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You’ve seen them.

Printed on a white background with varying shades of blue and red, the signs are invariably held by middle-aged men and women.

They’re waved in Donald Trump crowds alongside Confederate flags and dance in front of the stage while the billionaire speaks.

“The silent majority stands with Trump.”

Who are the silent majority? What does the term mean? And why are they coming out for Trump?

The answer has its roots in the intense white backlash to the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act. It’s a throwback to the coalition that helped Richard Nixon rise to power in 1968, and has much of the same connotations of white backlash to racial change and civil rights.

Trump is tapping into that same coalition and ideology in his quest for the presidency. White backlash is back. And so is the silent majority.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it appeared there was a real chance for racial justice and societal change in the US. The stain of Jim Crow in the South had hung over the country for so long that once it was gone, most Americans supported the idea of shedding the sins of the past.

Once the law became a reality, though, it sparked a response from majority middle and lower class white people who were in the path of the integrative change. This “white backlash” would have long-lasting effects on the country’s political reality.

White resistance to the desegregation of neighborhoods and schools begot federal intervention under Eisenhower in the 1950s in the Deep South. By 1964, the Civil Rights movement had largely won those battles, and the codification of integration and equal rights into law created a new societal standard.

Integration expanded to the entire country, and with it, the white resistance. California whites fought integration with Proposition 14, an anti-integration measure that essentially re-legalized discrimination in housing. Even as late as the 1970s and 1980s, whites in Boston, MA and Yonkers, NY, would fight against integration policies.

The Civil Rights Act made these struggles against integration exercises in futility. No matter what tactics the white resistance employed, the end result was the same- state sanctioned discrimination based on race could not stand and would lose.

In many cases, white backlash also took the form of white flight. Whites left the inner-city communities that were being “invaded” by people of color in droves. They headed to the more affluent suburbs; areas which were relatively protected by their wealth- the business classes that were helping integration along in the cities lived in the suburbs and would not allow integration to happen in their neighborhoods.

White flight and de facto segregation created an echo chamber for the strong right wing movement that had been building for the length of the 1950s and 1960s. In the suburbs, a hard right political philosophy was brewing. It was a mix of anger over integration, hippies, and secularism.

Meanwhile, the white backlash over the Civil Rights Movement was leaving many poorer, disadvantaged whites with a lot of anger and nowhere to channel it. Their population was caught between a rock and a hard place. The Civil Rights Act had shamed many into burying public displays of racism and hatred. Without this outlet, frustration began to build.

Indeed, the behavior of the politicians and people on the ground defending segregation in the South had shamed the entire region. It was no longer universally socially acceptable to support keeping people unequal based on the color of their skin.

With that shame came a sense of political betrayal. The South had dutifully supported Democrats more or less consistently since well before the Civil War. But it was a Democrat, from Texas no less, who had signed the Civil Rights Act and upended the entire Southern political system.

Whites in the South felt betrayed by their political leaders and impotent in the face of a changing America. The right wing was ideologically strong, but politically adrift. They needed a leader, and Richard Nixon emerged to fill that role.

Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1968 used the language of “the silent majority” to send a message to politically impotent whites: I stand with you. I will say what you feel you cannot.

The silent majority referred to the increasingly angry group of right wing whites that had watched their racial and economic supremacy become shaken by the Civil Rights Movement.

The silent majority referred to the increasingly angry group of right wing whites that had watched their racial and economic supremacy become shaken by the Civil Rights Movement. This group had been “silent” for too long, the thinking went, but now they had an outlet for their political activism.