On the eve of American intervention in the First World War, the South seemed to be a land suspended in time. In contrast to the urban and industrial North, the political and economic landscape of the southern states remained much as it had for decades. The old agrarian order still dominated the region. Southerners cultivated the land much as their ancestors had done, concentrating their labour on one staple crop, cotton. Whites also continued to assert their racial supremacy over African Americans, not only through the force of law but also through mob violence. The prospect of a New South, no longer reliant on cotton but instead integrated into the national industrial economy, had receded by the time the United States belatedly intervened in the war.
However, during the era of the world wars the American South underwent sudden changes that unsettled its social, political and economic foundations. Although the Jim Crow system absorbed much of the impact, the cumulative effect of these changes was to establish the preconditions for the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. The exigencies of the Great Depression and the Second World War resulted in federal intervention in southern affairs on a scale not seen since Reconstruction. Such actions undermined the traditional pattern of rural labour relations, leading thousands of African American farmers to abandon the land, some heading north while others resettled in the rapidly expanding urban and industrial centres of the South. The influx of these rural migrants to southern towns and cities created problems for the continued maintenance of racial segregation. Federal intervention also raised hopes among African Americans of their future inclusion as full citizens of the United States, just as it raised fears among the white elite at the loss of their autonomous control of the region. By the time the military conflict of the Second World War came to an end, a new set of battle-lines had begun to emerge in the southern states between a black race animated by a sense of political entitlement and a white conservative opposition determined to resist reform.
Publication information: Book title: Race in the American South: From Slavery to Civil Rights. Contributors: David Brown - Author, Clive Webb - Author. Publisher: Edinburgh University Press. Place of publication: Edinburgh. Publication year: 2007. Page number: 233.