"The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery", wrote W. E. B. Du Bois. The black community in the South was brought back under the yoke of the Southern Democrats, who had been politically undermined during Reconstruction. Whites in the South were committed to reestablish its own sociopolitical structure with the goal of a new social order enforcing racial subordination and labor control. While the Republicans succeeded in maintaining some power in part of the Upper South, such as Tennessee, in the Deep South there was a return to "home rule". Nowhere was this more true than Georgia, where an unbroken line of Democrats occupied the governor's office for 131 years, a period of dominance that only came to an end in 2003.