Charles W. Eagles – författare

In 1956, six months after the start of the Montgomery bus boycott, Alabama Attorney General John Patterson obtained from state circuit court judge Walter B. Jones, an ardent defender of segregation, an order banning the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). On appeal, the case led to the U.S. Supreme Court's declaration of the new constitutional right to freedom of association, the right of individuals to form groups and promote ideas without government interference: Martin Luther King Jr. called it "a victory for democracy." Charles W. Eagles examines the landmark decision in NAACP v. Alabama (1958) that the Court based on the First Amendment's freedoms of speech and assembly and the Fourteenth Amendment's right to due process. Drawing on NAACP papers, court records, the Justices' papers, newspapers, and other court decisions, Eagles follows the case from its origins in thirty years of courageous local NAACP activism and in Alabama white racist politics through the pathbreaking Supreme Court decision. Alabama political and judicial officials fought the 1958 decision with procedural traps in state courts, arbitrary court delays, and three more appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court until the court in 1964 finally ordered Alabama to allow the NAACP, after an eight-year absence, to register and operate in the state.A Victory for Democracy lucidly explains the legal procedures and constitutional questions in the case, depicts the lawyers for the NAACP and for the state of Alabama, and analyzes the Supreme Court deliberations behind Justice John M. Harlan's decisions. This landmark case establishing freedom of association had major unexpected implications for subsequent cases involving birth control, women in the Jaycees, gay men in the Boy Scouts, and the privacy of political contributions.

Historians have customarily explained the 1920s in terms of urban-rural conflict, arguing that cultural, ethnic, and economic differences between urban and rural Americans erupted to intensify and influence political conflict in the decade. In Democracy Delayed, Charles W. Eagles uses the issue of congressional reapportionment to examine politics in the 1920s, in particular to test the urban-rural thesis.After the 1920 census, the United States Congress for the first time failed to reapportion the House of Representatives as required by the Constitution. The 1920 enumeration showed that for the first time more people lived in urban areas than in rural areas. During a decade-long stalemate, congressional debates over reapportionment legislation contained repeated examples of violence and hostility as rural representatives resisted acceding to increased urban interests.Eagles points out that previous studies employing the urban-rural theory use an abstract model borrowed from the social sciences. Eagles combines historiography, narrative political history, and legislative roll-call analysis to provide extensive concrete evidence and a more precise definition of the urban-rural interpretation.

The Civil Rights Movement warrants continuing and extensive examination. The six papers in this collection, each supplemented by a follow-up assessment, contribute to a clearer perception of what caused and motivated the movement, of how it functioned, of the changes that occurred within it, and of its accomplishments and shortcomings. Its profound effect upon modern America has so greatly changed relations between the races that C. Vann Woodward has called it the ""second revolution.""In a limited space the eleven scholars range with a definitive view over a large subject. Their papers analyze and emphasize the Civil Rights Movement's important aspects: its origins and causes, its strategies and tactics for accomplishing black freedom, the creative tensions in its leadership, the politics of the movement in the key state of Mississippi, and the role of federal law and federal courts.In this collection a scholarly balance is achieved for each paper by a follow-up commentary from a significant authority. By deepening the understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, these essays underscore what has been gained through struggle, as well as acknowledging the goals that are yet to be attained.

When James Meredith enrolled as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi in 1962, the resulting riots produced more casualties than any other clash of the civil rights era. Eagles shows that the violence resulted from the university's and the state's long defiance of the civil rights movement and federal law. Ultimately, the price of such behaviour--the price of defiance--was not only the murderous riot that rocked the nation and almost closed the university but also the nation's enduring scorn for Ole Miss and Mississippi. Eagles paints a remarkable portrait of Meredith himself by describing his unusual family background, his personal values, and his service in the U.S. Air Force, all of which prepared him for his experience at Ole Miss.

Just as Mississippi whites in the 1950s and 1960s had fought to maintain school segregation, they battled in the 1970s to control the school curriculum. Educators faced a crucial choice between continuing to teach a white supremacist view of history or offering students a more enlightened multiracial view of their state's past. In 1974, when Random House's Pantheon Books published Mississippi: Conflict and Change (written and edited by James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis), the defenders of the traditional interpretation struck back at the innovative textbook. Intolerant of its inclusion of African Americans, Native Americans, women, workers, and subjects like poverty, white terrorism, and corruption, the state textbook commission rejected the book, and its action prompted Loewen and Sallis to join others in a federal lawsuit (Loewen v. Turnipseed) challenging the book ban.Charles W. Eagles explores the story of the controversial ninth-grade history textbook and the court case that allowed its adoption with state funds. Mississippi: Conflict and Change and the struggle for its acceptance deepen our understanding both of civil rights activism in the movement's last days and of an early controversy in the culture wars that persist today.