“White trash” is a flexible kind of insult, encompassing various ideas about poverty, criminality, and uncivilized behavior. As political scientist Kirstine Taylor writes, around the middle of the twentieth century, the use of the term in the American South term shifted, from signifying proximity to Blackness to representing an atavistic racist response to “moderate,” business-friendly racial politics.
Taylor writes that the term “white trash” emerged after the Civil War, used by white elites to disparage poor whites who worked alongside Black laborers as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The concepts wealthier white people had in mind when they used the term echoed stereotypes deployed against Black southerners: dirty, mentally lacking, and sexually deviant.
In the early twentieth-century heyday of American eugenics, ten southern states built institutions to sterilize and segregate “unfit” white people.
Taylor argues that the use of “white trash” rhetoric changed dramatically in the postwar period. At that time, southern politicians and political leaders set out to create a “New South” that would be more attractive to northern investors and in which racial hierarchy would be quietly maintained without formal segregation or lynchings. But, after the Brown v. Board of Education verdict in 1954, southern segregationists launched the “massive resistance” movement to defy the Supreme Court and prevent school integration. Some committed acts of terrorist violence.
“Southern moderates recognized these developments as threats to the emerging New South economy and political order,” Taylor writes. In 1956, while visiting New York to court industry that might want to do business in his state, Mississippi Governor J. P. Coleman said, “We’ve adopted the motto, ‘Anything offensive to industry is offensive to us and must be removed from the picture.’”
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Coleman and other New South moderates still viewed segregation as crucial for cultivating the rising middle-class white communities of cities like Atlanta and Charlotte. They just wanted to achieve it with a light touch. For example, Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill wrote in 1957 that “moderate governors” could shift school district lines to “confine the immediate problem of integration to a mere handful of schools. Their states will escape violence. Their school systems will remain strong. Industry will not be frightened away.”
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The moderates positioned such gradual moves toward very limited integration in opposition to both federal efforts to “force integration” and the mob violence of “white trash.” In this frame, white elites represented law-and-order, in contrast to the “disorder” of Black demands for equality and the unlawful violence of the Ku Klux Klan and its like.
In 1961, one Atlanta Constitution columnist argued that the “old and ugly term, ‘white trash,’” applied to those who assaulted “the so-called Freedom Riders” and that their uncivil violence threatened the “decent compromise” with pro-integration extremists from the North achieved by “the Southern gentlemen.”
“By imagining themselves as innocent of the racial guilt that plagued lower-class white trash,” Taylor writes, “southern moderates rendered their law-and-order strategy to solidify the postwar economy, secure a new political elite, and maintain racial stratification as a guiltless endeavor.”
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