Black Political Participation Research Articles

Willing but Unable: Reassessing the Relationship between Racial Group Consciousness and Black Political Participation

In this article, we offer a framework for understanding the role that racial group consciousness (RGC) plays in influencing Black Americans’ engagement in costly political action. Attempting to add clarity to decades of inconsistent and at times contradictory findings, we argue that the effect of RGC at inspiring political action among Black Americans is conditional on (1) the relevance of the political activity to achieving a well-recognized racial group outcome and (2) individual capacity to assume the cost of engaging in the activity. Analyzing data from the ANES and two behavioral experiments, we find that RGC exhibits a consistently strong relationship with engagement in low-cost political behavior, regardless of whether the behavior has some explicit group-relevant outcome. When engagement becomes more costly, however, Blacks high in RGC are only willing to assume these costs if the engagement has some clear potential for racial group benefit.

Racism versus culture: competing interpretations of racial inequality in Canadian public policy

ABSTRACT The paper explores why the provinces of Ontario and Quebec devised contrasting policies in response to similar incidents of urban violence in the mid-2000s. In both settings, municipal police departments launched aggressive campaigns against so-called “youth gangs.” However, Ontario went one step further and created a new “youth policy” to expand out-of-school programs for children and adolescents. By examining the origins of the policies in each province, the paper concludes that Black political actors in Ontario were leading champions of the youth policy, whereas, in Quebec, police chiefs took the driver’s seat and advocated for a disciplinary strategy against “street gangs.” The contrasts in policy and Black political participation exemplify the distinct racial politics of the provinces. Race-conscious policy in Ontario grows out of a tradition of Black radicalism and multi-racial coalitions. In Quebec, minority nationalism turns race into a proxy for clashes over ethnicity and culture.

Voting in the Reconstruction Novel: Black Suffrage, Election-Day Violence, and the Regulation of the Vote

AbstractHow did fiction respond to the expansions of democracy during the Reconstruction period? This article provides a survey of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction novels that include scenes of Black electoral participation. Such scenes of voting are also scenes of violence, either threatened or realized, and represent a range of political views. The article explores how novels use such scenes to advocate radical protections of Black voting rights, white supremacist restrictions on Black suffrage, and liberal policies of nonintervention in elections. A set of post-Reconstruction writers asserted a position as expressly moderate between the latter two: that Black political participation must be regulated. These novels pair the threat of Black voting with the civic emergencies of floods and other natural disasters in order to make the regulation of voting rights as necessary for survival as the management of a rising river. This view, positioned as a compromise between the rights provided by the Fifteenth Amendment and the fears of white reactionaries, was shared, alongside similar water metaphors, in the consequential decisions on voting rights by the period’s Supreme Court. This article shows the range of novelistic responses in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment and the shaping of a self-consciously moderate stance that ultimately supported the national policy of Black disenfranchisement.Liberals [could] square voting regulations with their belief in laissez-faire government . . . by treating electoral reform like the management of natural phenomena, a science of managing threats as in the linked rising tides of river and Black politics in [the period’s novels].

Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans ed. by Laura Kilcer VanHuss

Reviewed by: Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans ed. by Laura Kilcer VanHuss Perry Carter Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans. Laura Kilcer VanHuss, Editor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2021. x and 243 pp., ills, notes, index. $45.00 cloth (9780807174791). Before beginning this review, I need to state for the sake of transparency that while I do not personally know Laura Kilcer VanHuss, two of the people she cites in her introduction, David Butler and Stephen Hanna, are colleagues of mine. For five years we worked on a project that examined tourism at River Road plantation museums, one of which was Oak Alley Plantation, where Kilcer VanHuss works as a curator. This edited volume can be summarized as a deconstruction and a re-narration of the southern plantation myth. Put plainly; it is not Gone with the Wind. It is its antithesis. The nine essays center around yet counterpose themselves to Marie Adrien Persac’s map/painting Norman’s Chart of the Lower Mississippi, an 1858 hand-painted map showing plantations bordering the Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi, to New Orleans, Louisiana. Replicas as posters can be purchased at most plantation museum gift shops in the New Orleans region. Norman’s Chart is a conveyor of the plantation myth. A myth of a genteel landed aristocracy of 19th-century entrepreneurs and their families living a life of luxury on their estates. But, the enslaved are missing from this narrative. Those who, through their coerced labors, made their enslavers’ life of luxury possible. In this volume, part of how the plantation myth is deconstructed is by de-conflating the master’s house (his mansion, the Big House) and the plantation. The master’s home is the front face of an agro-industrial complex powered by enslaved labor, the actual plantation. At most plantation museums today, all that remains of the plantation is the master’s home. The true creators of the plantation are effaced. These essays examine various aspects of the plantation. The chapter by Laura Ewen Blokker scrutinizes the architecture and built environment of the plantation. She notes that Louisiana in 1860 was the state with the highest concentration of enslaved persons — 48.4 percent. Accordingly, a large portion of Louisiana’s built landscape was occupied by plantations. Suzanne Turner, in her chapter, interrogates plantation landscapes. Here she notes that instead of “moonlight and magnolias,” that “a series of landscape-altering interventions transformed what was essentially forest and wetlands into a managed agricultural entity, one that required tremendous financial investment, primarily in the form of enslaved labor” (50). [End Page 360] The chapter by Charles Chamberlain traces the political power of the planter elite and the role it played in the aftermath of the 1811 German Coast Slave rebellion, which up to that time was the largest slave rebellion in the United States. Creole planters such as Noël Destréhan and Jacques Villeré used their increased status from the trial (if it can be called that) of the rebels to run for political office. In a unique chapter, Christopher Willoughby describes 19th-century medicine/race science on the plantation. He shows how the pseudo theory of environmental determinism was used to justify the enslavement of Black people. He also shows how the toils of the plantation broke and debilitated Black bodies. Willoughby has some great sentences in his essay like this one on the spread of cholera: “While physicians during this period often saw cholera as the product of the local environment or personal sin, the disease was undoubtedly imported in the bowels of agents of commerce” (114). William Horne writes about the plantation as a base of Black power during the reconstruction period in Louisiana. Former enslaved people’s networks of kith and kin forged through subjugation created a formidable political activist movement during reconstruction. They were so successful that white supremacists in the state had to resort to violence to suppress them. This violent suppression was pinnacled in the Colfax massacre of 1873, where 60 to 100 Blacks were murdered. The massacre effectively ended Black political participation in Louisiana for 90 years. The power of visual imagery is the...

The Empowering Effects of Racial Messaging: The Link between Racial Outreach, Descriptive Representation and Black Political Mobilization

ABSTRACT This paper assesses the influence of racial outreach on Black political participation in the context of United States electoral politics. We argue that racial appeals should inspire higher levels of Black voter enthusiasm because they, in part, improve perceptions of empathy from politicians. However, we expect that racial outreach will matter more when it comes from non-descriptive representatives because Black representatives are perceived as empathetic regardless of their actions. We test these hypotheses using two separate experiments. We find that Black Americans are more politically active when non-Black politicians discuss their intentions to advance Black political interest. We also find that racial appeals provided by descriptive representatives is not a significant predictor of Black voter turnout. Our analysis demonstrates that under certain conditions racial outreach plays an important role in mobilizing underrepresented groups.

Editors’ Introduction

Editorial| April 01 2022 Editors’ Introduction Andra Gillespie, Andra Gillespie Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pearl Dowe Pearl Dowe Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar National Review of Black Politics (2022) 3 (1-2): 1. https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2022.3.1-2.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Andra Gillespie, Pearl Dowe; Editors’ Introduction. National Review of Black Politics 1 April 2022; 3 (1-2): 1. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2022.3.1-2.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNational Review of Black Politics Search The articles in this issue of NRBP reflect the breadth of scholarship in African American politics. Scholars who study Black politics approach the subject from many angles. Many focus on political behavior. Others focus on policies that affect Black communities. Still others consider the cultural significance of full Black political participation. The three original articles in this issue reflect that breadth of inquiry. The first article, by Andrea Benjamin and Sydney Carr, looks at voting behavior across racial groups. Their key question is whether racial coalitions look similar for different types of Democratic congressional candidates. In other words, do white and nonwhite incumbents receive the same level of support from voters of different races? What about white and nonwhite challengers? Do Black, white, and Latinx voters support them at the same rates? They find that Black voters comprise the base of minority incumbents’ re-election coalitions. For scholars interested in the... You do not currently have access to this content.

The social messages of Civil War monuments

AbstractWhat messages did the patrons of Civil War monuments, both Confederate and Union, intend them to send to viewers? While it is commonly thought that Confederate monuments were erected to intimidate Black Southerners and keep them from voting, this article uses a combination of visual analysis and historical research to argue that these monuments were generally erected only after Jim Crow legislation and other means had already rendered Black political participation impossible. Instead, the monuments spoke to white, working‐class Southerners, to persuade them not to cross racial lines, especially during labor disputes. Similarly, Union Civil War monuments also worked to enshrine racial inequality by erasing the memory of African‐American soldiers' participation in the Civil War.

An imperial historian of empire: insights from the Philip Warhurst papers, Killie Campbell Africana Library

This research note recovers the career and personal papers of Philip Warhurst, a British historian who taught at universities in Rhodesia and South Africa from the 1960s until the 1990s. The note simultaneously reviews the extent of the holdings of the Warhurst Papers at the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban while also exploring the insights the collection offers on Warhurst’s views on race relations and his positionality vis-a-vis the British Empire and the Commonwealth. As the collection is open but unprocessed, this note aims to provide a guide that will assist scholars in navigating the collection. The collection will particularly appeal to scholars interested in Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence era (1965-1979). Warhurst was at the frontline of numerous political developments in the colony during this time. Materials document conditions at the University of Rhodesia following political disturbances in 1966 and 1973 and Warhurst’s desire to maintain academic freedom at the university. Warhurst was also a senior official in the Centre Party, a comparatively moderate political group that sought to increase black political participation in Rhodesia, but which expressed opposition to black majority rule. The collection also holds extensive materials of a less overt political nature, primarily documenting Warhurst’s ecumenical activities and support for Scouting in both South Africa and Rhodesia. Finally, the papers hold extensive scholarly notes by Warhurst concerning his review of archival and published material as well as several unpublished lectures and papers.

“Ebony” Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America

“Ebony” Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America

Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postempancipation Virginia by Nicole Myers Turner

Reviewed by: Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postempancipation Virginia by Nicole Myers Turner Emily Suzanne Clark (bio) Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postempancipation Virginia. By Nicole Myers Turner. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 232. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $29.95.) Nicole Myers Turner’s Soul Liberty is impressive scholarship that reveals how black churches mediated political engagement and enabled [End Page 137] community organizing. While the book’s subtitle reflects Turner’s focus on Virginia, her deep look at the dynamics between the religious and the political demonstrates larger trends and answers some long-standing questions about black religious history at the pivotal moment of postemancipation. Rather than “presuppose political power” of black churches (147), Turner narrates this period in fresh ways to emphasize how black churches built on their existing political acumen. This approach puts the focus on the process by which churches became “vehicles for participation and self-determination” (143). Turner reveals a fascinating negotiation between the religious and the political; black church structures and networks shaped black political participation. Her use of the term “soul liberty” reflects this dynamic, as black Christians saw the intersections of “religious freedom, righteousness, equity, and justice” (2). The first chapter sets up the reader to see how some elements of life changed and others did not with the end of the Civil War. Black religious life had long been a space of communal gathering and resistance to white supremacy, as churches were “powerful bases for independence” (30). One thread begun in chapter 1 and continued throughout the book is an understanding of how black social community building transitioned into black political community organizing. In this chapter and in chapter 2, which specifically examines the creation of independent black church conventions, Turner vividly shows readers how the religious was inherently political. The church networks created and sustained by the conventions fostered powerful connections to propel black political interests. Additionally, by demonstrating their autonomy and ability to work with white church communities, black religious organizations made powerful arguments for their self-determination in matters both religious and political. As Turner explains, “The formation of independent black Baptist associations shows how black people organized themselves, developed their identities, and articulated their place within the new American freedom” (34). This dynamic is further developed in chapter 3, where Turner attends to the ways in which “a minister-centered leadership framework” developed in process and collaboration with community engagement (76). Education becomes a significant part of this conversation in chapter 4 in ways that reflect black political savvy. “Debates within the African American community about inspired versus educated ministerial leadership,” Turner explains, “often came out of concerns about how black people were perceived” (86). Access to seminary education often required interaction with white churchmen, but black political power allowed black churches to guard their autonomy even in collaboration. [End Page 138] Chapter 5, entitled “Politics of Engagement,” is where Turner’s analysis is at its strongest, in part owing to the developing themes and trends she expertly unpacks in earlier chapters. Because readers have followed the ongoing negotiation between black church networks and larger political movements, it comes as no surprise that even when they were a county minority, black church networks empowered black communities beyond their numbers. These church networks also strengthened “a race consciousness and a sense of communal power” that shaped black engagement with the patronage process (117). In exchange for their political support, black church networks negotiated for political positions for church members and leaders through the patronage system. Not only does this interaction help explain black voting trends, but it also shows the forward-thinking ways in which black churches advocated for their communities and goals. It is in chapter 5 that Turner’s use of ArcGIS and maps persuasively supports her interpretation of the historical data. Politicians could access these long-standing church networks to their advantage or ignore them to their deficit. The Pennsylvania State University recently created the Center for Black Digital Research, co-led by Gabrielle Foreman, one of the founders of the Colored Conventions Project. The center reflects increasing interest in digital humanities and...

Black hope floats: Racial emotion regulation and the uniquely motivating effects of hope on black political participation

Drawing upon theories of group based emotion, group based efficacy and appraisal, I propose a model of racial emotion regulation to explain variations in how Black and White Americans respond emotionally and behaviorally to policy opportunity cues. I test the major claims of this model with data from an original experiment and national survey. Findings from the studies indicate that expressions of hope carry a strong and consistent mobilizing effect on the political participation of African Americans, while producing null effects on White participation. I discuss the implications of this model for our understanding of the potential of hope to shape appraisals and perceptions of efficacy among socially marginalized groups, opening up a distinct pathway through which they can be mobilized for political engagement.

Editors’ Introduction

This issue is of special importance to us, as it is the first issue of the National Review of Black Politics that was edited entirely by the new editorial team. We are indebted to our predecessor, Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, for the trail she blazed at the National Political Science Review, and to the guest editors she selected for the first two issues of NRBP, Drs. Sherri Wallace and Sharon Wright Austin. And we honor the work of our book review editor, Shenita Brazelton. Book reviews are a vital part of this journal, and Dr. Brazelton has demonstrated her commitment to them as she partners with us on this editorial journey.Our goal is to build on the work of Dr. Willoughby-Herard in this and upcoming issues of NRBP. The current issue presents a snapshot of the ongoing great work in the field of Black politics, and includes articles that span traditional subfields and methodological approaches. The topics also vary, reflecting the expansive reach of the study of Black politics: an historical analysis of the legacy of pan-Africanism on African international organizations and Ghanaian political institutions; a religion and politics piece on the relationship between theological attitudes and Black political participation in the United States; and a comparative race, ethnicity, and politics article on the relationship between feelings of belonging and perceptions of discrimination on electoral and nonelectoral forms of American political participation.We would like to point out a particular aspect of our articles that we hope distinguishes our journal and sets a tone for scholarly discussion. As you will find, this issue does include null findings. While we cannot promise that all papers with null findings will make it through the peer-review process, we believe that it is important to publish null findings when appropriate. First, we believe that taking the approach that null findings are potentially publishable encourages transparency and ethical research practices. Plus, as you will see in this issue, we can learn as much from null findings as we can from positive findings. Because of the substantive value of all of these findings, we want to assure our colleagues, particularly junior scholars, that we welcome all kinds of rigorous studies for consideration in this journal.Now more than ever, we need the types of scholarship that we intend to publish in this journal. We imagine that many of you have been compelled by the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and police violence against Blacks to document and explain what is going on. We hope that you would give us the honor of considering your work for publication here. As the scholarly journal of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, we believe that this journal should be destination reading for such important scholarship.Thank you for reading, and thanks in advance for your submissions!

Inclusive American Economic History: Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow Laws and the Great Migration

This paper records the path by which African Americans were transformed from enslaved persons in the American economy to partial participants in the progress of the economy. The path was not monotonic, and we organize our tale by periods in which inclusiveness rose and fell. The history we recount demonstrates the staying power of the myth of black inferiority held by a changing white majority as the economy expanded dramatically. Slavery was outlawed after the Civil War, and blacks began to participate in American politics en masse for the first time during Reconstruction. This process met with white resistance, and black inclusion in the growing economy fell as the Gilded Age followed and white political will for black political participation faded. The Second World War also was followed by prosperity in which blacks were included more fully into the white economy, but still not completely. The Civil Rights Movement proved no more durable than Reconstruction, and blacks lost ground as the 20th century ended in the growth of a New Gilded Age. Resources that could be used to improve the welfare of whites and blacks continue to be spent on the continued repressions of blacks.

Reginald Hawkins, the 1968 North Carolina Democratic Primary, and the Future of Black Political Participation

Abstract In 1968, Dr. Reginald Hawkins, an African American civil rights leader and dentist from Charlotte, ran for governor in North Carolina within the Democratic primary. He lost the race, but his campaign succeeded by demonstrating the potential for Black political power. This article focuses on Hawkins, his civil rights activism in Charlotte, and his gubernatorial candidacy in 1968. From December 1967 through May 4, 1968, Hawkins barnstormed the state, promoted a progressive political agenda, and inspired African Americans. Always the underdog, Hawkins expected a boost from Martin Luther King Jr., who had promised to campaign with him across North Carolina, but King’s death curtailed Hawkins’s campaign. Hawkins did not win the primary—and he never stood much of a chance—but his effort strengthened Black political engagement and helped pave the way for Black candidates to win statewide races in the not-too-distant future.

Race and poverty matters: Black and Latino linked fate, neighborhood effects, and political participation

ABSTRACTWe examine if and how race and contextual poverty, among other neighborhood effects, impact Black and Latino/a rates of political participation. To do so, we expand upon questions at the intersection of Cohen and Dawson’s [1993. “Neighborhood Poverty and African American Politics.” The American Political Science Review 87: 286–302.] highly-cited study of neighborhood poverty’s impact upon African American political participation and Dawson’s [1994. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.] seminal study of Black linked fate. Our analysis of Black and Latino/a subsamples of the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Study (CMPS) data yields three principle findings. First, somewhat contrary to Cohen and Dawson [1993. “Neighborhood Poverty and African American Politics.” The American Political Science Review 87: 286–302.], we find contextual poverty has no statistically significant effect upon African American political participation; however, we find it significantly and negatively effects Latino/a political participation. This may speak to how contemporary forms of economic segregation impact Latino/a communities. Second, we find linked fate has positive and statistically significant effects upon Black and Latino/a political participation, which reinforces Dawson’s [1994. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.] previous findings. And third, beyond the scope of the aforementioned works, we find that face-to-face neighbor interactions positively and significantly promote Black and Latino/a political participation. In conclusion, we discuss how, despite changing political and economic contexts, Dawson’s work remains relevant for understanding Black (and Latino/a) political participation.

Obamacares: Candidate Traits, Descriptive Representation, and Black Political Participation

AbstractWhile a number of studies demonstrate that black candidates have the ability to increase black political participation, a growing literature is investigatingwhydescriptive representation matters. This paper contributes to this discussion by exploring whether perceptions of candidate traits play a mediating role between the presence of an African American candidate on the ballot and increases in black political activity. I test this trait hypothesis using data from the 1992–2012 American National Election Study, a survey experiment, and statistical mediation analysis. The results indicate that perceptions of black candidates as being better leaders, more empathetic, knowledgeable, intelligent, honest, and moral explain a substantial amount of why descriptive representation increases black political participation across a range of different political activities. In the conclusion, I discuss the importance of the psychological link between blacks and their co-racial representatives in inspiring higher levels of political participation.

Reconstructing Democracy: Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War by Justin Behrend

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Democracy: Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War by Justin Behrend Daryl Scott Reconstructing Democracy: Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War. By Justin Behrend. ( Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 355. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5142-1; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4033-3.) The rapid incorporation of newly emancipated people into the political community has been a feature of historiography since the advent of professional history. Writing in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois and Eric Foner, Justin Behrend is most interested in the spread of democracy. He seeks to add to this tradition by dismissing the notion that the trajectory of the political struggle was inevitable and by explaining how black Republicanism came to be: "What needs explaining, then, is how most freed people in the American South rejected patron-client relations and instead made the conceptual leap of believing that protection and opportunity could arise from a broad-based community of poor people, linked with a distant and nebulous power in the nation's capital" (p. 4). At the core of his project is understanding how freedpeople developed a "grassroots democracy" (p. 6). While Behrend does not forthrightly say so, the core of his argument is that black people were more interested in constructing a democracy than in pursuing racial solidarity or party politics. Moreover, he suggests that those who opposed them did so largely for antidemocratic reasons. The struggle, then, was about democracy not race. Using a wide array of federal sources and archival records, Behrend focuses on the Natchez District, four Mississippi counties and two Louisiana parishes with an overwhelmingly black population and large plantations. He documents how the black community developed its civic life by participating in religious, fraternal, and political formations and laid the groundwork for creating a grassroots democracy. The importance of this background is to document that freedpeople drew on their own experiences, not just the Union League and the Republican Party, to generate a political culture. He suggests that community building mattered greatly in producing grassroots democracy. His linkage of freedpeople's prior organizing to their subsequent political mobilization is the work's major contribution to the literature. By holding that political affairs could have instead developed with freed-people supporting their former masters, Behrend leads readers to expect that he will also explore the behavior of the Democrats and the planter class. Indeed, this part of the story cannot be told without an analysis of the motives and behaviors of the planters and businesspeople who formed the leadership of the Democratic Party during presidential Reconstruction. When restoring the political order, the Democrats made no efforts to include black people in the process, treating them as just as politically irrelevant as they had during the antebellum and Confederate [End Page 482] periods. Indeed, the black codes were created without the consent of those they governed. This fact undoubtedly shaped the political proclivities of freedpeople, making them wide open to the Republicans, especially as the Party of Lincoln came around to advocating for black citizenship and black male suffrage. Ignoring this phase of presidential Reconstruction also allows Behrend to suggest that white people were more open to the black community's political participation than they were. Increasingly, historians are realizing that the struggle for redemption was a veritable countermovement that began at the onset of black political participation, not simply with the ultimate electoral victories. The central state was attempting to undermine conservative white forces and lacked the capacity to do so. We learn much about grassroots democracy, but the nature of the opposition is often assumed. The story cannot be truly understood without a full juxtaposition and exploration of both political cultures, democratic and conservative. Unfortunately, the author does not explore how much of black people's democratic impulses were driven by racial necessity and by popular white conservative opposition. That would suggest black solidarity was predetermined. Daryl Scott Howard University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Freedom's ballot: African American political struggles in Chicago from abolition to the Great Migration

In the spring of 1915, Chicagoans elected the city's first black alderman, Oscar DePriest. In a city where African Americans made up less than five percent of the voting population, and in a nation that dismissed and denied black political participation, DePriest's victory was astonishing. It did not, however, surprise the unruly group of black activists who had been working for several decades to win representation on the city council. Freedom's Ballot is the history of three generations of African American activists - the ministers, professionals, labor leaders, clubwomen, and entrepreneurs - who transformed twentieth-century urban politics. This is a complex and important story of how black political power was institutionalized in Chicago in the half-century following the Civil War. Margaret Garb explores the social and political fabric of Chicago, revealing how the physical makeup of the city was shaped by both political corruption and racial empowerment - in ways that can still be seen and felt today.

Aqui No Hay Oportunidades: Latino Segregation and the Keys to Political Participation

For decades, political scientists, sociologists, and historians have tracked the perils of residential segregation in the African American community. The consensus is clear: segregation has hampered African American socioeconomic mobility and social integration. Given the strong relationship between socioeconomic status and political participation, segregation, therefore, is at least partially responsible for low levels of political participation within the black community. Over the last 20 years, Latinos have started to experience segregation rates similar to African Americans. I argue that the detriments of residential segregation are not isolated to the black community and present similar barriers to Latinos. This finding has important political implications, indicating that Latinos are unlikely to realize their full potential at the ballot box because of the socioeconomic barriers of segregation.Related Articles:“English Proficiency and Latino Participation in U.S. Elections.” (2011) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00302.x/abstract“Racial Self‐Identification and Latino Political Engagement.” (2009) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2009.00220.x/abstract“Boosting Latino and Black Political Participation.” (2005) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2005.tb00803.x/abstract

The Intersection of Redistricting, Race, and Participation

The drawing of congressional district lines can significantly reduce political participation in U.S. House elections, according to recent work. But such studies have failed to explain which citizens’ voting rates are most susceptible to the dislocating effects of redistricting and whether the findings are generalizable to a variety of political contexts. Building on this nascent literature and work on black political participation, we show that redistricting's negative effects on participation—measured by voter roll‐off in U.S. House elections—are generally strongest among African Americans, but that black voters can be mobilized when they are redrawn into a black representative's congressional district. Our findings, based on data from 11 postredistricting elections in five states from 1992 through 2006, both expand the empirical scope of previous work and suggest that redistricting plays a previously hidden role in affecting black participation in congressional contests.