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A GENERATION AGO, A STATE-OF-THE-FIELD FORUM ON SOUTHERN history would have included an entry on rather than suburbs. Ever since World War II era, southern historians have followed lead of V. O. Key Jr., who in 1949 predicted, growth of contains seeds of political change for Key and other contemporaries assumed that urban development would not only modernize but also liberalize southern politics, especially by shifting balance of power away from the black-belt whites [who had] succeeded in imposing their will on their states and thereby presented solid regional front in national politics on race issue. (1) Before long, however, analysts recognized that the first fruits of increasing industrialism, as Samuel Lubell wrote in 1956 edition of The Future of American Politics, had not liberalized South by empowering labor movement but were instead fostering a rising urban middle class, which is virtually Republican in political sympathies. (2) Two decades later, James C. Cobb argued that urbanization represented driving force behind weakening of regional distinctiveness and suggested that [t]he South's seem to be logical place to begin further analyses of southern Republicanism. (3) Earl Black and Merle Black concurred in Politics and Society in South (1987), which traced transformations brought by industrial development and metropolitan expansion and concluded that [t]he main winners in new southern politics have been growing middle classes, particularly in urban areas. (4) Until quite recently, suburbs had not played central or often even an explicit role in historical analysis of southern politics and society since World War II. (5) While an urban-suburban dichotomy took hold in community studies of postwar North and Midwest, scholars narrated geographic divisions and political conflicts within modern South primarily through two pairs of categories: rural versus urban (or sometimes metropolitan) and Deep South versus outer or peripheral South. (6) The Sun Belt framework that flourished in 1970s and 1980s paid more attention to suburban-style development, especially seen in pioneering work of Carl Abbott, who traced growing schisms between central and politically autonomous suburbs in fragmenting metropolitan regions. (7) But suburban cities concept that pervaded most of early Sun Belt literature drew regional contrast between sprawling metropolitan centers in South and West (such as Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, and Atlanta) and Chicago school of urban ecology that has dominated sensibilities of urban historians. (8) Political trends and behavioral patterns that scholars specifically attributed to suburbanization in other parts of country--the rise of white-collar corporate culture, an idealized middleclass domesticity, upwardly mobile base of postwar Republican Party, grassroots outlook driven by quality-of-life concerns such as property taxes and public schools, defensive localism that maintained social homogeneity through exclusionary zoning--seemed sufficiently captured through city-centered model for metropolitan South. (9) The suburbs of postwar South, however, were home to many of most dynamic and cutting-edge forces anywhere in region. The suburbs provided main locations for cold war military-industrial complexes and power base of new Republican voters in 1950s and 1960s. They became pivotal sites for national battles over court-ordered busing in 1970s and mobilization of Religious Right in 1980s and 1990s. Southern suburbia also has long been national pacesetter in expansion of middle-class black communities and, since 1980s, has emerged as primary destination for Latino and Asian immigrants, who are radically altering region's traditional biracial structure. …
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