The following is a guest post from Robert Greene II, a PhD student in History at the University of South Carolina. This is Greene’s second guest post for the USIH Blog. His first: “Why I Chose Intellectual History”

As historians, we often find ourselves digesting not just the past, but how it relates to the present. To that end, a research question I find myself coming back to is, “How did conservatives and liberals come to the positions they’ve taken on race?” Initially such a question appears easy to answer. Scratching beneath the surface, however, forces Americanists to take a closer look at not just the transition in thought on race amongst intellectuals and academics after the Second World War (chronicled most notably in Richard King’s Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals) [1] but the adjustment of liberals and conservatives to a new racial outlook in American society after the Civil Rights Movement, when blatant racism was no longer politically palatable. This would include, of course, Democrats (and new Republicans) in the South, figures such as George Wallace and Strom Thurmond. Being some of the most notable opponents of integration in the 1960s, they would have to adjust to a new reality to continue to win office in the 1970s and beyond.

The transition made in the 1970s for many Southern conservatives from opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, to supporting the renewal of the VRA and backing the creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday only makes sense once you consider the power of public memory. A memory of accepting African Americans fully into the body politic was necessary, but at the same time, conservatives would not countenance such liberal remedies for institutional racism as affirmative action. A vigorous, renewed debate over ideas of race and identity has taken place in the United States since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, this new debate would include the idea of color-blindness, something conservatives would immediately latch on to. Continue reading →