Making the Modern South – serie

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, as the poor made tangible gains in cases involving federal, state, and local social programs, low-income housing, consumer rights, domestic relations, and civil rights. While poverty lawyers, Shepard reveals, did not by themselves create a legal revolution in the South, they did force southern politicians, policy makers, businessmen, and law enforcement officials to recognise that they could not ignore the legal rights of low-income citizens. Having survived for four decades, America's legal services program has adapted to ever-changing political realities, including slashed budgets and severe restrictions on poverty law practice adopted by the Republican-led Congress of the mid-1990s. With its account of the relationship between poverty lawyers and their clients, and their interaction with legal, political, and social structures, Rationing Justice speaks poignantly to the possibility of justice for all in America.

A sweeping yet rigorous analysis of Dixon and his work. The collection approaches the southern intellectual through multiple methodologies - from literary theory and film studies to social history and religious studies. We get an exhaustive yet diverse perspective on Dixon's influence and legacy."" - Journal of American History.Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1946), best remembered today as the author of the racist novels that served as the basis for D. W. Griffith's controversial 1915 classic film The Birth of a Nation, also enjoyed great renown in his lifetime as a minister, lecturer, lawyer, and actor. Although this native southerner's blatantly racist, chauvinistic, and white supremacist views are abhorrent today, his contemporary audiences responded enthusiastically to Dixon. In Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America, distinguished scholars of religion, film, literature, music, history, and gender studies offer a provocative examination of Dixon's ideas, personal life, and career and in the process illuminate the evolution of white racism in the early twentieth century and its legacy down to the present. The contributors analyse Dixon's sermons, books, plays, and films seeking to understand the appeal of his message within the white culture of the Progressive era. They also explore the critical responses of African Americans contemporary with Dixon. By delving into the context and complexity of Dixon's life, the contributors also raise fascinating questions about the power of popular culture in forming Americans' views in any age. ""An important and valuable addition to the literature on turn-of-the-century white supremacy."" - Journal of Southern History.

Few historical events lend themselves to such a sharp delineation between right and wrong as does the civil rights struggle. Consequently, many historical accounts of white resistance to civil rights legislation emphasise the ferocity of the opposition, from the Ole Miss riots to the depredations of Eugene ""Bull"" Conner's Birmingham police force to George Wallace's stand on the schoolhouse steps. While such hostile episodes frequently occurred in the Jim Crow South, civil rights adversaries also employed other, less confrontational but remarkably successful, tactics to deny equal rights to black Americans. In Delaying the Dream, Keith M. Finley explores gradations in the opposition by examining how the region's principal national spokesmen, its United States senators, addressed themselves to the civil rights question and developed a concerted plan of action to thwart legislation: the use of strategic delay.

In 1957, Congress voted to set up the United States Civil War Centennial Commission. A federally funded agency within the Department of the Interior, the commission's charge was to oversee preparations to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the central event in the Republic's history. Politicians hoped that a formal program of activities to mark the centennial of the Civil War would both bolster American patriotism at the height of the cold war and increase tourism in the South. Almost overnight, however, the patriotic pageant that organisers envisioned was transformed into a struggle over the historical memory of the Civil War and the injustices of racism. In Troubled Commemoration, Robert J. Cook recounts the planning, organisation, and ultimate failure of this controversial event and reveals how the broad-based public history extravaganza was derailed by its appearance during the decisive phase of the civil rights movement. Cook shows how the centennial provoked widespread alarm among many African Americans, white liberals, and cold warriors because the national commission failed to prevent southern whites from commemorating the Civil War in a racially exclusive fashion. The public outcry followed embarrassing attempts to mark secession, the attack on Fort Sumter, and the South's victory at First Manassas, and prompted backlash against the celebration, causing the emotional scars left by the war to resurface. Cook convincingly demonstrates that both segregationists and their opponents used the controversy that surrounded the commemoration to their own advantage. Southern whites initially embraced the centennial as a weapon in their fight to save racial segregation, while African Americans and liberal whites tried to transform the event into a celebration of black emancipation. Forced to quickly reorganise the commission, the Kennedy administration replaced the conservative leadership team with historians, including Allan Nevins and a young James I. Robertson, Jr., who labored to rescue the centennial by promoting a more soberly considered view of the nation's past. Though the commemoration survived, Cook illustrates that white southerners quickly lost interest in the event as it began to coincide with the years of Confederate defeat, and the original vision of celebrating America's triumph over division and strife was lost. The first comprehensive analysis of the U.S. Civil War Centennial, Troubled Commemoration masterfully depicts the episode as an essential window into the political, social, and cultural conflicts of America in the 1960s and confirms that it has much to tell us about the development of the modern South.

In the late nineteenth century, black musicians in the lower Mississippi Valley, chafing under the social, legal, and economic restrictions of Jim Crow, responded with a new musical form, the blues. In Jim Crow's Counterculture, R. A. Lawson 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. These individuals, Lawson shows, collectively demonstrate the African American struggle during the early twentieth century.By uncovering the stories of artists who expressed much in their music but left little record in traditional historical sources, Jim Crow's Counterculture offers a fresh perspective on the historical experiences of black Americans and provides a new understanding of the blues: a shared music that offered a message of personal freedom to repressed citizens.

In Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace, Yasuhiro Katagiri offers the first scholarly work to illuminate an important but largely unstudied aspect of U.S. civil rights history - the collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship between professional anti-Communists in the North and segregationist politicians in the South. In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Soon after - while the political demise of U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy unfolded - northern anti-Communists looked to the South as a promising new territory in which they could expand their support base and continue their cause. Southern segregationists embraced the assistance, and the methods, of these Yankee collaborators, and utilized the ""northern messiahs"" in executing a massive resistance to the Supreme Court's desegregation decrees and the civil rights movement in general. Southern white leadership framed black southerners' crusades for social justice and human dignity as a foreign scheme directed by nefarious outside agitators, ""race-mixers,"" and, worse, outright subversives and card-carrying Communists.Based on years of extensive archival research, Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace explains how a southern version of McCarthyism became part of the opposition to the civil rights movement in the South, an analysis that leads us to a deeper understanding and appreciation for what the freedom movement - and those who struggled for equality - fought to overcome.

New Orleans on Parade 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. Stagnant between the Civil War and World War II - a period of great expansion nationally - New Orleans unintentionally preserved its distinctive physical appearance and culture. Though business, civic, and government leaders tried to pursue conventional modernization in the 1940s, competition from other Sunbelt cities as well as a national economic shift from production to consumption gradually led them to seize on tourism as the growth engine for future prosperity, giving rise to a veritable gumbo of sensory attractions. A trend in historic preservation and the influence of outsiders helped fan this newfound identity, and the city's residents learned to embrace rather than disdain their past. A growing reliance on the tourist trade fundamentally affected social relations in New Orleans. African Americans were cast as actors who shaped the culture that made tourism possible while at the same time they were exploited by the local power structure. As black leaders' influence increased, the white elite attempted to keep its traditions - including racial inequality - intact, and race and class issues often lay at the heart of controversies over progress. Once the most tolerant diverse city in the South and the nation, New Orleans came to lag behind the rest of the country in pursuing racial equity. Souther traces the ascendancy of tourism in New Orleans through the final decades of the twentieth century and beyond, examining the 1984 World's Fair, the collapse of Louisiana's oil industry in the eighties, and the devastating blow dealt by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Narrated in a lively style and resting on a bedrock of research, New Orleans on Parade is a landmark book that allows readers to fully understand the image-making of the Big Easy.

During the Civil War, approximately 56,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in enemy military prison camps. Even in the midst of the war's shocking violence, the intensity of the prisoners' suffering and the brutal manner of their deaths provoked outrage, and both the Lincoln and Davis administrations manipulated the prison controversy to serve the exigencies of war. As both sides distributed propaganda designed to convince citizens of each section of the relative virtue of their own prison system, in contrast to the cruel inhumanity of the opponent, they etched hardened and divisive memories of the prison controversy into the American psyche, memories that would prove difficult to uproot. In Haunted by Atrocity, Benjamin G. Cloyd deftly analyses how Americans have remembered the military prisons of the Civil War from the war itself to the present, making a strong case for the continued importance of the great conflict in contemporary America.Throughout Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century, Cloyd shows, competing sectional memories of the prisons prolonged the process of national reconciliation. Events such as the trial and execution of CSA Captain Henry Wirz, commander of the notorious Andersonville prison, along with political campaigns, the publication of prison memoirs, and even the construction of monuments to the prison dead all revived the painful accusations of deliberate cruelty. As northerners, white southerners, and African Americans contested the meaning of the war, these divisive memories tore at the scars of the conflict and ensured that the subject of Civil War prisons remained controversial.By the 1920s, the death of the Civil War generation removed much of the emotional connection to the war, and the devastation of the first two world wars provided new contexts in which to reassess the meaning of atrocity. As a result, Cloyd explains, a more objective opinion of Civil War prisons emerged, one that condemned both the Union and the Confederacy for their callous handling of captives while it deemed the mistreatment of prisoners an inevitable consequence of modern war. But, Cloyd argues, these seductive arguments also deflected a closer examination of the precise responsibility for the tragedy of Civil War prisons and allowed Americans to believe in a comforting but ahistorical memory of the controversy. Both the recasting of the town of Andersonville as a Civil War village in the 1970s and the 1998 opening of the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville National Historic Site reveal the continued American preference for myth over history, a preference, Cloyd asserts, that inhibits a candid assessment of the evils committed during the Civil War.The first study of Civil War memory to focus exclusively on the military prison camps, Haunted by Atrocity offers a cautionary tale of how Americans, for generations, have unconsciously constructed their recollections of painful events in ways that protect cherished ideals of myth, meaning, identity, and, ultimately, a deeply rooted faith in American exceptionalism.

In Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South Jeannie Whayne employs the fascinating history of a powerful plantation owner in the Arkansas delta to recount the evolution of southern agriculture from the late nineteenth century through World War II.After his father's death in 1870, Robert E. ""Lee"" Wilson inherited 400 acres of land in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Over his lifetime, he transformed that inheritance into a 50,000-acre lumber operation and cotton plantation. Early on, Wilson saw an opportunity in the swampy local terrain, which sold for as little as fifty cents an acre, to satisfy an expanding national market for Arkansas forest reserves. He also led the fundamental transformation of the landscape, involving the drainage of tens of thousands of acres of land, in order to create the vast agricultural empire he envisioned.A consummate manager, Wilson employed the tenancy and sharecropping system to his advantage while earning a reputation for fair treatment of laborers, a reputation, Whayne suggests, not entirely deserved. He cultivated a cadre of relatives and employees from whom he expected absolute devotion. Leveraging every asset during his life and often deeply in debt, Wilson saved his company from bankruptcy several times, leaving it to the next generation to successfully steer the business through the challenges of the 1930s and World War II.Delta Empire traces the transition from the labor-intensive sharecropping and tenancy system to the capital-intensive neo-plantations of the post-World War II era to the portfolio plantation model. Through Wilson's story Whayne provides a compelling case study of strategic innovation and the changing economy of the South in the late nineteenth century.

In Maintaining Segregation, LeeAnn G. Reynolds explores how black and white children in the early twentieth-century South learned about segregation in their homes, schools, and churches. As public lynchings and other 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. The cumulative effect of the racial instruction southern children received, prior to highly publicized news such as the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, perpetuated segregation by discouraging discussion or critical examination.As the system of segregation evolved throughout the early twentieth century, generations of southerners came of age having little or no knowledge of life without institutionalized segregation. Reynolds examines the motives and approaches of white and black parents to racial instruction in the home and how their methods reinforced the status quo. Whereas white families sought to preserve the legal system of segregation and their place within it, black families faced the more complicated task of ensuring the safety of their children in a racist society without sacrificing their sense of self-worth. Schools and churches functioned as secondary sites for racial conditioning, and Reynolds traces the ways in which these institutions alternately challenged and encouraged the marginalization of black Americans both within society and the historical narrative.In order for subsequent generations to imagine and embrace the sort of racial equality championed by the civil rights movement, they had to overcome preconceived notions of race instilled since childhood. Ultimately, Reynolds's work reveals that the social change that occurred due to the civil rights movement can only be fully understood within the context of the segregation imposed upon children by southern institutions throughout much of the early twentieth century.

Throughout the twentieth century, cities such as Houston, Galveston, New Orleans, and Mobile grappled with the safety hazards created by oil and gas industries as well as the role municipal governments should play in protecting the public from these threats. James B. McSwain's Petroleum and Public Safety reveals how officials in these cities created standards based on technical, scientific, and engineering knowledge to devise politically workable ordinances related to the storage and handling of fuel.Each of the cities studied in this volume struggled through protracted debates regarding the regulation of crude petroleum and fuel oil, sparked by the famous Spindletop strike of 1901 and the regional oil boom in the decades that followed. Municipal governments sought to ensure the safety of their citizens while still reaping lucrative economic benefits from local petroleum industry activities. Drawing on historical antecedents such as fire-protection engineering, the cities of the Gulf South came to adopt voluntary, consensual fire codes issued by insurance associations and standards organisations such as the National Board of Fire Underwriters, the National Fire Protection Association, and the Southern Standard Building Code Conference. The culmination of such efforts was the creation of the International Fire Code, an overarching fire-protection guide that is widely used in the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. In devising ordinances, Gulf South officials pursued the politics of risk management, as they hammered out strategies to eliminate or mitigate the dangers associated with petroleum industries and to reduce the possible consequences of catastrophic oil explosions and fires.Using an array of original sources, including newspapers, municipal records, fire-insurance documents, and risk-management literature, McSwain demonstrates that Gulf South cities played a vital role in twentieth-century modernization.

In Resisting Equality Stephanie R. Rolph examines the history of the Citizens' Council, an organisation committed to coordinating opposition to desegregation and black voting rights. In the first comprehensive study of this racist group, Rolph follows the Citizens' Council from its establishment in the Mississippi Delta, through its expansion into other areas of the country and its success in incorporating elements of its agenda into national politics, to its formal dissolution in 1989.Founded in 1954, two months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Council spread rapidly in its home state of Mississippi. Initially, the organisation relied on local chapters to monitor signs of black activism and take action to suppress that activism through economic and sometimes violent means. As the decade came to a close, however, the Council's influence expanded into Mississippi's political institutions, silencing white moderates and facilitating a wave of terror that severely obstructed black Mississippians' participation in the civil rights movement. As the Citizens' Council reached the peak of its power in Mississippi, its ambitions extended beyond the South. Alliances with like-minded organisations across the country supplemented waning influence at home, and the Council movement found itself in league with the earliest sparks of conservative ascension, cultivating consistent messages of grievance against minority groups and urging the necessity of white unity. Much more than a local arm of white terror, the Council's work intersected with anticommunism, conservative ideology, grassroots activism, and Radical Right organisations that facilitated its journey from the margins into mainstream politics.Perhaps most crucially, Rolph examines the extent to which the organisation survived the successes of the civil rights movement and found continued relevance even after the Council's campaign to preserve state-sanctioned forms of white supremacy ended in defeat. Using the Council's own materials, papers from its political allies, oral histories, and newspaper accounts, Resisting Equality illuminates the motives and mechanisms of this destructive group.

In Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, Brendan J. J. Payne reveals how prohibition helped realign the racial and religious order in the South by linking restrictions on alcohol with political preaching and the disfranchisement of Black voters. While both sides invoked Christianity, prohibitionists redefined churches' doctrines, practices, and political engagement. White prohibitionists initially courted Black voters in the 1880s but soon dismissed them as hopelessly wet and sought to disfranchise them, stoking fears of drunken Black men defiling white women in their efforts to reframe alcohol restriction as a means of racial control. Later, as the alcohol industry grew desperate, it turned to Black voters, many of whom joined the brewers to preserve their voting rights and maintain personal liberties. Tracking southern debates about alcohol from the 1880s through the 1930s, Payne shows that prohibition only retreated from the region once the racial and religious order it helped enshrine had been secured.

From the late nineteenth century to the dawn of the civil rights era, the Churches of Christ operated outside of conventional racial customs. Many of their congregations, even deep in the South, counted whites and blacks among their numbers. As the civil rights movement began to challenge pervasive social views about race, Church of Christ leaders and congregants found themselves in the midst of turmoil. In Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle, Barclay Key focuses on how these churches managed race relations during the Jim Crow era and how they adapted to the dramatic changes of the 1960s.Although most religious organisations grappled with changing attitudes toward race, the Churches of Christ had singular struggles. Fundamentally ""restorationist,"" these exclusionary churches perceived themselves as the only authentic expression of Christianity, compelling them to embrace peoples of different races, even as they succumbed to prevailing racial attitudes. The Churches of Christ thus offer a unique perspective for observing how Christian fellowship and human equality intersected during the civil rights era. Key reveals how racial attitudes and practices within individual congregations elude the simple categorizations often employed by historians. Public forums, designed by churches to bridge racial divides, offered insight into the minds of members while revealing the limited progress made by individual churches.Although the Churches of Christ did have a more racially diverse composition than many other denominations in the Jim Crow era, Key shows that their members were subject to many of the same aversions, prejudices, and fears of other churches of the time. Ironically, the tentative biracial relationships that had formed within and between congregations prior to World War II began to dissolve as leading voices of the civil rights movement prioritised desegregation.

Surveying the two centuries that preceded Jim Crow's demise, Race and Education in New Orleans traces the course of the city's education system from the colonial period to the start of school desegregation in 1960. Walter C. Stern's timely historical analysis reveals that public schools in New Orleans both suffered from and maintained the racial stratification that characterized urban areas for much of the twentieth century.By taking a long view of the interplay between education, race, and urban change, Stern underscores the fluidity of race as a social construct and the extent to which the Jim Crow system evolved through a dynamic though often improvisational process.

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.

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.

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.

Gregg L. Michel's Spying on Students focuses on the law enforcement campaign against New Left and progressive student activists in the South during the 1960s. Often overlooked by scholars, white southern students worked alongside their Black peers in the civil rights struggle, drove opposition to the Vietnam War, and embraced the counterculture's rejection of conventions and norms. While African Americans bore the brunt of police surveillance and harassment, federal agencies such as the FBI and local police intelligence units known as Red Squads subjected white student activists to wide-ranging, intrusive, and illegal monitoring. By examining the experiences of white students in the South, Michel provides fresh insights into the destructive, weaponized spying tactics deployed by state actors in their attempts to quash dissent in the region.Drawing on previously secret FBI files and records of other investigative agencies, Michel demonstrates that authorities at all levels of government turned the full power of their offices against white activists listening to their conversations, infiltrating their meetings, and sowing discord within their families and schools. Efforts to surveil and repress social activism reflected officials' fear of growing unrest on the part of white students who questioned the southern racial status quo and recoiled as the horrors of Vietnam laid bare the shibboleth of American exceptionalism. As white students revolted on campuses elsewhere, most notably at Berkeley and Columbia, law enforcement sought to curtail such disruptions in the South. In their view, white students threatened domestic tranquility and therefore warranted close monitoring.Spying on Students presents a unique perspective on state actors' war on dissent, exposing their suspicion of opposing political beliefs and revealing their paranoia as they sought to preserve the existing racial order. The work complicates further the dominant narrative of the era that casts white southern students as opponents of social change. The counterintelligence operations employed against them show not only that white students valued political engagement and social activism but also that authorities considered them a menace to the country as a whole.

In early 1968, more than 27,000 teachers across Florida mailed their resignation letters, initiating the country's first statewide teachers' strike. The striking teachers fought for and won a monumental victory, improving education in the state and gaining collective bargaining rights for all public sector employees. Even as the influence of industrial labor unions decreased across the country, the Florida teachers' strike and the spirit of teacher militancy that swept the nation during the late 1960s and 1970s demonstrate that a vibrant labor movement remained. Jody Baxter Noll's study challenges the prevailing view of these decades as a period of decline for the American labor movement by turning the spotlight on teachers and public sector unionism.In his examination of the 1968 strike and its aftermath, Noll illuminates the vital role of teachers in shaping political and social policy in the United States. As a predominantly women-led workforce, teachers challenged notions of feminine passivity in their mobilization efforts and used their union to fight for gender equality. The strike also provides insight into how interracial unionism could be a potent weapon for labor movements, even in the Deep South.In exploring the political and social factors that prompted the teachers' strike, Noll considers Florida's instrumental role in forming modern conservatism. Led by Republican governor Claude Kirk, the first Republican governor elected in the Deep South since Reconstruction, Florida helped to create a blueprint for Republicans to build a New Right powerhouse throughout the country. Though Florida has remained on the periphery of much scholarship on the ascendancy of the New Right, Noll demonstrates that the state more accurately reflects the nation's political attitudes than much of the rest of the South because of its economic, racial, social, and political diversity.

Sandhill Cities is a comparative history of Augusta, Columbus, and Macon, Georgia, in the twentieth century. Weaving together southern, urban, and environmental history, J. Mark Souther narrates urban boosters' hopes and actions in their pursuit of metropolitan stature in three midsized cities situated along the fall line running through the middle of the state.

James O. Heath's Deep South Democrats is the story of three men who redefined the southern political landscape through unique voting records in health, housing, labor, and education. Olin Johnston of South Carolina and John Sparkman and Lister Hill of Alabama contributed to the massive impact of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the southern states, though the reforms didn't affect just their constituents: the New Deal's characteristics of federal intervention and economic empowerment influenced their own political outlook for decades. While the senators' consistent defense of segregation stood in stark contrast to the purported "reluctance" of their racism in their election campaigns, the benefits of their economic liberalism benefited Black communities in their states. This, in turn, ensured a remarkable measure of support among Black southerners who were registered to vote and gave the three of them an unbeatable edge over opponents who were economically and racially conservative. In focusing on the paradoxical politics of three Deep South Democrats, Heath avoids the pitfalls of overcategorization while entertaining two possibilities. The first is that Johnston, Sparkman, and Hill privately supported the advancement of Black rights but were restrained from doing so publicly by the political realities in their states, which forced them to maintain a strict adherence to racial segregation, albeit while pursuing reforms in social policy that benefited Black and white residents alike. The second is that the three of them held racist beliefs but avoided the racist hyperbole of their contemporaries because they possessed a sense of duty to their communities. Heath's analysis considers the influence of region, rather than state, alongside tradition and family history, to explain how the reluctant racism of these three men proved unusually influential in the age of civil rights.

In A Fight for Visibility, Donna E. Reeves explores how Black Memphians fought to maintain dignity and self-respect during the post-Reconstruction period and Jim Crow era by challenging the negative images of African Americans produced by Confederate loyalists as part of the Lost Cause narrative. After the Civil War, Black Memphians actively struggled against the white Memphis establishment, which tried to shackle the movement and development of various Black communities. The more white Memphians tried to contain African Americans, the more African American residents stood against those efforts. Reeves surveys the history of Memphis in the postwar era, uncovering the motivations behind the Confederate monument-building frenzy at the end of the nineteenth century. She argues that the ceremonies and narratives of this period served to freeze Black people in deferential roles in the minds of white southerners. In response, through subtle and not-so-subtle avenues, Black residents challenged the notion that they were second-class citizens and sought to show that they were just as worthy of citizenship as their white counterparts. Reeves focuses on two themes emblematic of the city's racial struggles. The first was the decades-long presence of a statue depicting the infamous Confederate general, slave trader, and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, in the downtown area. The second was the hosting, beginning in the 1930s, of the Cotton Carnival, an event at which white residents and tourists, greeted by Black women dressed as plantation "mammies," celebrated the role of cotton in Memphis's history. When Black Memphians challenged depictions of their race at this annual event, they were not just rejecting demeaning stereotypes; they were also rejecting the white southern mindset that saw Black people in the role of servant and entertainer. Reeves examines the myriad ways that Black Memphians protested both the continued presence of the Forrest statue and the Cotton Carnival. Black residents, she suggests, wanted more than simply to demand the removal of the statue (which eventually occurred) and to correct the powerful, mythologized memory of slavery. They saw these sites of protest as an opportunity to take control of the image of Black citizens and to challenge the widespread belief that only white people could lead the city in politics and business.