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Now, I have no doubt she voted for Trump and Roy Moore, although we never discussed politics and I suspect her support was entirely passive, confined to pulling the lever in the voting booth. This wholesale destruction and degradation of life today understandably makes people look backward to past times when things were different, hence the appeal of “Make America Great Again.” I overheard my mechanic talking with another customer about what it was like to work for Goodyear Tires in Gadsden in the 1970s; the management built a golf course on the grounds for workers’ use and if you parked with non-Goodyear Tires on, someone would leave a handwritten note on your car suggesting you get some, sooner rather than later. Today, that Goodyear plant is a mere shadow of itself and all the perks long gone.
Without an alternative framework to make sense of the present – the last Socialist in rural north Alabama was probably Helen Keller in Tuscumbia in 1910 – people such as these fall back on explanations that preserve what was important and good in their lives. To reduce these complex and contradictory views to mere nostalgia for “white supremacy” I believe is making a serious mistake. Even if this white supremacy exists, it is not imbedded like some original sin, but something more fluid and malleable. In There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Right, 1945-1975, Jason Sokol’s superb study of white attitudes during the Civil Rights era, Sokol mentions how Lester Maddox, who later became a notorious racist demagogue, blocking the entrance of his Atlanta restaurant with a pick axe rather than let Black customers in, was himself fired from his supervisor position in a Marietta, Georgia steel plant in the 1940s after refusing to terminate two Black workers seen talking to a union organizer. What happened in between is anyone’s guess; Maddox is long in the grave and never spoke about it.
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