The South Transformed:

A Tale of Republicans’ Southern Ascendancy

Between 1950 and 2000, the Republican Party’s representation from the South increased from only two House members and no senators to a majority of the South’s congressional delegations.

“This transformation of the South is the biggest story in the last half-century of American politics, because we’ve gone from a region that was solidly Democratic to one that is very competitive,” says Earl Black, Rice’s Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Political Science. Black and his twin brother, Merle, a professor of politics and government at Emory University, analyze that transition in their latest book, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Harvard–Belknap Press, 2002).

The Blacks spent a decade researching and writing the book, which complements their previous two books, Politics and Society in the South and The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected. “You have to learn enough about the subject to be confident you’ve identified central patterns and can write about them with clarity,” Black says. “We set out to try to understand the changing impact of the South on congressional politics, and we tried, for the first time, to study the transformation of a large regional delegation to Congress over an extensive period—five decades.”

The authors describe the people, events, and changes that took place in society over the past 50 years and that created the possibility of two-party politics in the South. Civil rights legislation, race, economic class, gender, and religion had strong impacts on Republican and Democratic coalitions. The Blacks’ goal was to present all these factors without a political bias. “We’re critical of people in both parties,” Black says.

One thing that surprised Black while writing this book was the Republicans’ victories in the House. When he started on the book, he didn’t expect the Republicans in the House to attain as much success as they did later in the decade. “It looked to us as if there was tremendous unrealized Republican potential out there,” Black says, “ but in 1990, we didn’t think it would produce a Republican majority in the House delegation. As we got to 1994, the dissatisfaction with Clinton made it clear that by that point, it was possible the Republicans could take the
House and the Senate, and that turned out to be true.”

Black says the South is now at the epicenter of Republican and Democratic strategies to control Congress. Consequently, an understanding of the changing South is essential to comprehending
national political dynamics.

—B. J. Almond