Unlocking V. O. Key Jr.: Southern Politics for the Twenty-First Century

V. O. Key Jr.'s two central insights in Southern Politics (1949) were that beneath an outwardly solid South, defined by forced unity that was maintained to keep African Americans subordinate, white politics was largely fragmented and disorganized; and that in such a fragmented polity, unstructured by ongoing competition between organized political parties, the white and black have-nots usually lost. The ten essays in this volume, drawn from a 2009 conference at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute of the University of Arkansas, do not directly explain exactly how partisan competition came to the South after 1950, and they entirely ignore the processes and outputs of governance—an omission that reflects the largest failure of post-Key scholarship on southern politics. Disparate in topics and uneven in quality, the papers are inappropriate for assignment to undergraduate or graduate classes in political science, sociology, or history.