Matthew D. Lassiter

The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind” Conservatism: Middle-Class Consciousness in the Charlotte Busing Crisis

Between 1969 and 1974, the volatile conflict over court-ordered busing in Charlotte, North Carolina, revealed the fusion of racial and class attitudes in the political ideology of the “Silent Majority.” A powerful antibusing movement based in Charlotte’s white-collar suburbs defended neighborhood schools through a color-blind discourse that evaded the historical roots of residential segregation and shaped the legal stance of the Nixon administration. Despite the grassroots revolt of this Silent Majority, Charlotte ultimately achieved one of the most racially integrated school systems in the nation because of a metropolitan remedy that included the suburbs in a landmark two-way busing plan. This case study of suburban political mobilization challenges the distinction between de jure segregation in the South and de facto segregation in the North and argues that the color-blind populism in metropolitan Charlotte helped to forge a national suburban blueprint of consumer rights, residential privileges, and middle-class racial innocence.

Schools and Housing in Metropolitan History An Introduction

This essay introduces a special section in the Journal of Urban History that explores the interplay between educational policies and housing markets in metropolitan U.S. history during the twentieth century. A review of the literature in urban/suburban history reveals that most scholars have emphasized the centrality of housing policies and real estate markets in establishing patterns of racial segregation and metropolitan inequality while marginalizing or neglecting the educational policies and public school markets that simultaneously shaped these processes. The evidence in this forum challenges the dominant view that housing policies structured educational outcomes in American cities and suburbs, revealing that school policies often shaped housing outcomes as well.

Suburban Diversity in Postwar America

This essay introduces a special section in the Journal of Urban History that explores the concept of suburban diversity in the United States during the post-World War II decades. Recent scholarship has emphasized themes of suburban heterogeneity during the prewar and post-1970 periods, but the literature on postwar suburbia still revolves around the tropes of “white flight,” the urban–suburban divide, and the hegemonic middle-class cultural ideal. Through studies of community formation, the contributors to this forum examine the racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and political diversity of the postwar metropolitan landscape, with particular attention to the various meanings that suburbanites attached to their homes and neighborhoods. This introduction argues that making suburban diversity central, rather than exceptional, to the study of the postwar era requires scholarship that moves beyond the myth of white middle-class homogeneity and critically assesses the racialized binary of urban-suburban divergence. We propose a model of metropolitan diversity that highlights multiple dimensions of heterogeneity alongside the persistent patterns of neighborhood-level racial and class segregation in cities and suburbs alike.

Pushers, victims, and the lost innocence of white suburbia: California's war on narcotics during the 1950s

This case study of Los Angeles County portrays the war on drugs during the 1950s as a racial and spatial project that combined tough mandatory-minimum sentences for urban “pushers” and Mexican American “gangsters” with discretionary loopholes for white suburban “victims” of the heroin and marijuana markets. State institutions, media scripts, and white middle-class organizations constructed illegal drug use as a suburban crisis through a racialized pusher–victim discourse that collectively criminalized minority youth while decriminalizing white teenage lawbreakers. The escalation of California’s antinarcotics crusade during the postwar decades illuminates the deep historical roots, thoroughly bipartisan policies, and grassroots suburban politics that shaped the rise of mass incarceration and the continuing racial and spatial inequalities of drug war enforcement in modern America.

The New Suburban History II: Political Culture and Metropolitan Space

In early 2004, along with more than a dozen other practitioners, I attended the “City Limits” conference hosted by Princeton University, what the organizers labeled “New Directions in the History of American Suburbs.” The conference participants included two historians known for their pathbreaking accounts of housing segregation and white backlash in the urban north, Thomas Sugrue and Arnold Hirsch, along with a group that represented part of the vibrant second generation of suburban scholarship that is expanding on but also rethinking the synthetic frameworks assembled by Kenneth Jackson and Robert Fishman. The presentations emphasized many of the familiar themes of suburban historiography, especially the central role of the state in facilitating population decentralization in the