<p>In <em>The Politics of White Rights</em>, Joseph Bagley recounts the history of school desegregation litigation in Alabama, focusing on the malleability and durability of white resistance. He argues that the litigious battles of 1954-73 taught Alabama's segregationists how to fashion a more subtle defense of white privilege, placing them in the vanguard of a new conservatism oriented toward the Sunbelt, not the South.</p><p>Scholars have recently begun uncovering the ways in which segregationists abandoned violent backlash and overt economic reprisal and learned how to rearticulate their resistance and blind others to their racial motivations. Bagley is most interested in a creedal commitment to maintaining "law and order," which lay at the heart of this transition. Before it was a buzz phrase meant to conjure up fears of urban black violence, "law and order" represented a politics that allowed self-styled white moderates to begrudgingly accept token desegreg