White Flight, Kevin M. Kruse
White Flight, Kevin M. Kruse
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White Flight
Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism

Author: Kevin M. Kruse

Narrator: Aaron Williamson

Unabridged: 13 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/12/2019


Synopsis

During the civil rights era, Atlanta thought of itself as "The City Too Busy to Hate," a rare place in the South where the races lived and thrived together. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, so many whites fled the city for the suburbs that Atlanta earned a new nickname: "The City Too Busy Moving to Hate."

In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms, White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the meaning of white resistance. In the end, Kruse finds that segregationist resistance, which failed to stop the civil rights movement, nevertheless managed to preserve the world of segregation and even perfect it in subtler and stronger forms.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that white flight meant nothing more than a literal movement of whites to the suburbs, this book argues that it represented a more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. In a provocative revision of postwar American history, Kruse demonstrates that traditional elements of modern conservatism, such as hostility to the federal government and faith in free enterprise, underwent important transformations during the postwar struggle over segregation.

About Kevin M. Kruse

Kevin M. Kruse is professor of history at Princeton University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim on August 16, 2015

kruse works with an apparently narrow narrow topic — the history neighborhood-based desegregation within atlanta. impressively, he manages to document how more or less every major conservative policy position on every major domestic issue can be seen to flow from this issue. kruse's book is a detail......more

Goodreads review by Sanjiv on October 08, 2013

This was a well-put-together, if infinitely depressing, look at the process of white flight in Atlanta, a city which dubbed itself "too busy to hate" and used a form of half-measures to try and preserve the Jim Crow system until it ultimately became unsustainable. What really jumps out in these pages......more

Goodreads review by Alyce on May 19, 2010

Kruse traces the evolution of segregationist discourse in the seemingly moderate city of Atlanta from overtly racist rhetoric to a more nuanced, rights-based argument that emphasized middle class values. Kruse displays how events in Atlanta helped spur national events which culminated in the legitim......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on August 11, 2019

So this is how you get a job at Princeton! I thought this was a fascinating look at the very local origins of massive political shifts. Kruse builds his argument about the party switch of the 1960s and the rise of a new oconservatism that emphasized freedom from government intervention, privatizatio......more

Goodreads review by John on January 02, 2011

I wish all of my peers would read this book. My high school classmate Kevin Kruse is the author; he's now a history professor at Princeton, but that's just the reason why I (and now you) found out about it. The reason you should read it is that Kruse has chosen a powerful and proximate subject matte......more