Boyd deftly shows how Georgia Democrats forged a successful (if morally problematic) response to the civil rights movement, allowing them to remain in power until internal divisions eventually weakened the party. The result is a study that recognizes the myriad forces southern leaders faced as the Jim Crow South gave way to new political realities and greatly enhances our understanding of southern politics today.
"Tim Boyd has significantly reassessed the nature of southern politics in post--World War II America in this magnificent work. This is a first-rate history of Georgia politics in the modern era."--Gregory Schneider, author of The Conservative Century The precipitous fall of the Democratic Party in southern politics during the latter half of the twentieth century has sparked a rich scholarly debate. Many theories have been put forward to explain the sea change that swept Democrats out of office and replaced them with a new Republican order. In this timely volume, Tim Boyd challenges one of the most prominent explanations for this shift: the "white backlash" theory. Taking the political experience in Georgia as a case study, he makes a compelling argument that New South politics formed out of the factional differences within the state Democratic Party and not simply as a result of white reactions to the civil rights movement. Boyd deftly shows how Georgia Democrats forged a successful (if morally problematic) response to the civil rights movement, allowing them to remain in power until internal divisions eventually weakened the party. The result is a study that recognizes the myriad forces southern leaders faced as the Jim Crow South gave way to new political realities and greatly enhances our understanding of southern politics today. Tim Boyd is a history teacher at Montgomery Bell Academy and author of The 1966 Election in Georgia and the Ambiguity of the White Backlash.
What determines the interests, ideologies, and alliances that make up political parties? In its entire history, the United States has had only a handful of party transformations. First to the Party concludes that groups like unions and churches, not voters or politicians, are the most consistent influences on party transformation.
Poor Atlanta looks at the poor people’s campaigns in Atlanta in the 1960s and 1970s, which operated in relationship to Sunbelt city- building efforts. With these efforts, city leaders aimed to prevent urban violence, staunch disinvestment, check white flight, and amplify Atlanta’s importance as a business and transportation hub. As urban leaders promoted Forward Atlanta, a program to, in Mayor Ivan Allen Jr.’s words, “sell the city like a product,” poor families insisted that their lives and living conditions, too, should improve. While not always operating within public awareness, antipoverty campaigns among the poor presented a regular and sometimes strident critique of inequality and Atlanta’s uneven urban development. With Poor Atlanta, LeeAnn B. Lands demonstrates that, while eclipsed by the Black freedom movement, antipoverty organizing (including direct action campaigns, legal actions, lobbying, and other forms of activism) occurred with regularity from 1964 through 1976. Her analysis is one of the few citywide studies of antipoverty organizing in late twentieth-century America.
“This biography will find its place among a growing literature on post-war Southern politics.” —Charles Holden, author of The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC When W. Kerr Scott (1896–1958) began his campaign for the North Carolina gubernatorial seat in 1948, his opponents derided his candidacy as a farce. However, the plainspoken dairy farmer quickly gathered loyal supporters and mobilized a grassroots attack on the entrenched interests that had long controlled the state government, winning the race in a historic upset. In this meticulously researched book, Julian M. Pleasants traces Scott’s productive and controversial political career, from his years as North Carolina commissioner of agriculture, through his governorship (1949–1953), to his brief tenure as a U.S. senator (1954–1958). Scott was elected at a time when southern liberals were on the rise in post-World War II America. McCarthyism and civil rights agitation soon overwhelmed progressivism, but the trend lasted long enough for the straight-talking “Squire from Haw River” to enact major reforms and establish a reputation as one of the more interesting and influential southern politicians of the twentieth century. This long-overdue look at his political career illuminates the spirit that transformed an introspective, segregated society dependent on tobacco and textiles into a vibrant, diversified economy at the center of the industrial, banking, and information revolution in the South. “Pleasants writes with clarity and authority.” —Jeffrey J. Crow, Deputy Secretary, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources (ret.)
While there have been a number of studies that have explored African American “movement culture” and African American “movement politics,” rarely has the mixture of black music and black politics or, rather, black music an as expression of black movement politics, been explored across several genres of African American “movement music,” and certainly not with a central focus on the major soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement: gospel, freedom songs, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll. Here the mixture of music and politics emerging out of the Civil Rights Movement is critically examined as an incredibly important site and source of spiritual rejuvenation, social organization, political education, and cultural transformation, not simply for the non-violent civil rights soldiers of the 1950s and 1960s, but for organic intellectual-artist-activists deeply committed to continuing the core ideals and ethos of the Civil Rights Movement in the twenty-first century. Civil Rights Music: The Soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement is primarily preoccupied with that liminal, in-between, and often inexplicable place where black popular music and black popular movements meet and merge. Black popular movements are more than merely social and political affairs. Beyond social organization and political activism, black popular movements provide much-needed spaces for cultural development and artistic experimentation, including the mixing of musical and other aesthetic traditions. “Movement music” experimentation has historically led to musical innovation, and musical innovation in turn has led to new music that has myriad meanings and messages—some social, some political, some cultural, some spiritual and, indeed, some sexual. Just as black popular movements have a multiplicity of meanings, this book argues that the music that emerges out of black popular movements has a multiplicity of meanings as well.
The untold story of the unlikely heroes, the cutthroat politics, and the cultural forces that turned a Deep South state purple—by a top reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Flipped is the definitive account of how the election of Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff transformed Georgia from one of the staunchest Republican strongholds to the nation’s most watched battleground state—and ground zero for the disinformation wars certain to plague statewide and national elections in the future. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein charts how progressive activists and organizers worked to mobilize hundreds of thousands of new voters and how Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia may shape Democratic strategy for years to come. He also chronicles how Georgia’s Republicans countered with a move to the far right that culminated in state leaders defying Donald Trump’s demands to overturn his defeat. Bluestein tells the story of all the key figures in this election, including Stacey Abrams, Brian Kemp, David Perdue, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, and Kelly Loeffler, through hundreds of interviews with the people closest to the election. Flipped also features such fascinating characters as political activist turned U.S. congresswoman Nikema Williams; perma-tanned baseball star turned lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan; and the volunteers and voters who laid the groundwork for Biden’s triumphant Georgia campaign. Flipped tells a story that will resonate through the rest of the decade and beyond, as most political experts see Georgia headed toward years of close elections, and Democrats have developed a deep bench of strong candidates to challenge a still deeply entrenched GOP. Interest in the state only figures to increase if and when Stacey Abrams mounts a rematch against Governor Brian Kemp in the fall of 2022 and Trump promotes his own slate of candidates against Republicans who stood against his efforts to overturn Georgia’s election.
It’s not the economy, stupid: How liberal politicians’ faith in the healing powers of economic growth—and refusal to address racial divisions—fueled reactionary politics across the South. From FDR to Clinton, charismatic Democratic leaders have promised a New South—a model of social equality and economic opportunity that is always just around the corner. So how did the region become the stronghold of conservative Republicans in thrall to Donald Trump? After a lifetime studying Southern politics, Anthony Badger has come to a provocative conclusion: white liberals failed because they put their faith in policy solutions as an engine for social change and were reluctant to confront directly the explosive racial politics dividing their constituents. After World War II, many Americans believed that if the edifice of racial segregation, white supremacy, and voter disfranchisement could be dismantled across the South, the forces of liberalism would prevail. Hopeful that economic modernization and education would bring about gradual racial change, Southern moderates were rattled when civil rights protest and federal intervention forced their hand. Most were fatalistic in the face of massive resistance. When the end of segregation became inevitable, it was largely driven by activists and mediated by Republican businessmen. Badger follows the senators who refused to sign the Southern Manifesto and rejected Nixon’s Southern Strategy. He considers the dilemmas liberals faced across the South, arguing that their failure cannot be blamed simply on entrenched racism. Conservative triumph was not inevitable, he argues, before pointing to specific false steps and missed opportunities. Could the biracial coalition of low-income voters that liberal politicians keep counting on finally materialize? Badger sees hope but urges Democrats not to be too complacent.
In this beautifully written meditation on identity and place, Talmage A. Stanley tells the story of his grandparents' middle-class aspirations from the 1920s to the 1940s in the once-booming Pocahontas coalfields of southern West Virginia. Part lyrical family memoir and part social study, The Poco Field: An American Story of Place addresses a long-standing gap in Appalachian and American studies, illustrating the lives and choices of the middle class in the mid-twentieth century and delving into questions of place-based identity. Exploring the natural and built environments of the towns of Keystone, West Virginia and Newbern, Virginia, Stanley delineates the history of conflict and control of local industry and development. Through his grandparents' struggle for upward mobility into the middle class, Stanley narrates a history that counters ideas of Appalachia as an exception to American culture and history, presenting instead an image of the region as an emblem of America at large. Stanley builds out from family and local history to examine broad structures of values and practices as they reflect and relate to place, showing how events such as the development of extensive mineworks, the ghettoization of the area's black residents, the catastrophic flooding of the Elkhorn Creek, and the fraud-induced failure of Keystone National Bank signal values that erode a place both literally and figuratively. Giving voice to activists now working to break down boundaries and assumptions that long have defined and restricted the middle class in the global economy, The Poco Field also champions the creative potential of place for reinvigorating democratic society for the twenty-first century.
