G. Wayne Dowdy - Böcker

In the 1930s thousands of African Americans abandoned their long-standing allegiance to the party of Abraham Lincoln and began voting for Democratic Party candidates. This new voting pattern remapped the nation's political landscape and altered the relationship between citizen and government. One of the forgotten builders of this modern Democratic Party was Memphis mayor and congressman Edward Hull Crump (1874-1954). Crump created a biracial, multiethnic coalition within the segregated South that transformed the Mississippi Delta's largest city into a modern southern metropolis. Crump expanded city regulatory power, increased government efficiency and established a publicly owned electric utility. In addition, he secured a comprehensive flood control system for portions of the lower Mississippi River Valley. G. Wayne Dowdy cataloged the personal papers of Crump for the Memphis Public Library and brings southern political history to life in this biography. In the 1930s Crump emerged as a national leader who influenced the direction of American politics. In 1936 Time described Crump as ""one of the South's most remarkable politicians."" A political advisor to Franklin Roosevelt, Crump convinced a large number of blacks to abandon their allegiance to the Republicans for the party of FDR. Ironically, Crump's power and influence ebbed over the course of the 1940s in large part due to the increasing independence of black voters seeking to desegregate Memphis and the South. Determined to maintain segregation, Crump abandoned the Democrats in 1948 for the States' Rights Party and experienced a crushing political defeat. G. Wayne Dowdy is a senior librarian and archivist at the Memphis Public Library and Information Center. His work has appeared in the Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies, CrossRoads: A Southern Culture Annual, Journal of Negro History, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, and other publications.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the city of Memphis was governed by the Shelby County Democratic Party controlled by Edward Hull Crump, described by Time magazine as ""the most absolute political boss in the U.S."" Crusades for Freedom chronicles the demise of the Crump political machine and the corresponding rise to power of the South's two minorities, African Americans and Republicans.Between the years 1948 and 1968, Memphis emerged as a battleground in the struggle to create a strong two-party South. For the first time in its history, both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates campaigned vigorously for the Bluff City's votes. Closely tied to these changing political fortunes was the struggle of African Americans to overturn two centuries of discrimination. At the same time, many believed that the city needed a more modern political structure to meet the challenges of the 1950s and 1960s, preferably a mayor-city council governmental structure. By 1968 the segregated social order had collapsed, black politicians were firmly entrenched within the Democratic party, southern whites had swelled the ranks of the GOP, and Memphis had adopted a new city charter.