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In Defying Disfranchisement, R. Volney Riser documents a number of lawsuits challenging various requirements---including literacy tests, poll taxes, and white primaries---designed primarily to strip African American men of their right to vote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Twelve of these wended their way to the U. S. Supreme Court, and that body coldly ignored the systematic disfranchisement of black southerners. Nevertheless, as Riser demonstrates, the attempts themselves were stunning and demonstrate that even at one of their darkest hours, African Americans sheltered and nurtured a hope that would lead to wholesale changes upon the American legal and political landscape.
This book punctures the myth that important national civil rights organizing in the United States began with the NAACP, showing that earlier national organizations developed key ideas about law and racial justice activism that the NAACP later pursued.
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year “This absolutely splendid book is a triumph on every level. A first-rate history of the United States, it is beautifully written, deeply researched, and filled with entertaining stories. For anyone who wants to see our democracy flourish, this is the book to read.” —Doris Kearns Goodwin To all who say our democracy is broken—riven by partisanship, undermined by extremism, corrupted by wealth—history offers hope. Democracy’s nineteen cases, honed in David Moss’s popular course at Harvard and taught at the Library of Congress, in state capitols, and at hundreds of high schools across the country, take us from Alexander Hamilton’s debates in the run up to the Constitutional Convention to Citizens United. Each one presents a pivotal moment in U.S. history and raises questions facing key decision makers at the time: Should the delegates support Madison’s proposal for a congressional veto over state laws? Should Lincoln resupply Fort Sumter? Should Florida lawmakers approve or reject the Equal Rights Amendment? Should corporations have a right to free speech? Moss invites us to engage in the passionate debates that are crucial to a healthy society. “Engagingly written, well researched, rich in content and context...Moss believes that fierce political conflicts can be constructive if they are mediated by shared ideals.” —Glenn C. Altschuler, Huffington Post “Gives us the facts of key controversies in our history—from the adoption of the constitution to Citizens United—and invites readers to decide for themselves...A valuable resource for civic education.” —Michael Sandel, author of Justice
Imperium in Imperio (1899) was the first black novel to countenance openly the possibility of organized black violence against Jim Crow segregation. Its author, a Baptist minister and newspaper editor from Texas, Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933), would go on to publish four more novels; establish his own publishing company, one of the first secular publishing houses owned and operated by an African American in the United States; and help to found the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Tennessee. Alongside W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Griggs was a key political and literary voice for black education and political rights and against Jim Crow. Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs examines the wide scope of Griggs's influence on African American literature and politics at the turn of the twentieth century. Contributors engage Griggs's five novels and his numerous works of nonfiction, as well as his publishing and religious careers. By taking up Griggs's work, these essays open up a new historical perspective on African American literature and the terms that continue to shape American political thought and culture.
Carl V. Harris’s Segregation in the New South, completed and edited by W. Elliot Brownlee, explores the rise of racial exclusion in late nineteenth-century Birmingham, Alabama. In the 1870s, African Americans in this crucial southern industrial city were eager to exploit the disarray of slavery’s old racial lines, assert their new autonomy, and advance toward full equality. However, most southern whites worked to restore the restrictive racial lines of the antebellum South or invent new ones that would guarantee the subordination of Black residents. From Birmingham’s founding in 1871, color lines divided the city, and as its people strove to erase the lines or fortify them, they shaped their futures in fateful ways. Social segregation is at the center of Harris’s history. He shows that from the beginning of Reconstruction southern whites engaged in a comprehensive program of assigning social dishonor to African Americans—the same kind of dishonor that whites of the Old South had imposed on Black people while enslaving them. In the process, southern whites engaged in constructing the meaning of race in the New South.
In a largely previously untold story, from 1865 to 1950, black litigants throughout the South took on white southerners in civil suits. Drawing on almost a thousand cases, Milewski shows how African Americans negotiated the southern legal system and won suits against whites after the Civil War and before the Civil Rights struggle.
Living in Infamy examines the history of disfranchisement for criminal conviction in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the post-war South, white southern Democrats expanded the usage of laws disfranchising for crimes of infamy in order to deny African Americans the suffrage rights due them as citizens, employing historical similarities between the legal statuses of slaves and convicts as justification. At the same time, our nation's criminal code changed. The inhumane treatment of prisoners, the expansion of the prison system, the public nature of punishment by forced labor, and the abandonment of the idea of reform and rehabilitation of prisoners all contributed to a national consensus that certain categories of criminals should be permanently disfranchised. As racial barriers to suffrage were challenged and fell, rights remained restricted for persons targeted by such infamy laws; criminal convictions--in place of race--continued the disparity in legal status between whites and African Americans. Decades later, after race-based disfranchisement has officially ended, legislation steeped in a legacy of racial discrimination continues to perpetuate a dichotomy of suffrage and citizenship that still affects our election outcomes today.
In Search of Federal Enforcement is a call to investigate the history of federal oversight to secure and preserve black Americans’ voting rights over a ninety-five-year interregnum. This book satiates the reader’s harboring curiosity as to why the national government was culpably negligent in protecting the exercise of the franchise for black Americans until the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As Holloway explains, much of this problem stemmed from Southern Democrats operating in tandem with the power of private actors to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment. This mutual-advantage partnership codified disfranchisement, safeguarded the interests of recalcitrant Southern states and localities, and defended local systems of privilege. In the pages of this timely study, Holloway lays bare the abject failure of the national government and critically evaluates how the Southern status quo stimulated chaos at the national level. Despite market paradigms, In Search of Federal Enforcement confronts this historical conundrum and offers keen observations about voting manipulations and electoral abuse by both incumbents and private actors.
This pioneering work brings together for the first time in a single reference work all of the extant, fugitive, and recently discovered registration data on African American voters from Colonial America to the present. It features election returns for African American presidential, senatorial, congressional, and gubernatorial candidates over time. Rich, insightful narrative explains the data and traces the history of the laws dealing with the enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of African Americans. Topics covered include: - The contributions of statistical pioneers including Monroe Work, W.E.B. DuBois and Ralph Bunche - African American organizations, like the NAACP and National Equal Rights League (NERL) - Pioneering African American officeholders, including the few before the Civil War - Four influxes of African American voters: Reconstruction (Southern African American men), the Fifteenth Amendment (African American men across the country), the Nineteenth Amendment (African American female voters in 1920 election), and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - The historical development of disenfranchisement in the South and the statistical impact of the tools of disenfranchisement: literacy clauses, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses. The African-American Electorate features more than 300 tables, 150 figures, and 50 maps, many of which have been created exclusively for this work using demographic, voter registration, election return, and racial precinct data that have never been collected and assembled for the public. An appendix includes popular and electoral voting data for African-American presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial candidates, and a comprehensive bibliography indicates major topic areas and eras concerning the African-American electorate. The African American Electorate offers students and researchers the opportunity, for the first time, to explore the relationship between voters and political candidates, identify critical variables, and situate African Americans' voting behavior and political phenomena in the context of America's political history.
In his seminal article “Freedom Then, Freedom Now,” renowned civil rights historian Steven F. Lawson described his vision for the future study of the civil rights movement. Lawson called for a deeper examination of the social, economic, and political factors that influenced the movement’s development and growth. He urged his fellow scholars to connect the “local with the national, the political with the social,” and to investigate the ideological origins of the civil rights movement, its internal dynamics, the role of women, and the significance of gender and sexuality. In Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement, editors Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer follow Lawson’s example, bringing together the best new scholarship on the modern civil rights movement. The work expands our understanding of the movement by engaging issues of local and national politics, gender and race relations, family, community, and sexuality. The volume addresses cultural, legal, and social developments and also investigates the roots of the movement. Each essay highlights important moments in the history of the struggle, from the impact of the Young Women’s Christian Association on integration to the use of the arts as a form of activism. Freedom Rights not only answers Lawson’s call for a more dynamic, interactive history of the civil rights movement, but it also helps redefine the field.