The Belle of Ashby Street
The Belle of Ashby Street

Author: Lorraine Nelson Spritzer

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2008-06-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0820332542

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This biography of the first woman to be elected to Congress from the state of Georgia is more than the story of one woman's challenge of the political establishment. It also covers professional women in the modern South, southern liberalism in the New Deal era and beyond, and the gathering forces of racial change in the era immediately preceding the civil rights movement. A courageous and high-spirited woman, Helen Douglas Mankin drove an ambulance in France in 1918, made a daring cross-country motor-car tour with her sister in 1922, and was one of the first women to practice law before the state bar. Her political career began in 1936, when she was elected to the state legislature from Atlanta. During her four terms in office she worked for progressive legislation in the areas of child welfare, education, electoral reform, and women's rights. In 1946 when a special election was called to fill the unexpired term of Fifth District Congressman Robert Ramspeck, Helen Mankin left the legislature to seek the office. Of the seventeen candidates in the race, only Mankin actively sought the support of the black community, and she won the seat by a margin smaller than her vote in the heavily black Ashby Street precinct of Atlanta. Talmadge dubbed her "the Belle of Ashby Street" and belittled "the spectacle of Atlanta Negroes sending a Congresswoman to Washington." She was renominated in the no longer all-white Democratic primary of July 1946, winning more popular votes than her nearest opponent, but the entrenched political forces in the state unified to orchestrate her defeat and her opponent claimed victory. Although her tenure in Congress was brief and she never again held office, her legacy is one of courage and conviction in an era that saw many changes in the South and the nation.

Touched with Fire
Touched with Fire

Author: David E. Lowe

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-12-01

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1640122753

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Morris B. Abram (1918–2000) emerged from humble origins in a rural South Georgia town to become one of the leading civil rights lawyers in the United States during the 1950s. While unmasking the Ku Klux Klan and serving as a key intermediary for the release of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from prison on the eve of the 1960 presidential election, Abram carried out a successful fourteen-year battle to end the discriminatory voting system in his home state, which had entrenched racial segregation. The result was the historic “one man, one vote” ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963. At the time of his selection—the youngest person ever chosen to head the American Jewish Committee—Abram became a leading international advocate for the Jewish state of Israel. He was also a champion of international human rights, from his leadership in the struggle to liberate Soviet Jewry to his service as permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva. In Touched with Fire David E. Lowe chronicles the professional and personal life of this larger-than-life man. Encompassing many of the contentious issues we still face today—such as legislative apportionment, affirmative action, campus unrest, and the enforcement of international human rights— Abram’s varied career sheds light on our own troubled times. Abram was tapped for service by five different U.S. presidents and survived a battle with acute myelocytic leukemia. He never abandoned his belief that the United States might someday become a colorblind society, where people would be judged, as his friend Martin Luther King dreamed, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. This elegantly written book is the biography Abram has long deserved.

Women in Congress, 1917-2006
Women in Congress, 1917-2006

Author: Matthew Andrew Wasniewski

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 1020

ISBN-13:

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Contains profiles, contextual essays, historical images, and appendices that provide information about the 229 women who have served in Congress from 1917 through 2006.

White Flight
White Flight

Author: Kevin M. Kruse

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-07-11

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1400848970

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During the civil rights era, Atlanta thought of itself as "The City Too Busy to Hate," a rare place in the South where the races lived and thrived together. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, so many whites fled the city for the suburbs that Atlanta earned a new nickname: "The City Too Busy Moving to Hate." In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms, White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the meaning of white resistance. In the end, Kruse finds that segregationist resistance, which failed to stop the civil rights movement, nevertheless managed to preserve the world of segregation and even perfect it in subtler and stronger forms. Challenging the conventional wisdom that white flight meant nothing more than a literal movement of whites to the suburbs, this book argues that it represented a more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. In a provocative revision of postwar American history, Kruse demonstrates that traditional elements of modern conservatism, such as hostility to the federal government and faith in free enterprise, underwent important transformations during the postwar struggle over segregation. Likewise, white resistance gave birth to several new conservative causes, like the tax revolt, tuition vouchers, and privatization of public services. Tracing the journey of southern conservatives from white supremacy to white suburbia, Kruse locates the origins of modern American politics. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Grace Towns Hamilton and the Politics of Southern Change
Grace Towns Hamilton and the Politics of Southern Change

Author: Lorraine Nelson Spritzer

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009-02-01

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0820333875

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No history of the civil rights era in the South would be complete without an account of the remarkable life and career of Grace Towns Hamilton, the first African American woman in the Deep South to be elected to a state legislature. A national official of the Young Women's Christian Association early in her career, Hamilton later headed the Atlanta Urban League, where she worked within the confines of segregation to equalize African American access to education, health care, and voting rights. In the Georgia legislature from 1965 until 1984, she exercised considerable power as a leader in the black struggle for local, state, and national offices, promoting interracial cooperation as the key to racial justice. Her probity and moderation paved the way for the election of other black women, and by the end of her political career no southern legislature was without women members of her race. Lorraine Nelson Spritzer and Jean B. Bergmark examine two generations of African American history to give the long view of Hamilton's activism. The life spans of Hamilton and her father, an Atlanta University professor who was her greatest mentor, encompassed the best and worst of the African American experience, inevitably shaping Hamilton's outlook and achievements.

McCarthy's Americans
McCarthy's Americans

Author: M. J. Heale

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 9780820320267

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Was the communist witch-hunt unleashed by Senator Joe McCarthy an aberration, or has red scare politics been an intrinsic part of American political life since the 1930s? Was McCarthyism a populist or an elitist phenomenon? Was Senator McCarthy virtually irrelevant to the phenomenon? McCarthy's Americans shows that some of the contending interpretations of McCarthyism are mutually compatible and reveals the importance of pressures usually overlooked. M. J. Heale's deeply probing study of McCarthy's "hinterland" in the American states demonstrates that what is usually called McCarthyism was part of a political cycle that emerged in the 1930s and took two decades to run its course. Heale also argues that much of the red scare dynamic came from the big cities and the white South. It was here that a range of interests exhibiting a fundamentalist fury with the changing times that the political order had fashioned during the New Deal years rested on fragile foundations. Defying the "consensus liberalism" of the 1950s, McCarthy and, more important, the many little McCarthys in the states kept alive a brand of right-wing politics, preparing the way for George Wallace in the 1960s and the revitalized conservatism of Richard Nixon in the 1970s and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Service above Self
Service above Self

Author: Erika Cornelius Smith

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2022-08-04

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0700633227

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The 2018 midterm elections were both record-breaking and pathbreaking. Americans elected four women to the Senate along with twenty-four women to the House. At the same time, nearly two hundred veterans were on ballots across the country, including a dozen women with military service experience, three of whom won their races. Two years later, female veterans campaigned for office at every level—including a run for presidential nominee of a major party. Service above Self: Women Veterans in American Politics explores this burgeoning area of interest by looking closely at the careers of former servicewomen in US politics. Despite the growing presence of women candidates with military service or intelligence backgrounds in elected office throughout the United States, this is the first book to examine the motivation, messaging, and connections between military and public service for female veterans. Erika Cornelius Smith unravels the stories of the many trailblazing women—including Elaine Luria, Chrissy Houlahan, Elissa Slotkin, Tammy Duckworth, Joni Ernst, Martha McSally, and Tulsi Gabbard—and points the way for future studies. Inspired by their diverse paths to politics, the unique ways in which they communicate their experiences, as well as their policy positions, this work explores several important questions: What motivates servicewomen to run for office? When do their backgrounds in military service align with their mission for public service? How does experience as a servicemember affect their ability to navigate gendered stereotypes about female candidates and foreign policy? The answers revealed in their personal and professional narratives shed light on this historically significant cohort of political leaders. The first scholarly synthesis of women with military, quasimilitary, or intelligence backgrounds competing in political campaigns, Service above Self examines a long history of US women who served in or adjacent to the US military and translated those experiences into elected office. It is the first analysis of how they transitioned from national defense to public service—and what they did when they got to Washington, DC.

Paths Out of Dixie
Paths Out of Dixie

Author: Robert Mickey

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-02-22

Total Pages: 583

ISBN-13: 1400838789

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The transformation of the American South--from authoritarian to democratic rule--is the most important political development since World War II. It has re-sorted voters into parties, remapped presidential elections, and helped polarize Congress. Most important, it is the final step in America's democratization. Paths Out of Dixie illuminates this sea change by analyzing the democratization experiences of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Robert Mickey argues that Southern states, from the 1890s until the early 1970s, constituted pockets of authoritarian rule trapped within and sustained by a federal democracy. These enclaves--devoted to cheap agricultural labor and white supremacy--were established by conservative Democrats to protect their careers and clients. From the abolition of the whites-only Democratic primary in 1944 until the national party reforms of the early 1970s, enclaves were battered and destroyed by a series of democratization pressures from inside and outside their borders. Drawing on archival research, Mickey traces how Deep South rulers--dissimilar in their internal conflict and political institutions--varied in their responses to these challenges. Ultimately, enclaves differed in their degree of violence, incorporation of African Americans, and reconciliation of Democrats with the national party. These diverse paths generated political and economic legacies that continue to reverberate today. Focusing on enclave rulers, their governance challenges, and the monumental achievements of their adversaries, Paths Out of Dixie shows how the struggles of the recent past have reshaped the South and, in so doing, America's political development.

Defining the Peace
Defining the Peace

Author: Jennifer E. Brooks

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-01-20

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0807875759

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In the aftermath of World War II, Georgia's veterans--black, white, liberal, reactionary, pro-union, and anti-union--all found that service in the war enhanced their sense of male, political, and racial identity, but often in contradictory ways. In Defining the Peace, Jennifer E. Brooks shows how veterans competed in a protracted and sometimes violent struggle to determine the complex character of Georgia's postwar future. Brooks finds that veterans shaped the key events of the era, including the gubernatorial campaigns of both Eugene Talmadge and Herman Talmadge, the defeat of entrenched political machines in Augusta and Savannah, the terrorism perpetrated against black citizens, the CIO's drive to organize the textile South, and the controversies that dominated the 1947 Georgia General Assembly. Progressive black and white veterans forged new grassroots networks to mobilize voters against racial and economic conservatives who opposed their vision of a democratic South. Most white veterans, however, opted to support candidates who favored a conservative program of modernization that aimed to alter the state's economic landscape while sustaining its anti-union and racial traditions. As Brooks demonstrates, World War II veterans played a pivotal role in shaping the war's political impact on the South, generating a politics of race, anti-unionism, and modernization that stood as the war's most lasting political legacy.