Sweet Home Alabama: Integration and the Silent Majority

This paper analyzes the responses by the Silent Majority who pitted themselves against the civil rights movement and integration.  To her, these moderate and conservative citizens retained the anticommunist mindset of the Cold War in their views toward racial integration in the early 1960s. These Americans held on to their conviction that “law and order” was centered in states’ rights.  To them, the role of the federal government was to protect the nation against foreign threats, specifically the growth of communism.  They claimed the civil rights leaders were backed by communism, and that the federal government should defend them against that threat and refrain from meddling in state affairs.  First the Kennedy and then the Johnson administrations, thus, were not protecting their “American way of life,” but forcing them to accept a radical realignment of American society.