Abstract
With the 2000 presidential election imbroglio in Florida, reports of disfranchisement and intimidation of black voters at the polls raise questions regarding the Sunshine State's enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment. For those persons interested in understanding the historical context of this voting rights struggle, Abel A. Bartley's Keeping the Faith furnishes a concise political and legal history of the modern civil rights movement in Florida's largest city. As Bartley describes it, an emerging voting rights movement gained momentum in Jacksonville following World War II with the registration of some sixteen thousand new black voters by 1950. In direct response to this registration campaign, conservative white leaders changed the city's election charter, replacing district-based with at-large voting. That action successfully eliminated any possibility of African Americans' winning political office for the next seventeen years. Despite this setback, the voter registration movement continued to gain momentum during the 1950s as Mayor Haydon Burns, who ruled from 1950 to 1964, courted the city's African American community by upgrading parks and overseeing the hiring of black policemen.
Published Version
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