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This book discusses the central role that race played in Mississippi's gradual transition from a Democratic stronghold to a solidly Republican state. Prior to 1965, the state had almost no black political participation, but, in just over twenty years, it had hundreds of black elected officials. The growth of black political power was contested by white politicians in both parties, who alternated between resistance to and solicitation of black voters. These mechanisms of resistance included numerous vote-dilution schemes to weaken black voting strength and defeat black candidates. Eventually, the Democratic Party achieved integration, but white Democrats still held the real power in the party. The price of this integration was the increasing defection of white voters to the Republicans, who abandoned interracial efforts in favor of racial conservatism and indifference to black concerns. Unlike recent studies arguing that class, economics, or other nonracial issues played a role in southern political realignment, this study reinforces the fact that race was at the heart of the “Great White Switch” of Mississippi to the GOP in the 1980s.

This is a collection of recent scholarship on the aftermath of US slave emancipation, with a range of contributions from leading scholars in the field (Foner, Holt, Fitzgerald), up-and-coming historians with a reputation in the study of Reconstruction (O'Donovan, Baker, Kelly, Downs), and other promising junior and mid-level scholars (Illingworth, Mathisen, Bryant, Rhyne) whose essays here speak to some of the key issues in Reconstruction historiography. Aside from Holt's opening piece and the afterword by Foner, the essays were selected from more than 75 papers presented at two conferences organized by the After Slavery Project (www.afterslavery.com), a transatlantic research collaboration directed by Brian Kelly from Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. The selection was based on three main criteria: the essays had to concern the former Confederate states during the period following slave emancipation; they had to be based on original research; and in the judgment of the editors, the essays had to make a substantial contribution to Reconstruction historiography. We sought essays that concerned the role of labor in Reconstruction but did not confine ourselves to these. The result is a collection that covers a geographically diverse area of the former slave states, grappling with problems central to Reconstruction scholarship in the aftermath of Foner's important synthesis.

Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule focuses on America's most-forgotten farmers: black families that cast their lot on their own land and depended on their own labor in a nation that doubted their right to control either. Rural African Americans have long been perceived as dependent tenants, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers. This collection of essays indicates that one in four black farm families overcame numerous obstacles by 1920 to own farm land. It does this without diminishing the serious nature of the opposition that limited their right to property and independent decision making. These essays indicate that black farmers who became farm owners and landowners should not be dismissed as anomalous economic success stories. Instead, they should be evaluated within the context of a larger social historical milieu. White landowners attempted to protect white's privileged status within the American agrarian ideal that linked landownership to morality and full citizenship. Black farm families had to overcome this philosophical barrier and additional obstacles posed by racism and sexism, the crop lien system of labor, debt, and unstable markets. Additional factors such as geographic isolation, limited crop and stock choices, mechanization, personal relationships, and kinship networks all affected black farm families in numerous and inconsistent ways. Beyond Forty Acres encourages readers to re-conceptualize small farms not as failure when compared to large-scale production agriculture but as an alternative approach specific to a time and place.

Historical treatments of race during the early 20th century have generally focused on black women's activism. Leading books about the disenfranchisement era hint that black men withdrew from positions of community leadership until later in the century. This book argues that middle-class black men in North Carolina in fact actively responded to new manifestations of racism. Focusing on the localized, grassroots work of black men during this period, the author offers new insights about rarely scrutinized interracial dynamics as well as the interactions between men and women in the black community. Informed by feminist analysis, she uses gender as the lens through which to view cooperation, tension, and negotiation between the sexes and among African American men during an era of heightened race oppression. Her work promotes improved understanding of the construct of gender during these years, and expands the vocabulary of black manhood beyond the “great man ideology” which has obfuscated alternate, localized meanings of politics, manhood, and leadership.

Atlanta stands out among southern cities for many reasons, not least of which is the role African Americans have played in local politics. This book studies black politics in the city. From Reconstruction to recent times, the middle-class black leadership in Atlanta, while often subordinating class and gender differences to forge a continuous campaign for equality, successfully maintained its mantle of racial leadership for more than a century through a deft combination of racial advocacy and collaboration with local white business and political elites. The book provides an analysis of how one of the most important southern cities managed, adapted, and coped with the struggle for racial justice, examining both traditional electoral politics as well as the roles of non-elected individuals influential in the community. Highlighting the terms of Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young, the city's first two black mayors, the book concludes by raising important questions about the success of black political power and whether it has translated into measurable economic power for the African American community.

This book provides a regional and comparative analysis of the origins, development, and legacies of the Black Power movement in the Caribbean in the turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Black Power in the Caribbean highlights the unique local origins and causes of Black Power mobilization in the Caribbean and its relationship to Black Power in the United States, ultimately setting the historical roots and modern legacies of the movement in a wider international context. Providing a broad regional coverage, the studies in the book range from as far north as Jamaica, Bermuda and the Guyanas to as far south as Trinidad and Tobago and Curaçao. Exploring what Black Power meant in the majority black and multi-ethnic states of the Caribbean, the book demonstrates that the Caribbean has much to add to our understanding of Black Power in the global context.

This book chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women's educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. The author reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators — despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies — contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States. She argues that their experiences, ideas, and practices can inspire contemporary educators to create an intellectual democracy in which all people have a voice. Profiles include Anna Julia Cooper, who was born enslaved yet ultimately earned a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne, and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College. Exposing the hypocrisy in American assertions of democracy and discrediting European notions of intellectual superiority, Cooper argued that all human beings had a right to grow. Bethune believed that education is the right of all citizens in a democracy. Both women's philosophies raised questions of how human and civil rights are intertwined with educational access, scholarly research, pedagogy, and community service. This history of black women traces quantitative research, explores black women's collegiate memories, and identifies significant geographic patterns in America's institutional development.

High-profile rivalries between black male leaders in the early twentieth century have contributed to the view that integrationism and black nationalism were diametrically opposed philosophies shaped primarily by men. Ideas of authenticity and respectability were central to the construction of black identities within black cultural and political resistance movements of the early twentieth century. Unfortunately both concepts have also been used to demonize black middle-class women whose endeavors towards racial uplift are too frequently dismissed as assimilationist and whose class status has apparently disqualified them from performing “authentic” blackness and exhibiting race pride. This book challenges these conceptualizations in an examination of prominent black women leaders' political thought and cultural production in the years between the founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. Through an analysis of black women's political activism, entrepreneurship and literary endeavor, the book argues that black women made significant contributions toward the development of a black feminist tradition which enabled them to challenge the apparent dichotomy between Black Nationalism and integrationism. By exploring the connections between women like the pioneering black hairdresser Madam C. J. Walker and her daughter, A'Lelia, as well as clubwoman Mary McLeod Bethune and United Negro Improvement Association activist Amy Jacques Garvey, the book also makes a contribution to the field of women's history by positioning black women at the forefront of both intellectual and practical endeavors in the struggle for black autonomy.

This book offers a radical departure from other interpretations of Booker T. Washington by focusing on his business ideas and practices. More specifically, the book examines Washington as an entrepreneur, spelling out his business philosophy at great length and discussing the influence it had on black America. It analyzes the national and regional economies in which Washington worked and focuses on his advocacy of black business development as the key to economic uplift for African Americans. The result is a revisionist book that responds to the skewed literature on Washington, even as it offers a new framework for understanding him. Based upon a deep reading of the Tuskegee archives, the book acknowledges Washington not only as a champion of black business development but one who conceived and implemented successful strategies to promote it as well.

This book examines how the Institute of the Black World (IBW), led by historian, theologian, and political activist Vincent Harding, mobilized Black intellectuals in identifying strategy to continue the Black Freedom Struggle in the 1970s. Harding and colleagues founded the IBW in Atlanta, Georgia in 1969. Under Harding's leadership, it became an activist think tank that evaluated Black Studies for emerging programs, developed a Black political agenda for the 1970s with Black elected officials and grassroots activists, and mediated ideological conflicts among Black activists. Relying on the input from an array of activist-intellectuals, the IBW eschewed ideological rigidity, whether in the form of liberalism, Marxism, or Black Nationalism, for a synthetic and pragmatic analytic framework forged through debate and designed to generate the largest amount of political and activist support. It used its network of intellectuals and activists to emphasize structural racism and a racialized political economy, each of which was designed to foster broad consensus in the Black activist community on difficult issues in the 1970s.

This study explores how African American and white women in all-female and mixed gender organizations interpreted and dealt with racial issues and how individual women worked against racial injustice in South Carolina during and after World War II. It also examines the accomplishments and limitations of interracial activism as black and white women pursued sometimes similar but sometimes conflicting agendas. These women, many of whom had long been activists, were informed by a pamphlet entitled “Repairers of the Breach”: A Story of Interracial Cooperation Between Southern Women, 1935–1940. Published in December 1940 by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), it highlighted the history of black and white women’s cross-racial alliances throughout the South. The phrase “Repairers of the Breach,” taken from the Bible, Isaiah 58:12, guided black and white women’s activism in South Carolina. Although some black and white women found it difficult, at times, to overcome their fear and distrust of each other to pursue activism across racial lines, they realized that it was the best opportunity to exact change. They therefore took careful but courageous steps as they embarked upon their journey to improve race relations and conditions for African Americans in their region.

Embracing Protestantism argues that people of African descent in America who embraced Protestant Christianity during the eighteenth century did not become African Americans, but rather came to think of themselves in the context of more fluid Atlantic-African identities. America was the land of slavery and white supremacy where they had little chance of obtaining civil rights or economic mobility. Contrastingly, the Atlantic world offered access to the growing abolitionist movement in Britain and Europe, membership in transatlantic evangelical churches that gave people of color unprecedented power in their local congregations, the chance for contact with black Christians in West and Central Africa, and inspiration from the large black churches then developing in the Caribbean with whom they had formed links through correspondence and the movement of black missionaries. Rather than deracinated creoles who attempted to merge with white culture, people of color who became Protestants in this era were Atlantic Africans who used multiple religious traditions to restore cultural and ethnic connections. Reaching out to third parties outside the plantation complex in the new abolitionist and humanitarian societies then springing up in late eighteenth-century Britain and America was an important way black Anglophone Christians had to resist slavery.

A popular misconception about the American Revolution is that it was largely contained within the continental boundaries of North America. However, the American Revolution neither ended with the cessation of armed conflict in 1781 nor the Treaty of Versailles in 1783; rather it continued and mutated in unusual places, a revolution often carried by those who had the most to lose by being denied the freedom that was promised at the outset of the war. Freedom and Resistance: A Social History of Black Loyalists in the Bahamas studies the struggles for freedom of a group of black loyalists (those enslaved and free blacks loyal to the British causes), who settled in the non-plantation, slave-holding colony of the Bahamas, located on the periphery of the Caribbean region. By focusing on the struggles for freedom that black loyalists experienced in the Bahamas, this book not only aims to recover the social history of black loyalists but seeks to examine the nature of their contributions to Bahamian society. One of the major themes explored in this study is black resistance and political activism. Much of this activism was shaped by the racial discord which erupted in the Bahamas between black and white loyalists in two distinct locales: the previously uninhabited islands of Abaco and the older, more urban center of Nassau, located on the island of New Providence.

Rich with historical sketches of the life and experiences of slaves in Africa, on slave ships, and in Jamaica, this book illustrates the way enslaved Africans lived and helped to shape Jamaican society in the three decades before British abolition of the slave trade. The book's in-depth investigations reveal unexpected insights into the demographics of those captured in Africa and legally transported on British slave ships. For example, there is a commonly held belief that slave traders had a preference for adult males. In fact, the practicalities of slave raiding meant that women, children, and large groups of the elderly were particularly vulnerable during raids and were more often captured and made available for sale in the Caribbean. This book offers a new look at the Atlantic slave trade in its final years, fleshing out the historical portrait of the African men, women, and children who were sold in Jamaica and were thus among the last of the enslaved to put their stamp on Jamaican society. There is no comparable study that takes such a comprehensive approach, looking at both the African and Jamaican sides of the trade system.

Haiti has long been both a source of immense pride—because of the Haitian Revolution—and of profound disappointment—because of the unshakable realities of poverty, political instability, and violence—to the black diasporic imagination. Charting the long history of these multiple meanings is the focus of a critical transnational history of U.S. African Americans and Haitians. This book stretches from the thoughts and words of American intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass, Robert Moton, and Claude Barnett to the Civil Rights era. The book has huge thematic range, which carefully examines the political, economic, and cultural relations between U.S. African Americans and Haitians. The book examines the creative and critical ways U.S. African Americans and Haitians engaged the idealized tenets of Pan Americanism—mutual cooperation, egalitarianism, and nonintervention between nation-states—in order to strengthen Haiti's social, economic, and political growth and stability. The depth of Polyne's research allows him to speak confidently about the convoluted ways that these groups have viewed modernization, “uplift,” and racial unity, as well as the shifting meanings and importance of the concepts over time.

This book examines the emergence of the student civil rights movement in the sit-in protests of 1960 against the South's system of racial segregation and the development of that movement in the ensuing decade into a broader freedom struggle under the aegis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]. It is a history not of leaders but of innovative grass roots protest and new organizational development in support of racial equality. It analyzes: the nature, dynamics, and achievements of the sit-in movement; the impact of the sit-ins on both African Americans and Southern segregationists; the internal culture and organizational development of SNCC; and the ideological evolution of this organization from the bi-racial optimism of 1960 to a pessimistic view of America and what it represented. The international influence of a movement that captured the imagination of the world also comes under review in terms of both SNCC's changing attitudes on the Cold War and the development of racial equality protest in other countries, most notably the United Kingdom. Finally, the epilogue considers to what extent the goals of the 1960s student civil rights movement remain unfulfilled at a time when there is an African American in the White House.

Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America examines and contrasts the experiences of various groups of African-American slaves who tried to escape bondage between the revolutionary era and the U.S. Civil War. Whereas much of the existing scholarship tends to focus on fugitive slaves in very localized settings (especially in communities and regions north of the Mason-Dixon line), the eleven contributions in this volume bring together the latest scholarship on runaway slaves in a diverse range of geographic settings throughout North America—from Canada to Virginia and from Mexico to the British Bahamas—providing a broader and more continental perspective on slave refugee migration. The volume innovatively distinguishes between various “spaces of freedom” to which runaway slaves fled, specifically sites of formal freedom (free-soil regions where slavery had been abolished and refugees were legally free, even if the meanings of freedom in these places were heavily contested); semi-formal freedom (free-soil regions where slavery had been abolished but asylum for runaway slaves was either denied or contested, such as the northern U.S., where state abolition laws were curtailed by federal fugitive slave laws); and informal freedom (places within the slaveholding South where runaways formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations and pass for free). This edited volume encourages scholars to reroute and reconceptualize the geography of slavery and freedom in antebellum North America.

The prevailing narrative of post-1945 southern politics, both among scholars and in the media, is that the rise of the Republican Party in the South can be attributed to the national Democratic Party alienating white voters in the region by passing comprehensive federal civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. This “white backlash” narrative has also become a popular means of explaining the national political strength of the GOP since the end of the 1960s. In this book, the narrative is challenged as an inadequate explanation of modern southern and American politics. The book argues that rather than support for civil rights having undermined the Democratic Party in the South, it was a necessary and effective strategy that slowed Republican growth at the regional level for a generation. Out of conflicting attitudes toward race and civil rights between the major factions within the Georgia Democratic Party emerged a political strategy that stressed the need to minimize overt racial divisions in the state and instead focus voters' attention on economic growth and education. This strategy, known as progressive colorblindness, ultimately became the major driving force behind the creation of the post-Jim Crow “New South” politics of the 1970s and beyond.

This book presents the compelling story of colonial manumission movements among North Carolina Quakers. Embedding complete primary documents within the context of a personal interpretive analysis, the book shows how the consequences of this group's antislavery activism radiated out from a few individuals to the region, the state, and, eventually, the nation. Readers will be able to draw their own insights from the important documents presented in this book, many of them obscure or recently discovered. Through diaries, petitions, legislative debates, and letters, well-known as well as unknown players in the struggle for manumission are allowed to tell their own stories in their own words. This approach has the effect of highlighting the personal motivation of figures both prominent and obscure in the movement.

During the 1930s and 1940s, many African Americans left the Republican Party and joined ranks with the Democrats. Before this time, the few blacks actually able to exercise their franchise automatically voted for the party of Lincoln and emancipation. The resulting political realignment has had numerous and far-reaching impacts, including the 1948 election of Harry Truman. This book examines how the Republican Party lost black voters, what they did to try to win them back and retain them, and why they failed. The study helps put current Republican problems with African American voters into a longer historical framework. The author looks at the making of politics and policy, and investigates the evolving relationships between African Americans and political parties, ultimately revealing how political leaders' decisions or indifference can carry enormous repercussions for the rest of society.