Bøger i Making the Modern South serien

The 1968 burning of the Lazy B Stables in Charlotte, North Carolina, attracted little notice beyond coverage in local media. By the mid-1970s, however, the fire had become the center of a contentious and dubious arson case against a trio of Black civil rights activists, who became known as the "Charlotte Three." The charges against the men garnered interest from federal law enforcement agents, investigative journalists-- including one who later earned a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the trials--numerous New Left and Black Power activists, and Amnesty International, which declared the defendants "political prisoners." In Going to Hell to Get the Devil, J. Christopher Schutz offers the first comprehensive examination of this controversial case and its outcome. In the 1960s and 1970s, Charlotte's leaders sought to portray their home as a placid, business-friendly, and racially moderate community. When New Left and Black Power activists threatened that stability, city leaders employed a variety of means to silence them, including the use of law enforcement against African Americans they deemed too zealous. In the Charlotte Three case, prosecutors paid prisoners for testimony against the Black activists on trial, resulting in their convictions with lengthy prison sentences. The unwanted publicity surrounding the case of the Charlotte Three became a critical pivot point in the Queen City's post-World War II trajectory. Going to Hell to Get the Devil tells more than the story of an arson case; it also tells the story of the South's future, as the fate of the Charlotte Three became emblematic of the decline of the African American freedom struggle and the causes it championed.

Throughout the Jim Crow era, southern police departments played a vital role in the maintenance of white supremacy. Police targeted African Americans through an array of actions, including violent interactions, unjust arrests, and the enforcement of segregation laws and customs. Scholars have devoted much attention to law enforcement's use of aggression and brutality as a means of maintaining African American subordination. While these interpretations are vital to the broader understanding of police and minority relations, Black citizens have often come off as powerless in their encounters with law enforcement. Brandon T. Jett's Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South, by contrast, reveals previously unrecognized efforts by African Americans to use, manage, and exploit policing. In the process, Jett exposes a much more complex relationship, suggesting that while violence or the threat of violence shaped police and minority relations, it did not define all interactions. Black residents of southern cities repeatedly complained about violent policing strategies and law enforcement's seeming lack of interest in crimes committed against African Americans. These criticisms notwithstanding, Blacks also voiced a desire for the police to become more involved in their communities to reduce the seemingly intractable problem of crime, much of which resulted from racial discrimination and other structural factors related to Jim Crow. Although the actions of the police were problematic, African Americans nonetheless believed that law enforcement could play a role in reducing crime in their communities. During the first half of the twentieth century, Black citizens repeatedly demanded better policing and engaged in behaviors designed to extract services from law enforcement officers in Black neighborhoods as part of a broader strategy to make their communities safer. By examining the myriad ways in which African Americans influenced the police to serve the interests of the Black community, Jett adds a new layer to our understanding of race relations in the urban South in the Jim Crow era and contributes to current debates around the relationship between the police and minorities in the United States.

reveals previously unrecognized efforts by African Americans to use, manage, and exploit policing. In the process, Brandon Jett exposes a complex relationship, suggesting that while violence or the threat of violence shaped police and minority relations, it did not define all interactions.

Building upon the work of late twentieth-century scholars in the field of feminist studies, Megan Taylor Shockley provides an in-depth look at feminism in the modern US South. Shockley challenges the monolithic view of the region as a conservative bastion and argues that feminist advocates have provided crucial social progressive force.

Examines the history of the Citizens' Council, an organisation committed to coordinating opposition to desegregation and black voting rights. The book follows the Council from its establishment, through its expansion across America and its success in incorporating elements of its agenda into national politics, to its dissolution in 1989.

Throughout the twentieth century, cities such as Houston, Galveston, New Orleans, and Mobile grappled with the safety hazards created by oil and gas industries. James McSwain reveals how these cities created standards based on technical, scientific, and engineering knowledge to devise politically workable ordinances.

Explores how black and white children in the early twentieth-century South learned about segregation in their homes, schools, and churches. As public displays of racial violence declined in the 1920s, a culture of silence developed around segregation, serving to forestall, absorb, and deflect individual challenges to the racial hierarchy.

By the end of the 1970s, North Carolina operated the most thoroughly desegregated school system in the US. John Batchelor, a former North Carolina school superintendent, offers a robust analysis of this change and the initiatives that comprised the gradual, and often reluctant, desegregation of the state's public schools.

Through the career of Senator James Eastland, one of the mid-century's most prominent politicians, author Maarten Zwiers explores the uneasy, yet mutually beneficial relationship between conservative southerners and the increasingly liberal party to which they belonged.

Offering new insights into Florida's position within the cultural legacy of the South, The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami explores the long fight for civil rights in one of America's most popular tourist destinations.

Examines the transition from farm to factory in the American south and explores the dramatic reshaping of the region's economy. The book considers the role played by the recipients of government funds in the mid-twentieth century and demonstrates how communities exerted an unparalleled influence over federal investments.

Offers the first scholarly work to illuminate an important but largely unstudied aspect of US civil rights history - the collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship between professional anti-Communists in the North and segregationist politicians in the South.

In 1960, the College Entrance Examination Board became an unexpected participant in the movement to desegregate education in the American South. Traveling from state to state, two College Board staff members, waged "a campaign of quiet persuasion" and establishes a roster of desegregated test centers within segregated school districts.

Analyses the "new sexism" found in the agenda of the budding neoconservatism movement of the 1990s. Keira Williams argues a distinct code of gender discrimination developed that sought to reassert a traditional form of white male power.

More than fifty years after its initial publication, C. Vann Woodward s landmark work, The Burden of Southern History, remains an essential text on the southern past. Today, a southern burden still exists, but its shape and impact on southerners and the world varies dramatically from the one envisioned by Woodward. Recasting Woodward s ideas on the contemporary South, the contributors to The Ongoing Burden of Southern History highlight the relevance of his scholarship for the twenty-first-century reader and student.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman, perhaps more than any other writer in the first half of the twentieth century, helped shape and sustain a collective identity for white southerners. Keith Dickson's Sustaining Southern Identity offers a masterful intellectual biography of Freeman.

Legal scholars rank "Griggs v. Duke Power" on par with "Brown v. Board of Education" in terms of its impact on eradicating race discrimination from American institutions. Robert Samuel Smith offers the first full-length historical examination of this important case and its connection to civil rights activism during the second half of the 1960s.

Thirteen scholars of history, literature, film, and environmental studies examine modern white masculinity. With topics ranging from southern Protestant churches to the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd, this cutting-edge volume explore sthe ways in which white southern manhood has been experienced and represented since World War II.

Louis Mazzari brings to the fore one of the most important figures of the southern regionalist movement in the New Deal era. His is the first biography of Arthur Raper, a progressive sociologist, writer, and public intellectual who advocated racial and social justice in the South when such views were not only unpopular but dangerous.

The Churches of Christ offer a unique perspective for observing how Christian fellowship and human equality intersected during the civil rights era. In this study, Barclay Key reveals how racial attitudes and practices within individual congregations elude the simple categorizations often employed by historians.

In 1957, Congress voted to set up the Civil War Centennial Commission. A federally funded agency, the commission's charge was to oversee preparations to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the central event in the Republic's history. Robert Cook recounts the planning, organisation, and ultimate failure of this controversial event.

Tells the story of the Big Easy in the twentieth century. In this urban biography, J. Mark Souther explores the Crescent City's architecture, music, food and alcohol, folklore and spiritualism, Mardi Gras festivities, and illicit sex commerce in revealing how New Orleans became a city that parades itself to visitors and residents alike.

Established in 1964, the federal Legal Services Program (later, Corporation) served a vast group of Americans desperately in need of legal counsel: the poor. In Rationing Justice, Kris Shepard looks at this pioneering program's effect on the Deep South.

Offers a cultural history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black individuality and citizenship.