Black Political Leadership Research Articles

The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas by Carl H. Moneyhon

Reviewed by: The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas by Carl H. Moneyhon Derrick D. McKisick The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas. By Carl H. Moneyhon. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 401. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-956-3.) Carl H. Moneyhon returns to his usual scholarly territory—Texas after the Civil War—in The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas. This critical study concentrates on the twin developments of the [End Page 162] Republican Party and the Union League in Texas. Moneyhon relays a transformative story that details the first steps African Americans took toward developing a distinctive political voice in Texas and describes how Black Texans used the Union League as the base of their political activity during Reconstruction. Although the rise and fall of the Union League is not a new area of historical inquiry, Moneyhon’s focus on the interconnected development of the Texas Republican Party, the Union League, and African American political agency constitutes a break from earlier Reconstruction studies that have been more concerned with the national narrative. In Texas, unlike other southern states, the Union League and the Republican Party were formed through an uneasy alliance between native white Unionists and Black Texans, rather than by northern “carpetbaggers” and educated free people of color who moved south after the Civil War. According to Moneyhon, Texas presents an interesting lens through which to view the state Republican Party apparatus, the Union League, and African American political engagement. The Union League in Texas indicated the growth of a dynamic biracial coalition despite limited federal protection, Klan opposition, and a lack of support from various Republican factions. In this account, Moneyhon highlights the differences between Texas and other southern states. In Texas, the small antebellum free Black population, Union military policies requiring soldiers to muster out of service in the same state where they enlisted, and the late establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau combined to limit the number of possible Black political leaders. In other southern states, educated free Black populations and former soldiers collaborated to provide a significant portion of political leadership. These constraints created an entirely different context for Black political leadership in Texas. Moneyhon merges this narrative with a narrowly focused inquiry into the political machinations surrounding the “ab initio controversy,” a period of political infighting centered on “the legality of the constitutions of 1861 and 1866 and any legislation or government action taken following secession” (p. 97). His examination of this debate shows how this thorny political issue ripped away at the underpinnings of Republican solidarity in Reconstruction Texas. Moneyhon uses a wide variety of primary sources and provides two appendixes listing the charter members of the Union League in 1870 and 1871. These sources bolster his argument about how the league developed in Texas and why Republicans viewed it as a critical component in their plans for Texas Unionists to gain political power after Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. After the election of 1869, the Union League faced increasing political pressure within the state Republican Party to broaden its membership and create public clubs, outside resistance from a resurgent Democratic Party, and increased Klan violence. Moneyhon has created a significant volume in the study of Reconstruction that will give both scholars and history enthusiasts a clearer understanding of Reconstruction Texas. In this study, Moneyhon captures the developing tensions between native white Unionists in Texas, who supported the Republican Party and organized the Union League, and the increasing assertiveness of African American political leaders, who sought to use the Union League to further their political goals. His focus on this troubled relationship forms the basis of a balanced [End Page 163] historical narrative that offers a compelling analysis of Reconstruction politics in Texas. Derrick D. McKisick Texas A&M University–Commerce Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Of Green Tonalities and Radical Transcendence

This commentary discusses DIS/UNITY, a series of sound-based performances created by the collective Propelled Animals, in conjunction with Laura Garbes’s critical reflections on Indigenous radio broadcasts as radical resistance to settler colonialism, as well as the author’s experiences with the sonic impact on a community environment destroyed through a failure of Black political leadership.

Explaining Variation in Challenges to Social Conventions: Black Political Leadership and 'Contraband Camps' in the U.S. Civil War

What explains variation in the extent to which out-group individuals participate in behaviors that challenge existing social orders in ways that fall short of outright contentious politics? In addition to existing explanations that point to technological exposure, institutional change, or leadership attributes, we present a new and complementary explanation. We argue that more significant limitations on a dominant group's ability to police access to informal and formal institutions of power or to regulate participation in privileged activities in a given location cause higher rates of persistent out-group actions that challenge existing social orders. We test our argument using the creation of contraband camps'' during the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction-era Black political leadership. These camps significantly limited whites' power and control locally, while Black political leadership breached social conventions at the time. Using quantitative analyses that draw on original data collection, we find that relative to counties without such camps, counties with the camps had almost twice as many Black political leaders. Our results shed light on an understudied phenomenon in the U.S. Civil War while also contributing to research on social change.

Race, Discrimination, and the Cuban Constitution of 1940

Abstract After the Revolution of 1933, the Cuban Communist Party reflected an intersection of labor organizers, members of prestigious black fraternal organizations, and the intelligentsia—groups that have previously been framed as distinct bodies of black political activism. I argue that the Communist Party successfully reintroduced critical discussions of racial discrimination on the island during the 1939 Club Atenas colloquium and the 1940 constitutional assembly. Public engagement with race and discrimination had previously been silenced due to the island's famous rhetoric of a raceless nation, created by the writings of José Martí and enforced during the Race War of 1912. Between the Revolution of 1933 and the constitution of 1940, the political landscape of Cuba transformed dramatically. As the traditional two-party system splintered, the Communist Party coalesced to establish themselves as a unique site for black political leadership and operated as the island's most outspoken critic of racial discrimination.

Do Black Politicians Matter? Evidence from Reconstruction

This paper exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the effect of politician race on public finance. While the effect of black politicians is positive and significant, black officials may be endogenous to electoral preferences for redistribution. I therefore use the number of free blacks in the antebellum era (1860) as an instrument for black political leaders during Reconstruction. Instrumental variables (IV) estimates show that an additional black official increased per capita county tax revenue by $0.20, more than an hour’s wage at the time. The effect was not persistent, however, disappearing entirely once black politicians were removed from office at Reconstruction’s end. Consistent with the stated policy objectives of black officials, I find positive effects of black politicians on land tenancy and black literacy. These results suggest that black political leaders had large effects on public finance and individual outcomes over and above electoral preferences.

Examining the Impact of Black Political Representation on White Racial Attitudes in Majority Black Congressional Districts

This article investigates the impact of Black congressional representation on the racial attitudes of Whites. Utilizing data from the 2010 and 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, we test whether Black political representation impacts Whites’ levels of racial resentment. The informational theory suggests Whites gain critical information as a result of their experience living under Black political leadership and that their experience should positively impact how they feel about Blacks once Whites see that their lives are not dramatically changed as a result of Black political representation. The findings of this article challenge the notion that having a Black political representative will be associated with a decrease in negative racial attitudes among Whites. Using racial resentment to measure White racial attitudes, we find that living under a Black congressional representative only has a marginal effect on racial attitudes. In contrast to the informational hypothesis, we find that Whites who reside in congressional districts represented by a Black person are not less racially resentful than Whites who live in districts that are not represented by a Black person.

Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries

Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries

Defending A Liberal: The Liberal Logic of Booker T. Washington’s Political Thought

At present, the academic circles at home and abroad are locked in a binary judgment on Booker T. Washington. Generally, Booker T. Washington has also been being in the comments with two different faces in the field of the academic circle. Some scholars believed that Booker T. Washington was the one who pushed the black rights movement to the rock bottom. While, other scholars believed that his political thoughts appeared to be a kind of special product of a specific historical period. To get out of this dual trap, I believe that Booker T. Washington is absolutely not an accomplice of white racism, or just only a great black political leader having the tinge of a cult of personality; instead, from my perspective of view, he is a liberal fighter with black skin outside and white soul inside. Actually, behind Booker T. Washington’s political thought, there has been lying a set of deep-rooted liberal logic which makes him a liberal at any time. We have to say that it is an immutable truth which is the appearance and ending of each historical figure is the epitome of that era; and, the formation and development of his or her thoughts doom not to be isolated from the enormous influence of social mainstream culture. More specifically, the American paradox of liberalism, the self-concept of liberalism, and the discourse hegemony of liberalism all profoundly influenced the formation and development of Booker T. Washington’s political thought, and all those have been defending such an ambitious black boy vigorously as an out-and-out liberal.

“Order as well as Decency”: The Development of Order Maintenance Policing in Black Atlanta

In 1971, Ebony magazine named Atlanta the country’s “new Black Mecca,” citing its black political and economic leadership as well as the success of black businesses in the city. At this same time, however, Atlanta, like cities around the country, experienced rising crime rates and economic decline in its urban core. This article examines how Atlanta’s black political leaders, supported by both white and black business owners, responded to the crime crisis by privileging the preservation of order and the protection of capital in their public safety policies. It suggests that this commitment to orderliness, often overlooked in examinations of black political culture, undergirded black political leaders’ advocacy of punitive crime control procedures in the postcivil rights era. Analyzing how black political officials and property owners advocated for intensified foot patrol policing and public decency legislation, this article argues that the city’s black political class were early theorizers and codifiers of order maintenance, or “broken windows,” or still “quality-of-life” policing. Consequently, black business owners and municipal officials sanctioned the expansion of police power in low-income urban neighborhoods in the postcivil rights era.

Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP by Joshua D. Farrington

Reviewed by: Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP by Joshua D. Farrington William Sturkey (bio) Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. By Joshua D. Farrington. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 328. $49.00 cloth; $45.00 ebook) Joshua Farrington's intriguing new book Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP chronicles the political activism of African Americans in the Republican Party between the New Deal and the 1970s. Although Farrington overstates the historiographical void of this topic (perhaps due to a wave of very recent scholarship), Black Republicans makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of African American political life by offering a broader analysis that captures the "full ideological range of black Republicanism in the twentieth century" (p. 5). This is an important point because, as Farrington observes, black Republicans during most of the twentieth century did not always have the "tenuous relationship with other African American leaders" that they do in the present (p. 2). In other [End Page 556] words, the GOP was not always antithetical to the NAACP. Farrington opens with a discussion of black political actors who remained loyal to the GOP during the 1930s and 1940s when millions of African Americans supported the Democratic Party's New Deal. Of the South, however, Farrington wisely observes that the relatively small number of black political leaders in formal roles remained loyal to the GOP because of segregated white supremacist state Democratic Party leadership. These black Republicans, as Farrington argues, established early leadership roles within the GOP, advocating for civil rights and using their influence to help expand organizations such as the NAACP in the urban South. Farrington could extend this point even further by more fully discussing the community organizing efforts of these very same leaders, but the point is well-taken that Southern black institutional growth during the interwar years was often led by African American Republicans. Black influence in the GOP reached its zenith in the 1950s. The Eisenhower Administration has received all types of criticism of its role, or lack thereof, in the school desegregation crises of the 1950s. But Farrington appropriately repositions our perspectives about the national Republican Party from the position of racial morality to political reality by highlighting how black Republican political actors operated through existing roles in the party to influence the GOP from within. This lead to a number of "high-ranking federal appointments and influential positions" for black Republicans and helped push the GOP toward a moderate approach toward desegregation and civil rights that was far more attractive than the racist anti-black hysteria embodied by Southern Democrats (p. 38). Farrington is onto something here. Some observers might be quick to cite the limitations of Eisenhower's civil rights policies or the low amount of support he received among black voters during the 1952 election. But the 1950s was indeed the most rapid era of racial desegregation to that point in American history. And Eisenhower's support among African Americans essentially doubled in just one election cycle. Farrington's focus allows him to reveal the importance of black Republicans, the [End Page 557] very same people who stayed loyal to the party during the New Deal, for influencing policies that shaped that trend. This particular point is the strength of this book. The remainder of Farrington's study covers a familiar story of African Americans and the Republican Party, describing the effects of the black vote on the 1960 Presidential Election and the ending of significant black support for the GOP in 1964. The rest of Farrington's book examines the small numbers of black Republicans who remained active in the party. Black Republicans is an interesting examination of black actors in the national GOP. It would be useful for this book to have engaged more fully with changing black demographics, especially considering that millions of black people gained the right to vote either by migration or by federal law. Nonetheless, Farrington's well-researched and compelling book will be useful to anyone studying the history of black politics and is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature of African Americans and the Republican Party. William Sturkey WILLIAM...

Explaining White Opposition to Black Political Leadership: The Role of Fear of Racial Favoritism

Despite the election of America's first Black president, most non‐Hispanic Whites continue to oppose Black political leadership. The conventional explanation for White opposition is sheer racial prejudice, yet the available empirical evidence for this theory is inconsistent. I test an alternative theory that Whites perceive Black political leaders as a threat to their group's interests. Using a new survey measure and nationally representative panel data covering the 2008, 2010, and 2012 U.S. elections, I find that a majority of Whites perceive Black elected officials as likely to favor Blacks over Whites. Moreover, fear of racial favoritism predicts support for Barack Obama in both cross‐sectional models and fixed‐effects models of within‐person change, controlling for negative racial stereotypes. I replicate these findings using a separate cross‐sectional survey fielded after the 2014 election that controls for racial resentment. Collectively, these results suggest that perceptions of conflicting group interests—and not just prejudice—drive White opposition to Black political leadership.

Race, Republicans, and Real Estate: The 1991 Fulton County Tax Revolt

A 1991 reappraisal of property in Atlanta and Fulton County, Georgia, corrected systemic inequalities in property taxation that had subsidized affluent whites during a boom period. Many of those homeowners responded to reassessment by initiating a major tax revolt. The tax revolt failed to stop reassessment but won lasting victory in the political arena. Tax revolt politicians successfully linked the economic grievances of taxpayers to resentments against black political leaders and the poor, replaced older, moderate suburban politics with confrontation, and sped partisan realignment and Republican ascendancy in the state. Historical perspective on the politics of the Fulton County tax revolt supports the conclusion that metropolitics were essential to the development of “color-blind” or “laissez-faire” forms of racial ideology that became the dominant mode of American racial discourse in the post–Civil Rights era.

Othering Obama

The literature on descriptive representation indicates that the election of black political leaders may prompt white enmity. We assess this claim by examining the relationship between whites’ racial attitudes and their likelihood of othering Barack Obama by labeling him as a Muslim and/or a noncitizen interloper. The findings reveal that both symbolic racial resentment and traditional racial attitudes are associated with othering Obama. In addition, the results reveal that the relationship between racial resentment and othering is substantially mediated by the use of seemingly nonracist frames based on emotional reactions and negative expectations about an Obama presidency. Conversely, much of the effect of belief in traditional antiblack stereotypes was transmitted directly to othering Obama without the use of justificatory frames. Despite claims of racial progress, our findings suggest that racial sentiments—both overt and symbolic—continue to play a major role in politics.

‘Cinematographic Calamity’ or ‘Soul-Stirring Appeal to Every Briton’: Birth of a Nation in England and South Africa, 1915–1931

D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) remains one of the most controversial films ever made, widely condemned for its offensive and racist representations of African Americans in its fictional recreation of the American Civil War and its aftermath. Whilst the reception of the film in the United States has been well documented, far less attention has been paid to the wider impact of the film outside the USA. I investigate the impact of the film in the UK and the issues this raised, shedding light on the protests that were made by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society, by Sol T. Plaatje (the well-known black South African writer and political leader who was in London at the time), and by several other concerned individuals. These protests brought the film to the attention of the British Colonial Office and the South African High Commissioner in London, W.P. Schreiner. I explore the reaction of the Colonial Office to the film, and the reasons for its decision not to recommend a blanket ban on showing the film in the colonies. W.P. Schreiner, however, took a different view, and as a result of the steps he took the film was not shown in South Africa until 1931. I then consider the reception of the film when it was eventually shown in South Africa, paying attention to the views expressed by Sol Plaatje and in the press more generally. I conclude with an assessment of the impact the film may have had on Plaatje's engagement with the medium of film, evidenced particularly in his ‘travelling bioscope’ in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Black legislative politics: Examining the issue of voting rights in the post-Hurricane Katrina period

Following Hurricane Katrina, a significant number of black voters were displaced from the New Orleans metropolitan area. With the 2006 New Orleans municipal elections forthcoming, especially the mayoral election, a significant portion of displaced black voters were faced with being disenfranchised, which was a violation of their civil rights and posed a threat to black political leadership in the city. This article examines whether black legislators provided substantive representation to these voters during the post-Hurricane Katrina period. That is, did black legislators advocate a legislative agenda to facilitate access to the ballot for displaced black New Orleans voters? Using a multi-methodological approach, evidence is presented indicating that black legislators did provide substantive representation to black voters by introducing key voting rights bills and voting in a way that was responsive to black concerns which facilitated access to the ballot.

Chester Himes, Frantz Fanon and the Literary Decolonization of Harlem

The existing scholarship on African American novelist Chester Bomar Himes and Martinican postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon offers concrete, but sporadic indications that each was acquainted with t...

Infectious fear: politics, disease, and the health effects of segregation

This title uncovers the links between race, class, and health. For most of the first half of the twentieth century, tuberculosis ranked among the top three causes of mortality among urban African Americans. Often afflicting an entire family or large segments of a neighborhood, the plague of TB was as mysterious as it was fatal. Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. examines how individuals and institutions - black and white, public and private - responded to the challenges of tuberculosis in a segregated society. Reactionary white politicians and health officials promoted 'racial hygiene' and sought to control TB through Jim Crow quarantines, Roberts explains.African Americans, in turn, protested the segregated, overcrowded housing that was the true root of the tuberculosis problem. Moderate white and black political leadership reconfigured definitions of health and citizenship, extending some rights while constraining others. Meanwhile, those who suffered with the disease - as its victims or as family and neighbors - made the daily adjustments required by the devastating effects of the 'white plague'. Exploring the politics of race, reform, and public health, Infectious Fear uses the tuberculosis crisis to reveal the limits of racialized medicine and the roots of modern health disparities. Ultimately, it shows a disturbing picture of the United States' health history while offering a vision of a more democratic future.

Changing White Attitudes toward Black Political Leadership. By Zoltan L. Hajnal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp vii+219. $65.00 (cloth); $22.99 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewChanging White Attitudes toward Black Political Leadership. By Zoltan L. Hajnal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp vii+219. $65.00 (cloth); $22.99 (paper).Kenneth T. AndrewsKenneth T. AndrewsUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for more articles by this author University of North Carolina, Chapel HillPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 114, Number 4January 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/599154 Views: 30Total views on this site © 2009 by the University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Changing White Attitudes Toward Black Political Leadership – By Zoltan L. Hajnal

Changing White Attitudes Toward Black Political Leadership – By Zoltan L. Hajnal

In a shade of blue: pragmatism and the politics of black America

this provocative book, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience - and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Central to Glaude's mission is a rehabilitation of philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas, he argues, can be fruitfully applied to a renewal of African American politics.According to Glaude, Dewey's pragmatism, when attentive to the darker dimensions of life - or what we often speak of as the blues - can address many of the conceptual problems that plague contemporary African American discourse. How blacks think about themselves, how they imagine their own history, and how they conceive of their own actions can be rendered in ways that escape bad ways of thinking that assume a tendentious political unity among African Americans simply because they are black. Drawing deeply on black religious thought and literature, In a Shade of Blue seeks to dislodge such crude and simplistic thinking and replace it with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for black life in all its variety and intricacy. Glaude argues that only when black political leaders acknowledge such complexity can the real-life sufferings of many African Americans be remedied, an argument echoed in the recent rhetoric and optimism of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.In a Shade of Blue is a remarkable work of political commentary, and to follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their cultural and political history - and to envision where they might head in the twenty-first century.