward, perpetuated, and acquiesced to extremism. Constructions of southern masculinity, I argue, played a pivotal role in shaping and aligning white responses to the prospects and realities of racial integration. Masculinized mobilization discourses concerning territoriality, blood status, protection of southern (white) womanhood, freedom of associations, and claims to individual rights crafted a new southern male in Birmingham whose first claim to manhood was his fealty to racial segregation.
My paper focuses on the ascendance of territoriality in the rhetoric of white backlash to evaluate how and why the defense of space became compulsory for Birmingham's white men. Although whites in Birmingham defended" any and all places where the prospect of integration loomed, two spaces direct my study: 1) the South" as both a physical place and as a way of life and 2) neighborhoods going through racial transition within the city. Using political speeches, newspaper editorials, letters to local politicians, records of violence and community reactions to brutality, I argue that a politics of masculinity, rooted in the historic claims of southern territoriality, shaped and stimulated Birmingham's violent white backlash.
Between 1956 and 1961, as the local civil rights movement in Birmingham pushed for integration, most whites in Birmingham assented to a brutish and extreme political order. My paper places constructions of white masculinity at the center of this process to explore how gender was used to create consensus and silence dissent even as the city drifted into chaos. Moving beyond Birmingham as a case study, my analysis also includes the powerful fusion of territoriality and masculinity in the South African experience.
Heather Bryson, University of Florida