Professor talks on civil rights law history

• By VIC COUVILLION
• Special to The Advocate
• Published: Oct 25, 2009 - Page: 4B

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HAMMOND — Historian Keith M. Finley told a university audience that Southern politicians could not have successfully blocked meaningful civil rights legislation for many years without cooperation and complicity of colleagues in Northern and Western states.

Finley, a professor in the department of history and political science at Southeastern Louisiana University, suggested that racial attitudes in other parts of the nation closely paralleled those usually identified with residents of the South during the 1920s through the early 1960s.

Finley, who grew up in a small town near New York, N.Y., said that during his formative years, white residents of his hometown generally shared the same prejudices toward minorities as those usually identified as Southerners.

“By the 1960s, civil rights leaders had come to the realization that they could not count on the federal government, especially the U.S. Senate, to give them meaningful civil rights … so they took their cause to the streets,” Finley said. “Television was coming of age by then and citizens everywhere could watch the whole thing unfold before their eyes.”

Finley, the author of a new book, “Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights 1938-1965,” which was published by LSU Press, addressed a forum Wednesday as part of SLU’s Fanfare Celebration, a month-long salute to the arts.

Finley asserted that Southern U.S. senators had to rely on their counterparts from other sections of the nation to constantly thwart moves toward civil rights legislation, particularly in the mid-20th century.

The reason, he said, was because representatives from the states that had formed the Confederacy during the 19th century’s Civil War simply did not have the numbers to constantly beat back attempts by some to write civil rights laws.

Finley said he drew his conclusions after studying debates surrounding proposals in the U.S. Congress to write civil rights legislation during the 1920s through the 1960s.

Finley said he conducted extensive research in secondary sources such as news accounts of the running arguments about civil rights.
“In almost every case, national news commentators depicted Southern senators as caricatures of what was expected,” Finley said, “bigoted racists who refused to listen to reason.”

Finley said his research shows that Southern opponents of civil rights had to change their tactics as the times changed in their efforts to stop laws aimed at equality among the races.

In the 1920s, he said, Southern members of the U.S. Senate used the time-worn arguments of white supremacy and made an appeal based on emotions and enmity between conservatives who wanted to maintain the status quo and keep blacks out of the voting booths and out of power and a growing group of liberals who sought change.

Finley said the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was at the vanguard of movements seeking to win for blacks the same civil rights as all other citizens.

However, he said, traditional attitudes in Congress toward racial issues began to lose their appeal in the 1930s and Southern senators began basing their opposition to civil rights laws on constitutional and states’ rights issues.