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The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. By Matthew D. Lassiter. (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2006. xviii, 390 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-691-09255-9.)
Matthew D. Lassiter has written an important book reinterpreting postwar politics in the sun belt South. Focusing on the school desegregation and school busing crises of the 1960s and 1970s, Lassiter offers an analysis of the dynamic intersection of southern race relations, metropolitan growth, and regional convergence with national patterns. Emerging sun belt metropolises such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, stood at the intersection of southern change. Downtown business elites sought to manage the integration crisis while maintaining metropolitan growth and racial separation. The suburbanization of southern whites and northern transplants, supported by government planning and growth policies, provided a base...