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This chapter examines how the federal government and black protest organizations intervened in southern authoritarian enclaves, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as the reform of the National Democratic Party during the period 1964–1972. It first considers state authorities' consensus preference for effecting a “harnessed revolution” before discussing the challenges posed by the Civil and Voting rights acts to southern enclaves. It then describes the degree to which outsiders interfered in enclaves' responses to these landmark statutes, including federal oversight of voting rights in the Deep South and deployments by black protest organizations. It concludes by analyzing the McGovern–Fraser national Democratic party reforms of 1968–1972.

Part 3 discusses the growth of basic legal rights. In the twenty-first century it can be hard to appreciate how remarkably welcoming the federal judiciary was to the claims of the civil rights movement. Part 3 includes chapter 7, “Access to Justice”; chapter 8, “Voting Rights and Political Representation”; chapter 9, “Public Accommodations”; chapter 10, “School Desegregation and Municipal Equalization”; and chapter 11, “Employment Discrimination.” Voting rights and political representation were key. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened the portals for dramatic increases in black voter registration. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated equal accommodation in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and other public places. Some applications of these rights were realized immediately, others not so much. This was the era in which the promise of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision became a reality in the Deep South. Desegregation suits proliferated. The Supreme Court dramatically increased the pace of desegregation. The varied forms of pushback were astonishing: the shutting down of a historic black high school lest white students have to attend (even at the expense of double sessions); the hiding of athletic trophies from the historic black high school upon merger; the suspension and expulsion of many black students at the moment of desegregation. The other major accomplishment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the ban on employment discrimination. At the time of its passage, job and labor union segregation were ubiquitous in the Deep South. This all changed.

This chapter spans the period immediately following the assassination of President Kennedy to the riots in the Watts district of Los Angeles, which exploded in the summer of 1965. Although Lyndon Johnson was a familiar figure, it was difficult to tell whether he would champion Kennedy’s civil rights legislation, which was working its way through Congress at the time of the president’s death. Much to Wilkins’s relief Johnson proved to be his greatest political ally. Johnson made great efforts to court black leaders, particularly Wilkins and Whitney Young of the Urban League. The president frequently sought Wilkins’s counsel and advice on civil rights issues and, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, his administration quickly drafted more legislation to secure voting rights. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, however, did little to quell the increasing frustration felt by African Americans marginalized in urban ghettoes, and just days after the bill was signed, violent riots broke out in Watts, warning Wilkins that much more still needed to be done. Frustration was also evident within the Association when a group called the Young Turks, board members dissatisfied with Wilkins’s leadership, challenged him to take more militant action.

Chris Danielson takes up the Mississippi story after 1964 and provides a somewhat different interpretation of succeeding events than Rebecca Miller Davis implies. Danielson acknowledges that race did play a major role in the Republicanization of Mississippi, but contends that the move toward a GOP-controlled state was not seamless or without significant internal division. The essay explores the growth of a large black electorate in the Magnolia State after the 1965 Voting Rights Act and contends that state Republican leaders were not immediately warm to the idea of an all-white party, held conflicting ideas about the viability of the black vote in post-1965 Mississippi, and weighed the effects of Republican presidential administrations pursing a more nuanced path than simply embracing the raw white supremacy of the Ross Barnetts and George Wallaces. Despite attempts by Republican presidents to weaken renewals of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, Danielson argues, GOP administrations actually expanded black office-holding through their enforcement of the Act's provisions.

This chapter chronicles the VEP’s impact on black southerners and politics after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Under the leadership of Vernon Jordan, the VEP went beyond voter registration and started programs to educate African Americans about the political process. The VEP also started hosting conferences designed to swell the number of black candidates running for various political offices across the South. During this period, not only did the VEP increase the number of black southern voters, it also grew black political power in a variety of ways at local and state levels across the American South.

By 1965, the VRA not only revolutionized electoral politics in the United States but also immediately gave rise to white resistance. This chapter describes the freedom struggle’s progression from protest to politics and how African Americans took their place in American city halls. By 1966, Richmond had elected three African Americans to the city council, including Henry Marsh III. As black Americans began to elect more than a handful of representatives and to contest the legacy of segregationist policies (e.g., slum clearance, expressway construction, police brutality), whites embarked on a Machiavellian campaign of vote dilution. In Richmond, they first tried to dilute blacks votes by staggering elections. The urban unrest of the late 1960s and the rise of Black Power heightened white anxiety about a black revolution. By 1968, the Crusade embraced not only the politics of black empowerment but also Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Richmond’s white officials met these challenges by annexing portions of a predominantly white suburb, Chesterfield County.

This chapter examines Joe T. Patterson's practical racism as a means to undermine the civil rights movement. It first considers the response of white southern leaders to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with particular emphasis on Paul Johnson's call for a special legislative session to enact constitutional amendments to change Mississippi's voting laws. It then discusses Patterson's stand on the proposed constitutional amendments, as well as his lobbying against the Voting Rights Act and his use of the Sovereignty Commission to continue his fight against the Citizens' Council. It also explores Erle Johnston's version of practical segregation; Patterson's feud with Hazel Brannon Smith, editor of the Lexington Advertiser; James Meredith's March Against Fear in Mississippi in 1966; and Aubrey Norvell's attempted assassination of Meredith. The chapter concludes by focusing on how the March Against Fear became the launching pad of the civil rights slogan “Black Power.”

Ezra Taft Benson brazenly asserted that Martin Luther King was a communist agent. Thus, Benson rejected the civil rights movement, claiming that it was an invitation to promote communist aims and organizations. In specific, Benson feared that the unrest unleashed by the “civil rights agitators,” as he called them, would lead to a revolution that would ultimately produce a worldwide depression and a catastrophic failure of money markets in the United States. For Benson, then, the civil rights movement was not about black rights but about communists using them as a pawn to undermine American institutions. This essay traces Benson’s views on civil rights, specifically Birch Society founder Robert Welch and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s influence on Benson’s racialist thinking.

This chapter examines Joe T. Patterson's role in the conservative political effort to derail the advancing civil rights movement. When Patterson won a third term as Mississippi attorney general in 1963, he had to face a number of challenges from the civil rights movement. Among them were the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP); Freedom Summer; the murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. During those years, Patterson refused to renounce segregation and took tough stands against the movement. He also shaped a burgeoning brand of conservatism in the South. This chapter first considers how Patterson helped transition southern Democrats into modern-day Republicans before turning to Freedom Summer, an attempt by civil rights activists to bring African Americans access to the voting rolls and adequate educational opportunities. It also discusses the significance of Paul Johnson's tenure as governor of Mississippi to the shift in Mississippi politics.

Martin Luther King Jr. was more radical and angry in 1960 than in 1955, more of both in 1965 than in 1960, and more of both in 1968 than ever. The great demonstrations in Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma yielded the civil rights bills, but King struggled to adjust to the rise of Black Power and dared to oppose the Vietnam War, burning his alliance with President Johnson. King provided the theology of social justice that the civil rights movement spoke and sang.

Abstract: The chapter considers nonvoting after World War II, a unique electoral period in American history with the lowest nonvoting rates of any period from 1920–2012. The post-war period also boasts the highest economic growth rate of any of the four periods, coupled with the early days of television which transformed politics in the 1950s. In general, economic growth and the introduction of television move nonvoting rates downward. The chapter also considers in detail the struggles leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the law’s impact on nonvoting rates among African Americans. It also uncovers that in the 1960s the Vietnam War increased nonvoting. The chapter begins an analysis of nonvoting at the individual level. The less individuals know about the campaign context and the less they form comparisons between the candidates, the more likely they will say home on Election Day.

Born on September 14, 1921, in New Haven, Connecticut, Constance Baker Motley experienced discrimination at the age of fifteen when she was turned away from a public beach for her dark skin. In 1964 she became the first African American woman to serve in the New York State Senate and the first woman president of the Manhattan City Council. Two years later she became the first African American woman to serve as a federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. On August 9, 1965, Motley addressed a Southern Christian Leadership Conference audience in Birmingham, Alabama. This chapter presents Motley’s speech, in which she praised Rosa Parks for her role in the Montgomery bus boycotts of 1955 and Martin Luther King Jr. for his leadership that culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She also urged members of the “Grand Alliance,” of labor, intellectuals, religious liberals, and civil rights advocates to continue to strive for educational integration.

The book ends with a brief examination of the 1955 to 2011 period. In 1960, the sit-in movement swept Memphis and the South. Civil rights activists in Memphis, including Maxine Atkins Smith and Russell B. Sugarmon, Jr., embraced direct action and supported the Democratic Party, which spearheaded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Black Memphians and southerners saw better employment opportunities and won public office on a larger scale. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in Memphis in 1968, and civil rights gains were stunted by the persistence of poverty and ongoing racial polarization. Nevertheless, this study concludes that the political activities of black southerners in the Jim Crow era not only led to racial advancement at the time but also forwarded the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which forever changed the country for the better.

During his Inaugural Ball, Lyndon B. Johnson danced with a Negro woman, Lynette Taylor. What he did was something no American president had ever done before. Many blacks were represented in the celebration. Johnson easily won the 1964 presidential election, garnering more than 61 percent of the popular vote and 94 percent of the black vote. The election also saw more blacks winning political office than in any year since the Reconstruction. This chapter focuses on Johnson’s support for the civil rights movement during his term as president of the United States, including his signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It also examines his support for the Alabama Freedom Campaign launched by Martin Luther King Jr. and leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in protest of voting restrictions that kept most Negroes out of the polls.

This chapter covers the activities of three youth-based activist movements: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU), and the Free South Africa Movement (FSAM). It examines their experiment with creative organizing strategies in three parts. The first part focuses on the SNCC's organizing efforts after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its efforts to implement new strategies aimed at helping the organization adjust to a different political context in the second half of the 1960s. The second part turns to the SOBU who used framing and appropriation to marry African American students to black working-class politics and Pan-African movements. The last part deals with the FSAM and how the anti-apartheid campaign heightened the political consciousness of the youth about racial justice and transnational politics.

This introduction lays out the main arguments of the book. It begins with a case study, a voting rights campaign in Orangeburg, South Carolina, during the early 1960s with support from the Voter Education Project (VEP). It then zooms out and explains the scope and importance of the VEP during the civil rights era. The book argues that the VEP was the main engine that drove the civil rights movement forward by providing money and support to hundreds of African American grassroots campaigns throughout eleven southern states, money deriving from philanthropic foundations, up until conservatives cut off the money supply through the Tax Reform Act of 1969.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, along with the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, affected the way Fannie Lou Hamer delivered her speeches. In the late 1960s, Hamer discarded personal narratives, in which she highlighted the cruelties and violence of Mississippi’s white supremacist culture, in favor of new rhetorical strategies and tactics for bureaucratic and electoral ends. In early 1967, Hamer spoke at a chapter meeting of the National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi. This chapter reproduces Hamer’s speech, in which she continues to criticize the educated middle-class blacks’ alliances with “chicken-eating” black ministers and white power brokers. Hamer specifically attacked the Sunflower County Progress Inc., a coalition of moderate blacks and whites that sought to attract Head Start monies from the federal government and would compete directly with the Child Development Group of Mississippi, with whom Hamer was aligned.