African American Voters Research Articles

Alabama Black Belt Politics: Promise and Peril, 1890-1935

This thesis examines African Americans in Alabama’s Black Belt—the majority constituent in the region—and their centrality in Republican and Communist Party voter campaigns. The Black Belt, originally named for the geological conditions of the soil, was home to a large enslaved population in the nineteenth century. As African Americans became the largest settled community across the belt’s counties, they were seen as useful constituents, first by Alabama politicians in the early twentieth century, and then, by the Communist Party in the 1930s. Both hoped to mobilize African American voters to bolster support for their own parties. These instances reflect a consistent trend of disregarding Black Belt residents as independent political actors. This thesis shows that despite earlier failures by the Republican Party to politically incorporate African Americans, the Communist Party would later create a mutually beneficial relationship. African Americans worked within the party to advocate for their own needs. This self-advocacy by African Americans is often overlooked in regional histories of the area. 

Felon Voting Rights: The Shift & The Suppression of the African American Vote

Felon Voting Rights: The Shift & The Suppression of the African American Vote

Planning, Civil Rights, and African American Voting: The Case of Montgomery, Alabama

This paper explores the link between African American civil rights activism and city planning before the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Using historical and spatial analyses, we discern the relationship between civil rights activism and leadership, voter registration, and city planning in Montgomery, Alabama, concluding—planning and African American activism and voting coevolved—with three distinct periods of planning and civil rights activism. The article suggests that housing demolition sought to curb potential political power through voting and civil rights activism alongside maintaining racial segregation and creating economic development in the postwar era.

Restricting Suffrage, Contracting Rights: Variations on Polanyi’s “Double Movement”

Karl Polanyi analyzed a “double movement” of society against the market in the nineteenth century. In our populist moment of the twenty-first century, we may be witnessing a movement in the other direction, of defenders of the market against the welfare state. A key method of implementing such a strategy is the motive of protecting “electoral integrity,” which may be in fact a rationale for restricting suffrage, especially among African American voters in central cities. The narrative of the stolen election of 2020, promoted by former President Donald J. Trump, may be providing the cover for targeting specific populations to disenfranchise them. Whereas expansion of suffrage in the nineteenth century was a method of supporting the working class, an opposite movement of contraction of suffrage may empower efforts to dismantle the welfare state and whatever is remaining of progressive taxation While the ravages of Neoliberalism might otherwise have been expected to propel a movement to defend society once again, the prospect at present may be to “double down” on defense of the market, to achieve a new form of authoritarian minority governance. According to Bruno Latour, a durable movement for the protection of society must build an alliance of labor with ecologists, to defend the earth, which forms the material foundation of Polanyi’s other fictional commodity, land.

Policing Polling Places in the United States: The Negative Effect of Police Presence on African American Turnout in an Alabama Election

ABSTRACT Can the presence of police outside a polling place deter African American voting in the United States? To address this question, this study compares voter turnout at polling places in a 2017 U.S. Senate special election in Alabama based on whether police were present. In short, the presence of police is associated with a 32% reduction in African American participation. That is, if the African American population is 10% of a precinct’s registered voter base, the presence of police is estimated to reduce the African American share of the participating electorate to 7%. The results are the first to quantify the effect of police presence on voting in the United States and indicate that election participation and election outcomes can be affected by the presence of police. These results stand in stark contrast to assertions advanced by both scholars and the courts that the presence of police and other poll watchers in and around polling places has no meaningful consequence for participation.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Suppressing Black Votes: A Historical Case Study of Voting Restrictions in Louisiana

Southern states have used a variety of methods to disenfranchise African American voters. Empirical data on the effectiveness of these measures is rare. We present a unique data source from Louisiana that allows us to empirically document voter registration rates from the end of Reconstruction to the present. Using basic time series data, we document how voter registration rates changed over time in response to state restrictions. We then conduct a second analysis, which focuses on Louisiana’s use of the Understanding Clause to reduce voter registration among Blacks. We show that in parishes that used the Understanding Clause, Black registration rates dropped by nearly 30 percentage points, with little effect on white registration. The findings of this paper have important implications for understanding the potential for discrimination in the enforcement of modern, ostensibly nonracial, voter eligibility requirements, such as voter ID laws, which grant substantial discretion to local officials in determining voter eligibility.

School Choice as Community Disempowerment: Racial Rhetoric about Voucher Policy in Urban America

Depictions of school choice offering greater individual and local autonomy are widespread, yet they sit uneasily with portrayals of such policies within African-American political discourse. This article analyses the ways in which opposition to publicly funded private school vouchers has been used as a cue to signal solidaristic ties to the African-American electorate. School choice is highly racialized. Black politicians have been known to campaign against school choice policies by presenting them as tools of White outsiders to break up and divide the Black community. Although opinion polls have indicated that a majority of African-American voters support education vouchers, in a campaign context school choice policies can be framed through the prisms of racial authenticity and community control. Using data drawn from interviews with political operatives and archival research in Newark, New Jersey, this article demonstrates that school choice can paradoxically be rendered as a policy of community disempowerment.

Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics by Timothy J. Lombardo

Reviewed by: Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics by Timothy J. Lombardo Ian Toller-Clark Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 328 pp. $37.50 (cloth). Donald Trump’s electoral college victory in the 2016 presidential election achieved in part through wins in the so-called Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania shocked seasoned political observers and everyday Americans. However, the political culture of all three states has been shifting for well over two decades. Journalist Dan Kaufman’s The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (2018) argues that Trump’s Wisconsin victory “merely heralded the final stage of Wisconsin’s dramatic transformation from a pioneering beacon of progressive, democratic politics to the embodiment of that legacy’s unraveling” (4). Meanwhile, political scientist [End Page 183] Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (2016) contends that a “rural consciousness” among Wisconsinites forged a politics of resentment that powered both Walker and Trump to electoral success. She defines “rural consciousness” as “a perspective that is at its core rooted in place and class” and imbued with “a sense that rural folks don’t get their fair share” (12). Cramer’s work underscores an important part of contemporary politics that influences both Rust Belt and national politics: the polarization between rural and urban communities. Still, the focus on rural or even White middle-class suburban politics has obscured the crucial role of urban politics and the “urban crisis” in conservatism’s resurgence across the Midwest and the nation. Historian Timothy Lombardo’s deeply researched and insightful Blue-Collar Conservatism offers a powerful intervention to our understanding of contemporary political culture and the popularity of Trumpism in the city of Philadelphia. Blue-Collar Conservatism traces the political transformation of White working-and middle-class Philadelphians from blue-collar Whites to blue-collar conservatives between the 1950s and 1980s. White working-and middle-class Philadelphians of the 1950s had been foundational members of the city’s postwar reform coalition. Along with African American voters, White working-and middle-class voters powered the rise of Democratic mayors Joseph S. Clark and Richardson Dilworth, who promised to bring the prosperity of the postwar United States to Philadelphia through urban and industrial renewal projects. These projects, however, could not reverse the structural changes to Philadelphia’s economy. Moreover, they reified the racial and class inequalities of that segregated city. These inequalities produced tensions, especially between the predominantly White police force and the city’s burgeoning African American population. The result was a three-day urban rebellion during the summer of 1964. Lombardo, however, is careful to show that Whites did not engage in a simple backlash against the failures of postwar liberalism. From the mid-to-late 1960s, White working-and middle-class Philadelphians, who included police officers and their families, crafted a colorblind argument that “differentiated the right to entitlements by making the clear distinction between hard work and handouts” (132). In their telling, opposition to public housing, school integration, and even “law and order” liberalism was not about keeping African Americans and other minorities out of their neighborhoods but rather about preserving what they had earned for themselves. [End Page 184] This argument obscured the ways that “Blue-collar whites benefited from and cheered liberal plans like urban renewal and federal spending for construction” (131). Meanwhile, Philadelphia police commissioner Frank Rizzo effectively used the argument to win the mayoralty in 1971. As mayor, Rizzo became the champion of Philadelphia’s blue-collar Whites. He made their causes his own, including state funding for parochial schooling and preventing the construction of public housing in Whitman Park. In these ways, Rizzo reflected blue-collar Whites’ selective rejection of postwar liberalism. That rejection was based on a colorblind, racially obfuscating ideology—one divisive to Philadelphians and Americans more broadly—that pitted people who saw themselves as hardworking against those who accepted so-called handouts. As Lombardo provocatively concludes, “Blue-collar conservatives did not view the liberal governance of...

Review: Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia, by Brent Tarter

Review: <i>Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia</i>, by Brent Tarter

Good Trouble: Pioneering the Power of Protest

30 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 1 84 No.1 GOOD TROUBLE: PIONEERING THE POWER OF PROTEST By Andrew Jezisek Introduction The right to protest is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America. It is the bedrock of democracy, granted to all citizens of the United States regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity. However, the power of protest has been employed by African Americans for generations. From the local level to the federal level and even on the world stage, African Americans have demonstrated the power of protest in order to forward their cause for social justice. Since the three Reconstruction Amendments were added to the US Constitution, African Americans have struggled for social change despite systemic and stigmatic obstacles at every turn. Nonetheless, they have steeled themselves by mobilizing alongside their allies in protests that have shaped the history of the United States of America. Blueprints for Action In 1954, the battle for integration began. The United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren struck down the “separate but equal” precedent established by the controversial Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. The ruling in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education declared that school segregation policies directed against African Americans were unconstitutional.1 However, pro-segregation southern politicians had no intention of toeing the new line. A struggle between African Americans and white supremacists was inevitable. African American civil rights leaders such as John Lewis and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had a roadmap to the goal of equality drawn out. The vehicle to get to that ultimate goal was nonviolent civil disobedience as a form of protest. John Lewis, the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and future representative of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, referred to this practice as getting into “good trouble.”2 Civil rights leaders planned to mobilize in activities that would potentially elicit legal penalties and violent retaliation. Marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts were the manifestations of “good trouble.” Many of these nonviolent tactics had been implemented before the American Civil Rights Movement in countries that were colonized by large European empires. Most notably, India was led to independence from the British Empire in the 1940s by nonviolent protests spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s nonviolent movement gained a large following, especially from bystanders who witnessed the British’s violent opposition to the Indian Independence Movement.3 Drawing from the tactics of Gandhi, African American civil rights leaders such as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. reinvented the meaning of protest in the United States in order to overturn the Jim Crow status quo.4 “Good Trouble” in Practice Nonviolent protests by African Americans continued after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1956. Jim Crow was beginning to lose footing from 1956 to 1960 as boycotts and sit-ins organized by civil rights groups forced local communities to do away with segregation on buses and in businesses.5 These acts of nonviolent civil disobedience achieved success at the federal level after local efforts were successful. The Supreme Court declared segregated busing and segregated counters in businesses unconstitutional by 1960. Yet cities in states that ignored Supreme Court rulings on segregation, particularly Alabama, still enforced discriminatory laws.6 Additionally, African American votes were suppressed by pro-segregation politicians who sought to cling to both power and the past. As a result, the same tactics of participating in “good trouble” were employed against these more entrenched discriminatory policies. At every sit-in, every march, and every freedom ride, protestors were met with brute force from white supremacy. Alabama became a central battleground in the Civil Rights Movement as one of the most segregated states in the country, an assertion that was reinforced in 1963 by its newly elected governor, George Wallace, who proclaimed his oppositiontointegrationinhisinauguraladdress.Nonetheless, massive grassroots nonviolent protests were organized by the SCLC in Birmingham in April of 1963. As the protests persisted into May, the authorities in Birmingham drastically escalated their response; Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor allowed the police to arm themselves with nightsticks, fire hoses, and attack dogs...

Review: The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America, by Bernard L. Fraga

Review: <i>The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity, and Political Inequality in a Diversifying America</i>, by Bernard L. Fraga

The Marching Priest: The Civil Rights and Labor Activism of Father Sherrill Smith during the 1950s and 1960s

The Marching PriestThe Civil Rights and Labor Activism of Father Sherrill Smith during the 1950s and 1960s Mark Newman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Father Sherrill Smith of San Antonio holds a Saturday Evening Post from 1965 featuring a photo of him in the Selma-to-Montgomery march. ©Morris Goen/San Antonio Express-News via ZUMA Press. [End Page 300] In 1961, Father Sherrill Smith, the assistant pastor of St. Joseph Church in the city of San Antonio, became the first Catholic priest based in the South to participate in a direct-action civil rights protest when he joined the stand-ins at San Antonio's Majestic Theater, which confined African American customers to an upstairs balcony. For Smith, the denial of civil rights to African Americans was a "moral and religious" issue he felt compelled to address when the movement called for assistance.1 Four years later, Smith was one of hundreds of mainly White clergy and laity from many denominations who responded to Martin Luther King Jr.'s appeal for their participation in the demonstrations at Selma, Alabama, for African American voting rights. The Selma protests marked the first time that a large number of Catholic priests and sisters had joined a direct-action civil rights protest in the South, where Catholic dioceses struggled with varying degrees of commitment and success to overturn decades of segregation in their institutions. Only a handful of the more than 250 sisters and Catholic clergy who marched in Selma were based in the South. Smith was only one of thirty-six White people, and one of only two Catholic priests, whom civil rights organizers permitted to walk the entire fifty-four-mile route of the Selma-to-Montgomery march that marked the climax of the Alabama protests. His experience in Selma made Smith more militant and outspoken. In 1966, he helped mediate during James [End Page 301] Meredith's March against Fear in Mississippi, and he endorsed the idea of Black Power.2 Father Smith's fight against racial injustice was not confined solely to discrimination against African Americans in the Deep South, however. In addition to opposing discrimination against African Americans, he supported the Mexican American civil rights movement. The same sense of morality that took him to the Majestic Theater, Selma, and Mississippi had earlier impelled him to support a Hispanic labor protest in the late 1950s and also informed his subsequent labor activism in the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s. As the first Catholic priest to participate in labor and civil rights direct action in Texas and the South, Smith was an important part of a wider, yet underestimated, Catholic contribution to civil rights and labor struggles in the South.3 Smith's labor and civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s has not received sufficient attention from scholars of Catholicism, civil rights, or Texas history. Smith does not appear in Martin Herman Kuhlman's dissertation on desegregation in Texas. Robert A. Goldberg's study of racial change in San Antonio between 1960 and 1965 only mentions Smith briefly. Saul E. Bronder's biography of Archbishop Robert E. Lucey, who initially supported Smith but clashed with him in later years, discusses Smith's deteriorating relationship with his superior. More recently, Brian D. Behnken's account of the civil rights struggle in Texas acknowledges some of Smith's activism but considers him chiefly regarding Project Equality, an interdenominational program that sought to promote nondiscriminatory hiring by businesses and the Church. Max Krochmal's study of multiracial coalition building in civil rights era Texas mentions Smith briefly on three occasions. Smith contributed to both labor and civil rights struggles, but as an Anglo and a priest who saw his role mostly as supporting these struggles when called upon by those involved.4 [End Page 302] Some scholars, such as Amy L. Koehlinger and John T. McGreevy, have stressed the importance of the Second Vatican Council in encouraging Catholic participation in the civil rights movement. The council, which met in Rome between 1962 and 1965, emphasized the duty of the Church to engage with the problems of...

Has the Sleeping Giant Awakened in Kansas? An Overview of Latino Voting Behavior in the Sunflower State

The purpose of this study is to provide a contemporary look at Latino voting behavior in the state of Kansas. Data collected from the United States Census Bureau are synthesized with historical records to outline the growth of the Latino population in the state. This analysis describes the size of the Latino population of Kansas and specific Hispanic origins of Latino Kansans, both of which affect their electoral impact. The focus then shifts to examining pre-electoral polls, exit polling data, US Census estimates of voter registration and turnout, and additional relevant research from the 2018 and 2020 elections. The analysis reveals that the Latino (predominantly Mexican American) population in Kansas has grown exponentially in the past century (especially since 1970) and the "sleeping giant" is beginning to show signs of awakening in the Sunflower State. Most saliently, the current and future importance of the Latino vote in Kansas and nationwide is demonstrated by the fact that beginning in 2020, Latinos likely surpassed the African American share of the electorate in the US and may have already done so in Kansas. A second finding is that Kansas Latino voters reflect the voting behavior of Latinos nationwide. Lastly, when the Latino vote is taken into consideration alongside the African American vote in Kansas, this electoral coalition was decisive in the 2018 gubernatorial election and may tilt future close elections in the state.

The Wings of Atalanta: Essays Written along the Color Line

The Wings of Atalanta: Essays Written along the Color Line

Searching for the “Sleeping Giant”: Racialized News Coverage of Latinos Pre‐2020 Elections

Latinos are often thought as potential game changers in the political world in the United States. As the media discusses and analyzes the 2016 election and the path to the 2020 elections, narratives on the role of Latinos leading up to the 2020 election have started to emerge. In this article, I seek to examine how U.S. daily newspapers frame the role of Latinos in the 2016 election and leading up to the 2020 elections. Previous literature has focused on the racialized media coverage of African American politicians and the effects of racial priming; however, extant literature has not explored how Latinos are framed in U.S. media when it comes to electoral politics. Using a sample of newspaper articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, I found that newspapers largely focus on the demographic changes while operating under various assumptions about those changes. First, newspapers frame Latinos as more likely to vote for a politician if they are Latino. Second, they construct Latinos as a monolithic ethnoracial group that has simplistic interests in immigration. Third, Latino voters and African American voters are often lumped into the same category when discussing mobilization. These narratives continue a tradition of framing Latinos in monolithic ways, while also showing slight departures from previous narratives.

Driving a Wedge? Republicans, Immigration, and the Impact of Substantive Appeals on African American Vote Choice

Recently, a number of prominent Republican elites have argued that the economic plight of African Americans is attributable to undocumented immigration to the United States. Have these arguments concerning the link between black economic well-being and undocumented immigration become commonplace in the rhetoric of Republican elites, and if so, does exposure to these appeals impact black vote choice? Employing data from over forty years of congressional speeches, the campaign speeches and public addresses of President Donald Trump, televised campaign advertisements from the Wisconsin/Wesleyan Advertising Projects, and a survey experiment embedded in the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find that Republican elected officials have increasingly made substantive appeals to blacks on the issue of immigration reform, that exposure to this type of substantive appeal leads blacks to more strongly support a fictional Republican candidate, and that this support is moderated by a respondent’s level of linked fate. These findings challenge existing scholarship that Republican elites ignore the concerns of the black community and suggest that Republicans may be using the issue of immigration to drive a wedge in the Democratic electoral coalition by targeting the Democratic Party’s strongest constituency.

Black Votes Count, But Do They Matter? Symbolic Empowerment and the Jackson-Obama Mobilizing Effect on Gender and Age Cohorts

Using data from the 1984–1988 National Black Election Studies as well as the 2008 and 2012 American National Election Studies, we provide a comprehensive study of African American political behavior with support for Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson serving as explanatory variables alongside other sources of variation—gender and age cohorts. Results show that African American voters who preferred Jackson and Obama in the 1984 and 2008 Democratic nominating contests were more likely to proselytize, attend a campaign rally or political meeting, donate money, and wear a campaign button. While opposition to Ronald Reagan and George Bush, church membership, involvement in Black political organizations were also linked to behavior, racial group identification (linked fate) had a less consistent effect. Both Obama’s candidacy like that of Jackson’s had an empowering effect on African American women—particularly, those of the civil rights generation—as was the case for Obama supporters of a younger cohort.

On Anne Firor Scott's Turf

On Anne Firor Scott's Turf Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore (bio) Historians who labor in a field often stake out a topic as their own turf. They fence it and defend it—sometimes in scathing reviews—from all trespassers who encroach bearing differing interpretations. Historian Anne Firor Scott understood these turf wars better than did most scholars. She also knew that, at the beginning of her career, the overwhelmingly male historical profession saw the history of women as peripheral to the landscape of U.S. history, a sort of untilled, patchy turf, one that could be mostly ignored, located down past even the lower forty. The complete neglect of women's history gave Scott some scrubby cover as she toiled in the 1960s on her first book, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (1970).1 Even after its publication, some historians might have glanced at the title and assumed that their own turf remained secure. So barren was the field of women's history in 1970 that Scott could stake out a vast swath of space to write a century-long account of white women across the South. Historian A. Elizabeth Taylor's review of The Southern Lady in the Journal of Southern History noted a "dearth of period studies on southern women [w]ith the exception of Julia Cherry Spruill's excellent history of the colonial period" and "several accounts of women during the Civil War."2 Writing one definitive history of middle- and upper-class southern white women would have been an impossible task, but the title is, perhaps deliberately, misleading. Scott was not writing a history of all southern ladies; instead, her goal was to demolish the myth of the southern lady. In prescient ways, Scott dismantled that gendered stereotype to dismantle the existence of southern women's frailty, which historians had argued justified patriarchal protection, or to undermine prevailing accounts of Confederate women's universal willingness to sacrifice during the Civil War. Instead, Scott [End Page 123] Click for larger view View full resolution Anne Firor Scott, in 1992. Courtesy of Duke University Archives. [End Page 124] emphasized women's discontent with the slaveholding patriarchy and argued that the Civil War provided opportunities for liberation from it. She revealed that postbellum women's organizations brought women into the public sphere and were para-political. Certainly, her interpretation of the southern woman suffrage movement as an instrument for southern reform, rather than solely as a racist campaign to prevent the African American vote, countered standing interpretations.3 Most reviewers recognized and took up the broader implications of The Southern Lady, even if few—for example, A. Elizabeth Taylor—objected to Scott's "convey[ing] the impression that the cult of ladyhood might have been something of a brainwash to keep women submissive and that it was a barrier to their fulfillment as human beings." Taylor gently mourned the "decline in refinement and gentility."4 But Bell I. Wiley crafted a wily review that began by establishing "Mrs." Scott's bona fides, referring to her as someone "born and reared in Georgia, who received her doctoral training at Radcliffe under Oscar Handlin, and who is a successful wife, mother, and careerist." He then compared Scott's smashing of the southern lady cult to exploding the myth of the happy slave and approved of both.5 Scott proved, as George M. Fredrickson pointed out, women's "undercurrent of discontent with the patriarchal institutions of a slave-holding society."6 Gerda Lerner praised the book but gently noted its lack of race and class analysis.7 Scott's foremost goal was to make southern white women visible, not to have the last word. Her expansive and provocative work has proved incredibly generative in the almost half-century since its publication. Scott's long chronicle provided a through line to prove that the history of southern white women posed challenges to the accepted account of all of southern history, as well as to the modest outpouring on northeastern women's history, which generally dismissed southern women as an unimportant exception to the larger national narrative. Criticism that she had overemphasized white women's discomfort with slavery and the...

Sowing the Wind: The Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890

In Sowing the Wind, Dorothy Overstreet Pratt offers a well-written, detailed treatment of the Mississippi Constitution Convention of 1890 and the controversial governing document it produced. Pratt argues that the convention was much more than a political gathering designed to neutralize African American voting strength and the effects of Reconstruction in general. It was also a turning point in the history of the state, when a class-based social structure rooted in the antebellum period gave way to a new, more volatile structure driven to an even greater extent by racial concerns. On the surface, the motives behind calling the convention seem clear cut. It was sold in 1890 as a much-needed step in the process of taking away political power in the state from former slaves and their progeny. It was supposedly an effort to right the wrongs of federal Reconstruction and place political power firmly in the hands of the more responsible white electorate. As Pratt argues, this is a narrow view of the historical record, and the convention did not represent merely an electoral purge. The gathering became a power struggle within the white political universe between the elite class that had traditionally exercised control, and the mass of poorer whites who wanted their voices heard. The former group lived in counties with substantial black populations over whom they held economic sway, while the latter came from areas where whites were a significant majority. This struggle between the politicians of the “black counties” and those of the “white counties” provides a framework for the book. Amid the turmoil, Isaiah Montgomery emerges as the convention's most enigmatic character. As the gathering's only African American delegate, he supported the new constitution, and the motives behind his decision still seem curious. In the end, the convention accomplished its goal of curtailing the black vote, and much more. Pratt points out that the race-based agenda of the Mississippi meeting contributed to a permanent shift in political power from the paternalistic elites of the state's old guard to demagogues, personified by men such as James K. Vardeman, who won the loyalty of many white voters by spewing unrestrained racial hatred on the campaign trail. The political foundation thus formed among the mass of Mississippi whites “included a virulent racism, a paranoia over strong government and higher taxes, and a loathing of northern influence, such as industrial development” (p. 7). This process was not unique to Mississippi, and it set the stage for decades of racially based economic stagnation in the South, and, ultimately, for the rise of the civil rights movement.