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This chapter examines the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Smith v. Allwright that challenged the restriction on suffrage: it invalidated the all-white Democratic primary and struck at the heart of southern politics—one-party rule based on white supremacy. It first considers the Supreme Court's challenge to the white primary in relation to rulers' dilemmas, opportunities, and options before discussing narratives of enclave experiences with the white primary challenge in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia. It then compares outer South and Deep South responses to Smith, showing that Georgia and South Carolina featured more impressive black mobilizations than Mississippi. However, the consequences of these episodes were not driven solely by such forces as economic development or black protest infrastructure. Rather, given different configurations of intraparty conflict, party–state institutions, and levels of black insurgency, Smith and the responses it invoked had different consequences for each enclave.

This chapter examines four important features of Deep South authoritarian enclaves on the eve of the transition: their political geography, centralization of political authority, party factionalism, and latent strength of their indigenous opponents. A review of these and other characteristics of these polities suggests that modernization cannot fully explain the variation in Deep South democratization experiences. The chapter considers a causal account emphasizing the importance of regime defenders, opponents, and the institutional topography on which they battled one another. It compares the degree to which authority was centralized in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia and highlights the factionalism within Democratic parties. It concludes with a discussion of black protest capacity on the eve of the transition.

This chapter examines how the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education sparked a crisis over the desegregation of Clemson College in South Carolina. Prior to Brown, South Carolina's rulers sought to preempt the invalidation of state-mandated segregation by improving black education. After the ruling, they launched a strategy of massive resistance: decrying, deterring, and deferring threats to white supremacy in the public sphere. The chapter first reviews the state of black education before Brown and South Carolina's attempts to preempt the decision. It then considers the state's responses to Brown in the 1950s and early 1960s, showing that its leaders attacked both white civil society and black protest organizations. It also describes how the state bolstered its institutional resources to manage democratization pressures and concludes with an assessment of how politicians capitalized on ruling party cohesion and an improved coercive apparatus to navigate the Clemson crisis.

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.

This chapter examines how the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education sparked a crisis over the desegregation of the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens. On the eve of Brown, Georgia's ruling party remained controlled by the rural elites and white supremacist politicians composing the faction led by Governor Herman Talmadge. Through their massive resistance, enclave rulers successfully avoided the desegregation of state-supported schools for more than six years while also gaining headway in their repression of the statewide infrastructure of black protest. The chapter first reviews the state of black education in Georgia prior to Brown and the state's attempts to preempt the ruling before discussing how factional conflict affected rulers' development of new institutional defenses to ward off democratization pressures. It then considers the Talmadgeites' attacks on black protest throughout the 1950s and concludes by explaining how Georgia's rulers mishandled the UGA crisis.

This chapter delineates the major arguments, questions, and historiographic interventions of the book, discussing the discourse theories that the book engages, centering especially on public spheres, black publics, and counterpublics. It also provides a reconsideration of the critical dialogical and commercial relationship between black readers and black publishers, as well as between the publishers and their own papers.

This chapter describes Wells-Barnett's life in Chicago. For Wells-Barnett, Chicago's social problems were inspirations for activism. The city was experiencing growing pains that challenged city services and threatened racial tolerance. Housing and job competition created hostility that was beginning to erode black rights. Nevertheless, white reformers offered her new experiences of integration, and black protests frequently brought tangible results. Wells-Barnett began to spend more time in Chicago in 1896. At that time, she had two major outlets for her activism: the Conservator and the Ida B. Wells Club.

This chapter looks at the rise of the black campus movement. University of Michigan (UM) leaders were not ready for black campus activism; they took comfort in the fact that black activism was still something unfolding off campus. That all changed in the late 1960s. Black activism that took over buildings and shut down classes threatened university operations. The black campus activists also offered more radical visions of inclusion than federal bureaucrats had. They wanted to create an institution that saw racial justice as the driving force of its mission. A new president led the University of Michigan through these protests. Arriving at the university in January of 1968, Robben Fleming introduced a new managerial strategy to co-opt activism. His efforts worked briefly to stem the tide of black student protests in the late 1960s, but they ultimately failed when Fleming did not provide the types of policies and initiatives that would satisfy activists. By 1970, black student activists organized the most successful student strike in the university's history, calling into question whether UM leaders could retain control of the meaning and character of racial inclusion.

This chapter shows how white liberal leaders criticized black protest and promoted the racially unequal status quo as the most sustainable urban form when confronted with the belief that the push for racial equality would produce an intolerable or uncontainable level of conflict. Under pressure from African Americans and in response to shifting northern racial ideologies, Detroit's white business and municipal leaders increasingly expressed disdain for acts of racial discrimination and support for a northern racial system that they saw as more just than the South's. However, instead of considering strategies for alleviating the discrepancies between the lives of black and white Detroiters, white liberal leaders sought a way to manage racial conflicts. Even though they saw themselves as allies of all urban residents, including African Americans, the ideological limits of liberalism gave them the tools to oversee rather than resolve structural inequalities.

This chapter describes the role of Chambers's law practice and law firm as a locus and focal point of the African American struggle for racial equality in North Carolina from the mid-1960s onward. Chambers and the firm were well known to African Americans in every corner of the state, and Chambers provided legal representation, mostly free of charge, to civil rights demonstrators and activists of every persuasion and mode of protest while also advancing the interests of black citizens in other ways. In 1968, James Ferguson managed Rev. Dr. Reginald Hawkins's gubernatorial campaign, designed to energize the state's newly enfranchised black electorate. Ferguson and Adam Stein represented and insurgent, racially-mixed delegation from North Carolina at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Stein assisted striking black cafeteria workers at UNC-Chapel Hill, adroitly securing most of their goals despite a highly-charged political atmosphere. Ferguson convinced a disciplinary panel at Duke University to forego punishment of black students who had occupied the administration building. Working ceaselessly, Chambers and his partners encountered racist judges, endured the occasional missed paycheck, but kept on, persuaded that their work was essential to the goal of full black equality.

This chapter chronicles the long “Red Summer” and persistent racial violence throughout the 1920s. With America's entry into World War I, black populations swelled in response to labor shortages, thus precipitating racial conflict over jobs and housing between white residents of northern industrial cities and the black newcomers. These tensions would culminate in the “Red Summer,” a season of race riots, conflagrations, and other types of spectacular violence. Though the wartime surge in violence would subside after 1921, racial prejudice and violence continued on. Despite these setbacks, however, black resistance likewise persisted; and this period marks the ascent of a new generation of civil rights activists, as well as a few other notable milestones such as the Thurman-Watts v. Board of Education of Coffeyville and Brown v. Board of Education decisions and the establishment of the Kansas City branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

This chapter reviews the history of women’s reproductive rights in Poland, starting with early 20th-century mobilizations, the de facto legalization of abortion during the communist era, and the post-1989 dramatic shift. It points to the cyclical nature of these struggles and mobilizations and also to the fact that they remain unresolved and are contested by both pro-choice and pro-life movements. The chapter examines these confrontations and shows how the alliance between state and church has produced a set of legal and moral controls over women’s bodies and shifted the power to decide away from women. It reviews restrictive legislation that has contributed to women’s and their families physical and emotional suffering and points to doctors’ complacency. It concludes that despite years of relentless pro-life pressure that has resulted in a change of public attitudes, women continue to resist, organize, and mobilize; thus, the struggle over women’s reproductive rights continues.