ABSTRACT
It is a truism that liberals are different from conservatives. In the case of American race relations, we know that middle-class whites are more liberal than working-class whites, for example. However, these statements apply to American whites as a whole, and we have no reason to believe that any statements made about the national population will apply to the rather special collection of people who govern the schools in the eight cities in our sample. In this chapter we will examine the attitudes of the school board members to determine what factors distinguish liberal board members from their conservative peers. (Perhaps we had better say clearly here at the beginning that liberal and conservative are relative terms and that the most conservative board members are still a good deal more liberal on civil rights than many whites.) It will not come as any surprise, of course, that liberals and conservatives tend to be recruited from different sectors of the community; hence whether a board is liberal or conservative is determined in large measure by the procedures used to recruit school board members. We shall also see that the way in which board members are recruited has a good deal to do with whether the board members function as a cohesive group.
