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During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, thousands of people were incarcerated in southern jails as a result of their involvement with the civil rights movement. This book follows those activists inside the jail cell to explore the trials and tribulations of life as a civil rights prisoner. It highlights the conditions inside southern jails, activists’ interactions with “ordinary” prisoners, and the importance of race and gender in shaping the prisoners’ treatment. It also reveals how, beyond the jail cell, the movement sought to counter such repression via an ideology that embraced imprisonment as a mark of honor and a statement of resistance, while also seeking to fill the jails and thereby place financial pressure upon local government; this was encapsulated in the term “jail-no-bail.” Organizations and individuals regularly testified to the importance of incarceration as a form of induction into the movement. However, after 1963, as activists faced increasingly serious charges and served longer sentences, many struggled to maintain their commitment to the philosophy behind jail-no-bail. Beneath movement rhetoric, activists found that the earlier exuberance for jail sentences did not fit with the conditions under which they worked. Ain’t Scared of Your Jail concludes by examining the shift toward black power in the post-1965 era and demonstrates how activists, now freed from an earlier focus upon integration and respectability, began to challenge mainstream definitions of criminality to claim that black prisoners were not so much criminals as victims of a racist social structure.

American historians tend to believe that labor activism was moribund in the years between the First World War and the New Deal. The book challenges this perspective in this examination of the railroad unions of the time, arguing that not only were they active, but that they made a big difference in American Labor practices by helping to set legal precedents. The book explains how efforts by the Plumb Plan League and the Railroad Labor Executive Association created the Railroad Labor Act, its amendments, and the Railroad Retirement Act. These laws became models for the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act. Unfortunately, the significant contributions of the railroad laws are, more often than not, overlooked when the NLRA or Social Security are discussed. Offering a new perspective on labor unions in the 1920s, the book describes how the railroad unions created a model for union activism that workers' organizations followed for the next two decades.

In the 1990s, churches across the south-eastern United States were targeted and set ablaze. These arsonists predominately targeted African American congregations and captured the attention of the media nationwide. Using oral histories, newspaper accounts, and governmental reports, this book gives a chronological account of the series of church fires. The book considers the various forces at work, including government responses, civil rights groups, religious forces, and media coverage, in providing an analysis of the events and their fallout. Arguing that these church fires symbolize the breakdown of communal bonds in the nation, the text appeals for the revitalization of united Americans and the return to a sense of community.

Challenge of Change focuses on the engagement of right-wing women with the baby boom generation during the period 1950 through the mid-1970s, a time of tremendous change in America. It explores how women of the older generations, particularly those who were white, middle-class, and right-wing, sought to shape the entire values system of the younger generation. These women were active in grassroots campaigns in regions throughout the United States, campaigning as individuals, in women’s groups, and together with men in their efforts to achieve their goals. Their efforts frequently met with resistance from moderates, the left, and from the youth themselves; thus, the book also looks at reactions from baby boomers and women of the older generation who did not share rightist views. As many areas existed in which the far right and the mainstream concurred, these dimensions are also examined. The book explores ideas that define the “right” and “far right”, including the right’s allegations of “conspiracy” on the part of communists, liberals in government, scientists, and intellectual elites. Overall, this work provides a look into the roots of and growth of right-wing women’s influence, and reveals how women of more recent rightist movements, including the Tea Party movement, have much in common with those of the past. It also shows that the baby boom generation, being the largest generation in American history, became a major factor that the older generation had to deal with.

Chesterfield Smith was one of the boldest lawyers of the twentieth century. A child of a poor, broken household but also a child of a politically connected family, Smith grew up aimless. His World War II combat experience changed him. He returned an ambitious and impatient man who had learned from the European theater what systemized hate and prejudice could do. Smith rose fast, building his small firm to a goliath, leading the Florida Bar, and masterminding the creation of a new state constitution. As president of the American Bar Association during Watergate, his was one of the earliest voices calling for Nixon to obey the law or resign. At home, Smith urged his lawyers to improve the practice of law, and the world around them, by “doing good.” Smith’s larger-than-life personality and drive to improve his surroundings irritated some and inspired many.

This book details how African American women used lessons in basic literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy and sow seeds for collective action during the civil rights movement. Deanna Gillespie traces the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration—a profoundly powerful objective in the Jim Crow South. Born in 1957 as a result of discussions between community activist Esau Jenkins, schoolteacher Septima Clark, and Highlander Folk School director Myles Horton, the CEP became a part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961. The teachers, mostly Black women, gathered friends and neighbors in living rooms, churches, beauty salons, and community centers. Through the work of the CEP, literate black men and women were able to gather their own information, determine fair compensation for a day’s work, and register formal complaints. Drawing on teachers’ reports and correspondence, oral history interviews, and papers from a variety of civil rights organizations, Gillespie follows the growth of the CEP from its beginnings in the South Carolina Sea Islands to southeastern Georgia, the Mississippi Delta, and Alabama’s Black Belt. This book retells the story of the civil rights movement from the vantage point of activists who have often been overlooked and makeshift classrooms where local people discussed, organized, and demanded change.

This book is about a state legislative committee that originated as a tool of massive resistance in Florida, but, through its investigations of gay and lesbian teachers, indecent literature, and liberal professors, became a conservative cultural watchdog and a forerunner in the modern culture wars. The committee's targets illuminate the extent to which national discussions about race, sexuality, education, and communism shaped political concerns on the local and state levels and intersected with the desire to maintain racial segregation beginning in the 1950s. The book also demonstrates that red-baiting civil rights activists, claims of protecting youth from homosexual predators, eradicating smut from newsstands and classrooms, and defending the rights of Christian college students could be politically useful, but also that these tactics were based on more than mere political expediency. They were carried out and popularly supported by people who believed that their values were, at best, being undermined through modernization and, at worst, being threatened with extinction through the liberal subversion of American institutions. The Johns Committee's anti-Communist critique of sexual and racial perversion bound them together under the rubric of subversion and the rhetoric of defending children. This book suggests rethinking the origins of the social conservatism that became central to the New Right and the Republican Party by examining the ideas invoked to marginalize and silence those who opposed segregation as well as the imagined links between sexual and political nonconformity in the postwar period.

The book examines the impact of deindustrialization on the American political economy through a case study of the New England region. New England experienced dramatic downsizing in textiles and other traditional industries beginning in the 1920s and lasting for much of the twentieth century. The book concentrates on events in Massachusetts, by far the most populous New England state and the one hit hardest by industrial decline. The volume spotlights developments in the 1920s, 30s, and early 40s, when the problem of deindustrialization was new. Cold War–era episodes of industrial downsizing are examined as well. Attention focuses on cotton textiles, New England’s largest troubled sector in the post–World War I period and the one declining most rapidly at that time. The demise of traditional manufacturing in New England resulted in a number of initiatives to address the problem, backed by a variety of interest groups. The effects of industrial decline on the political economy played out principally through these efforts. Three distinct initiatives to counter deindustrialization were advanced in New England. First was what can be called “retrenchment”—a drive to reduce business regulations and taxes so as to enhance the competitiveness of area industries. Second was “federal assistance”—an effort to secure federal government aid for declining industries and locales affected by downsizing. Third was “economic development”—an attempt to develop new regional industries to replace those in decline. The study describes each effort in detail, looks at the groups who supported it, and assesses the outcome.

This book is a comprehensive account of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and its efforts to keep alive the memory of the nation’s past. It argues that, especially prior to World War II, the DAR’s conservative white middle-class members played a vital role in private citizens’ efforts to both bolster patriotism and guard the nation’s gendered and racial boundaries through commemorative practices. The Daughters engaged in patriotic activism long believed to be the domain of men and deliberately challenged male-centered accounts of US nation-building. At the same time, however, their tales about the past helped reinforce traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, reflecting a strong-held belief that any challenge to these traditions would jeopardize the nation’s stability. In a similar fashion, the organization frequently voiced support for inclusive civic nationalism, but deliberately used memory to consolidate Anglo-Saxon whiteness and keep the nation’s racial divisions in place. By closely examining these ambiguities, this study sheds fresh light on white conservative women’s remarkable agency in US nationalism and explains the tenacity of a particular nationalist ideology that deemed ingrained gender and race hierarchies vital to America’s unity and progress.

In Detain and Punish, Carl Lindskoog provides the first in-depth history of immigration detention in the United States. Employing extensive archival research to document the origins and development of immigration detention in the U.S. from 1973 to 2000, it reveals how the world’s largest detention system originated in the U.S. government’s campaign to exclude Haitians from American shores, and how resistance by Haitians and their allies constantly challenged the detention regime. From the Krome Avenue Detention Center in Miami, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to jails and prisons across the country, Haitians have been at the center of the story of immigration detention. Contrary to the notion that immigration detention serves a merely administrative function, this history shows the intentionally punitive design of the modern detention regime. From its origin, immigration detention was designed to deter asylum seekers and unauthorized migrants by depriving them of their liberty; to detain and punish. And while Haitians were the first to be targeted by this deterrence-through-punishment policy, Central American asylum seekers and many others were soon ensnared in the expanding web of detention. Just as immigration detention was re-emerging in the late-1970s, taking root in the 1980s, and then exploding in the 1990s, the United States was constructing a parallel system of mass incarceration for its own citizens. Racialized mass incarceration for both citizens and non-citizens thus emerged as a critical element of social, political, and economic life in the United States in the late-twentieth century. This book explains how it came to be.

This book examines the major trends in drug trafficking and organized crime in the Americas in the twenty-first century. We have compiled a list of leading experts in the field. The book explores U.S. drug policies within the U.S. as well as abroad and examines drug-trafficking and organized crime in specific countries and regions. The book also analyzes regional and international drug control policies.

Everybody’s Problem: The War on Poverty in Eastern North Carolina puts forward a new and broader understanding of the factors that contributed to declining poverty rates during the 1960s and beyond. The main focus of this study is Craven County, North Carolina, home to the nation’s first rural antipoverty program to receive federal funds as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. After quickly creating local contoversy in its first year, the program—much to the surprise of its conservative critics—survived through the remainder of the decade and into the next. Most responsible was the large presence and influence of moderates, both white and black, who kept it going out of a strong desire to improve economic development and opportunity in their community. In addition to focusing on urban areas, scholars have largely underappreciated the practicality and effectiveness of cooperation, compromise, and other forms of moderate leadership in their analyses of the social change that occurred during the 1960s. They have generally argued that confrontation and direct protest against those in power were among the most effective means for the poor to achieve economic empowerment. While protest and other forms of confrontation were sometimes key tactics in creating change, they were not always the most successful ones in Eastern North Carolina. Aiming to build upon existing research on the War on Poverty, this book tells a fuller story of what community action entailed and how it functioned in a local community.

The Failure of Term Limits in Florida assesses the impact of term limitations on Florida’s state legislature and provides the theory and history behind the term limits movement. This book argues term limits have not provided the panacea that proponents claimed. Legislative tenure has been decimated and legislative experience cut deeply since term limits took effect in 2000. Forced turnover has facilitated more competition but only when a seat initially opens. Term limits have not dramatically increased the number of women and minorities elected to office as proponents envisioned. Politicians elected under term limits are shown to have significant elective experience coming into the Legislature and continue to vie for elected positions when they exit, certainly not the “citizen” legislators proponents preferred. Legislative process knowledge is not the important criteria for leadership selection under term limits; the ability to fundraise and campaign for fellow party members is now the key criterion. The Senate has become the repository of institutional memory and gained an advantage over the less experienced House. The legislative branch is severely weakened under term limits with the governor, staff, and lobbyists filling the void. While term limits remain a popular idea in Florida, the effect on the legislative institution has not been a positive one.

This book is a narrative history of the operations of the U.S. Middle District Court of Florida from its founding in 1962 to the present. The book sets the court in the social, economic, and political context of the time and place. With federal courthouses in Jacksonville, Ocala, Orlando, Tampa, and Fort Myers, the Middle District contains roughly half of Florida’s population of nearly nineteen million and is one of the busiest in the nation. Cases involving organized crime, drugs, civil rights, desegregation, redistricting, First Amendment, employment discrimination, voters rights, kidnapping, the environment, death penalty, abortion rights, the right to die, terrorism, espionage, and a whole host of other types of cases have been litigated in its courtrooms. Over its fifty years Middle District judges made many important decisions that shaped the law and affected thousands of lives in fundamental ways. The lives, times, and work of the district judges, magistrates, and bankruptcy judges are included in these pages. The book also narrates the story of prosecutors, marshals, attorneys, and the many other dedicated officials that made the Middle District of Florida function from its inception in 1962 to the present.

Few men make their mark in their profession as indelibly as historian Francis Butler Simkins (1897–1966). Known as an eccentric, Simkins is almost as famous for falling asleep while performing his ceremonial duties as president-elect of the Southern Historical Association as he is for his wildly influential and radical scholarship. Simkins was considered one of the most liberal voices in the academic dialogue about Reconstruction and race relations in the South during the first part of his career, but his outlook changed drastically during the 1950s. This man, whose scholarship once challenged racism, became a staunch conservative—arguing in his final book that the Jim Crow South was “everlasting” and would never change. This biography takes a close look at Simkins as a man, to understand better him as a historian. The book engages with Simkins' physical and mental eccentricities—his troubled health and career stresses—and explores the extent to which the historian was shaped by the values he learned during his childhood in segregationist South Carolina.

History has labelled Lyndon B. Johnson “Lincoln's successor.” But how did a southern president representing a predominantly conservative state, with connections to some of the nation's leading segregationists, come to play such an influential role in civil rights history? In Freedom's Pragmatist, Sylvia Ellis tracks Johnson's personal and political civil rights journey from his childhood and early adulthood in Texas to his lengthy career in Congress and the Senate to his time as vice president and president. Once in the White House, and pressured constantly by grassroots civil rights protests, Johnson made a major contribution to the black freedom struggle through his effective use of executive power. He provided much-needed moral leadership on racial equality; secured the passage of landmark civil rights acts that ended legal segregation and ensured voting rights for blacks; pushed for affirmative action; introduced antipoverty, education, and health programs that benefited all citizens; and made important and symbolic appointments of African Americans to key political positions. Freedom's Pragmatist argues that place, historical context, and personal ambition are the keys to understanding Johnson on civil rights. And Johnson is key to understanding the history of civil rights in the United States. Ellis emphasizes Johnson's complex love-hate relationship with the South, his innate compassion for the disadvantaged and dispossessed, and his political instincts and skills that allowed him to know when and how to implement racial change in a divided nation.

This substantially revised new edition depicts the transformation of Florida, beginning with World War II and spanning Republican Rick Scott's first term as Governor of the state in 2012. Following a tortuous path that saw natives struggling with newcomers for political control of the state, whites and blacks doing battle over the future of segregation, Hispanic immigrants trying to adapt to a new culture that bore no resemblance to their own, retirees searching for paradise and the Fountain of Youth, and middle and lower-class families seeking new opportunities and with it the American Dream, Florida emerged dramatically onto the national political stage with a people and a culture that foretold the future of America. The story of Florida is the story of the nation with all its complexities in the period from World War II to 2012. During those seventy years, Florida was transformed from a biracial, rigidly segregated, illiberal, and rural society into a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, liberal, and urban state. Florida had become part of the nation and, in the process, helped transform it.

During the first half of the 20th century, Florida prisoners were divided into two categories: Grade 1 prisoners were sent to the chain gangs to build the roads and highways that brought settlers and tourists to the state, and Grade 2 prisoners were sent to the state prison farm near Raiford. The farm began as a temporary stockade in November 1913 but expanded dramatically in the 1920s and 1930s as permanent structures including factories and an execution chamber were established. As there was no separate women's prison before 1952, all female prisoners were also housed at the state prison farm. Over 45,000 men, women, and some children spent time in Florida's prison farms and road camps between 1913 and 1956. The majority of inmates were African American men, and the prison system was defined by racial segregation and expectations of black deference to white guards and inmates. Raiford was the third largest prison farm in the United States and in the interwar years was considered by penologists across the U.S. to be a progressive and innovative penal farm. Yet, overcrowding, mistreatment of inmates, silent sabotage, and prisoner protests were also commonplace in these years. To chart Florida's uneven journey toward penal modernism, this study explores the origins and development of Florida's prison farms and chain gangs, the changing racial and gender demographics of the inmate population, the institutional life and leisure activities of guards and inmates, and the development of prison healthcare.

Home Front tells about the extraordinary transformation of North Carolina as a result of World War II. Emphasis is on the large number of military bases; selective service; rationing and the sale of war bonds; German submarine warfare off the coast; women in the war; racial issues; German prisoners of war in the state; North Carolina’s heroes; and the contributions made by the textile, tobacco, farming, shipbuilding, and lumber industries during the war.

In How the New Deal Built Florida Tourism, David Nelson examines the creation of modern Florida tourism through the state and federal government during the Great Depression. And more specifically, with the Florida civic-elite’s use of the Federal New Deal to develop state parks in order to re-boot Florida’s depressed tourist industry. The Florida Park Service is financially, thematically, ideally, and literally a direct product of the New Deal, as the Civilian Conservation Corps funded, designed, and in large ran the state park program. And the same can be said for much of modern Florida tourism, as well. So many of our current concerns—environment change and overdevelopment, Florida’s ongoing north-south cultural and political divide, ideas of what constitutes the “Real Florida,” and the continued fascination with the mythical “Florida Cracker”—have their origins in the 1930s. With such a focus, this book addresses three previously underserved topics—the creation of the Florida Park Service, the development and work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Florida, and a case study of the New Deal in Florida. Florida in the Great Depression has been largely ignored by historians when compared to other eras. But as this book will demonstrate, the New Deal era was in fact crucial to the creation of modern Florida.