White Democracy Research Articles

Jason Morgan Ward. Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965.

Jason Morgan Ward. Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965.

Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965.

More than a decade ago civil rights scholars began to make a case for a “long civil rights movement,” beginning before the 1950s and rooted in the activism and political changes of the New Deal and World War II eras. If we imagine this movement originating in the 1930s and 1940s, we might then reasonably ask: What about the segregationists? How did they respond to this civil rights revolution? Jason Morgan Ward's Defending White Democracy addresses these questions and argues for a parallel “long segregationist movement” that formed two decades prior to the marches, boycotts, and court decisions of the 1950s. In six chapters Ward charts the rise of a segregationist counterrevolution. This movement began in the 1930s with isolated criticisms of New Deal programs. The critical moments, however, came during World War II, with segregationists reacting to evidence and rumors of black protest and activism and an increasing federal presence in the South. By the 1950s, with mounting civil rights protests and the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling against segregated schools, an already established segregationist movement was in transition. Many political elites were replacing an openly racist rhetoric of white supremacy with a toned-down language focused on segregation and on legal and constitutional defenses of Jim Crow. Ward suggests that these changes may have facilitated southern conservatives' entry into a national conservative movement in the post–civil rights era.

Defending white democracy: the making of a segregationist movement and the remaking of racial politics, 1936-1965

After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, white backlash seemed to explode overnight. Journalists profiled the rise of a movement committed to preserving the southern way of life through a campaign of massive resistance. In Defending White Democracy , Jason Morgan Ward reconsiders the origins of this white resistance, arguing that conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, in the era before World War II, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South. As Ward shows, years before segregationist became a badge of honor for civil rights opponents, many white southerners resisted racial change at every turn--launching a preemptive campaign aimed at preserving a social order that they saw as under siege. By the time of the Brown decision, segregationists had amassed an arsenal of tested tactics and arguments to deploy against the civil rights movement in the coming battles. Connecting the racial controversies of the New Deal era to the more familiar confrontations of the 1950s and 1960s, Ward uncovers a parallel history of opposition that mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement and raises troubling questions about the enduring influence of segregation's defenders. |After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, white backlash seemed to explode overnight. However, Jason Morgan Ward argues that conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South. Ward uncovers a parallel history of opposition that mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement.

Jason Morgan Ward: Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. 272.)

Jason Morgan Ward: Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. 272.)

The New and (Somewhat) Improved Frontier Thesis

For more than a century, Frederick Jackson Turner and his frontier thesis have loomed over the study of the American West, much like the sword-wielding giant that hovers over England on the cover of Thomas Hobbes's The Leviathan, the work that inspires both the title and thesis of Patrick Griffin's new book. In recent decades, historians have sought to expunge Turner's dominant presence from the interpretive landscape. They have condemned the frontier thesis for its Euro-centric and racist assumptions, carving up Turner for his depiction of enlightened whites and savage natives and for discounting Indian agency. Historians studying the American Revolution have assailed Turner's argument that the frontier created America character and ideology by revealing how Americans drew upon European antecedents and their own experiences in urban or rural settings that did not involve fights with Indians or land speculators. New studies of backcountry political and economic life revealed that the frontier was neither especially democratic nor equal. Now, in the wake of this onslaught, comes Patrick Griffin, who, in American Leviathan, attempts to resurrect the frontier thesis, albeit in a new version ostensibly stripped of its racism, Euro-centrism, and mythic notions of white democracy and egalitarianism. Like Turner, Griffin sees the frontier experience at the root of both American character and the emergence of democratic ideals during the Revolutionary period. Unlike Turner, who was oblivious to white racism or attempted to justify it, Griffin makes white supremacy and Indian hating key components of this new democratic American character. Indeed, Griffin goes so far as to argue that experiences on the Revolutionary frontier actually created American racism from the bottom-up. Thus, what Griffin offers is a less comforting version of the Turner thesis that includes a more pessimistic assessment of Revolutionary-era democracy, primarily by highlighting its underlying racism. Griffin also puts a new spin on frontier determinism by adding a dark Hobbesian twist. As Griffin sees it, the frontier's transformative power came

The Freshness of Fanaticism: The Abolitionist Defense of Zealotry

Zealotry or fanaticism is increasingly regarded as one of the principal threats to liberal democracy in the twenty-first century. Yet even as it is universally disparaged, zealotry is a severely understudied concept. This article seeks to formulate a critical theory of zealotry and investigate its relationship to democracy through a close reading of the speeches of the radical abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips. The American abolitionists were passionate democrats. Yet many of them, such as Phillips, were also self-defined fanatics who believed in using extremist language and tactics on behalf of the slave. Phillips's speeches suggest a specifically political definition of zealotry as a strategy that seeks to mobilize populations in defense of a particular position by dividing the public sphere into friends (those who support the position) and enemies (those who oppose it) and pressuring the moderates in between. Through his defense of fanaticism and his argument for disunion, Phillips articulates a democratic form of fanaticism that challenges common pejorative associations of zealotry with irrationality, intolerance, fundamentalism, or terrorism.Joel Olson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University (joel.olson@nau.edu) and the author of The Abolition of White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press). Thanks to Randall Amster, Lisa Disch, Mike Kramer, Michael Lienesch, Jill Locke, Ryan Narce, David Schlosberg, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and criticisms of earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to Baohua Yan, Steve VanDalen, Katrina Taylor, and Adria Mooney for valuable research assistance.

Locked out: felon disenfranchisement and American democracy

Locked Out provides a substantial empirical basis for reasoned debate on the legitimacy of felon disfranchisement in an ostensibly democratic society. Accomplishing this requires surveying an impressive expanse of history and range of conceptual and empirical questions. Jeff Manza, Chris Uggen and their colleagues meet this challenge by skillfully tying together diverse strands of previous and ongoing research, presenting a sophisticated yet highly accessible study of the origins, dynamics and impact of felon disfranchisement in the context of American democracy. The authors place U.S. policies of disfranchisement in comparative international perspective, revealing its especially restrictive felon voting rights law and policy, particularly as ex-felon disfranchisement (the continued denial of voting rights to those who have completed sentences) is concerned. They compellingly demonstrate that U.S. felon disfranchisement policy originates in efforts to exclude black Americans from democratic participation. Disfranchisement is a criminal justice policy rooted it seems in what American race scholars describe as this nation’s design as a “White Democracy,” originating as a state-level counter-measure to the race-related democratic liberalism forced by federal civil rights protections in the post-emancipation period. As an artifact of historical intentions to limit democratic participation on the basis of race, disfranchisement is not a distortion of American Democracy, but a reflection of a normative, racially oppressive orientation. Disfranchisement policies are defended today on outwardly race-neutral grounds, typically in discourse about preserving the integrity of electoral politics, or their legitimacy as “just desserts” for those in violation of the law. Turning their attention to these contemporary debates, Manza and Uggen show empirically that former felons do not significantly threaten to corrupt or taint political systems, and that the denial of voting rights does not clearly serve some established purpose of punishment. They also show that voting rights restoration is not easily available to former felons, as some legislative advocates contend, and that disfranchisement policies in place today are not generally the Crime Law Soc Change (2007) 47:125–127 DOI 10.1007/s10611-007-9065-5

"The Only Real White Democracy" and the Language of Liberation: The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s

France became configured as a space and a cultural apparatus of democracy and 'color-blindness' by African American writers around World War I. W.E.B. Du Bois, Addie Hunton, and Gwendolyn Bennett identified French as replete with a democratic consciousness, and suggested learning French thereby challenges the racialized body politic of the U.SA. Despite the limited and strategic value of this position, as recognised by Rudolph Fisher and evident when juxtaposed to French colonial policy, the essay argues that France's role as a polemical lever for civil rights struggle in the U.S.A. is an important legacy for the New Negro Renaissance.

The Abolition of White Democracy

The Abolition of White Democracy

Old Southampton: Politics and Society in a Virginia County, 1834-1869

Crofts (history, Trenton State College) links local and national history. He explains how partisan loyalties developed, white democracy flourished in the late antebellum years, secession sharply divided neighborhoods with few slaves from those with large plantations, and how, following emancipation,

The White House conference and democracy: A missed opportunity

The White House conference and democracy: A missed opportunity