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This introductory chapter provides a background of the civil rights realignment. The conventional account treats the civil rights realignment as the disruption of one stable partisan alignment and its replacement by another alignment in which race played a defining role. The critical decisions driving this process occurred in the 1960s as national party elites grappled with the question of how to respond to pressure from civil rights activists. The choices made at the center then reverberated throughout the political system, gradually remaking both parties at the mass and middle levels. In contrast, this book argues that the partisan realignment on civil rights was rooted in changes in the New Deal coalition that emerged in the mid- to late 1930s, not the 1960s. Rather than realignment starting in Washington and diffusing out and down, state parties and locally oriented rank- and-file members of Congress provided a key mechanism for pro-civil rights forces to capture the Democratic Party from below.

This chapter looks at civil rights activists who pursued the freedom struggle through practical standards on specific aspects of segregation. Black union activists tried to break the Jim Crow system down step by step at the point of production. They first sought the right to unionize, sometimes risking their lives merely to achieve that right. Secondly, black union activists sought to use unions to end workplace discrimination, including separate and color-coded hiring lists, rates of pay, and seniority lines for white and black that, among other practices, kept blacks in the worst paid, dirtiest, and most dangerous jobs.

This chapter examines the story of white southerner civil rights activist Billy Graham. It explores Graham's efforts to encourage the American South to accept peacefully the demise of racial segregation as part of his perennial emphasis on individual personal conversion, salvation, and a personal relationship with Christ. It criticizes Graham's support to former U.S. President Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy and suggests that his commitment to the demise of racial segregation had much to do with the realization that his credibility on the national and international stages could never survive a defense of his native region's reactionary racial customs.

This chapter assesses post-civil rights activists in the juvenile justice reform movement (JJRM) from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. It examines how the JJRM's movement infrastructure, along with the regional and local political cultures that shaped the orientation of their key activists, influenced the trajectory of the campaigns. This movement infrastructure created a safe space for marginal youth and youth workers to become engaged in social activism. JJRM campaigns attempted to deinstitutionalize the juvenile justice system and combat disproportionate minority confinement. Unlike the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN) and the movement initiatives of the 1960s, yet similar to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, JJRM networks were multiracial and multisectoral. The chapter places JJRM within the discussion of youth movement activism and intergenerational politics because the status of marginalized youth in relation to the juvenile justice system alerted social justice and civil rights activists about regressive policies impacting poor communities.

This chapter examines the story of civil rights activist Dorothy Tilly and her Methodist women's Fellowship of the Concerned in Georgia. It suggests that Tilly exemplified her Christian faith and the social reform potential of Wesleyan tradition of Protestantism to its fullest. She nudged white Southerners to do the right thing on race relations much as a mother might encourage her children and she lived a life that encouraged and fostered change, racial toleration, and inclusiveness.

This chapter examines how Philadelphia's civil rights activists tried to use the media to make de facto segregation an issue that the city's school board could not avoid. More specifically, it considers media coverage for the racial integration crisis at the Central High School of Philadelphia in Little Rock in the fall of 1957. It analyzes how the coverage of the Little Rock crisis in Philadelphia's print and broadcast media raised the profile of the city's own educational issues to a higher level than in the previous two decades. It also discusses Floyd Logan's attempts to foreground school segregation as an issue to be taken up by Philadelphia's civil rights advocates. It shows how Logan used the visibility of Little Rock as leverage to help the school segregation issue in Philadelphia reach a larger audience in the black community and set the stage for larger protests in the early 1960s.

This book begins with the story of how Texas legislators drafted a plethora of segregationist legislation designed to circumvent the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation. Mexican American and African American civil rights activists quickly organized to prevent these bills from passing. However, when a few Mexican Americans associated with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) suggested working with blacks in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), LULAC national president Felix Tijerina sternly reprimanded his colleagues, saying: “Let the Negro fight his own battles. His problems are not mine. I don't want to ally with him.” Over the next two decades, such sentiments intensified as the school desegregation battles continued.

The end of the 1960s saw many psychiatrists and psychologists, along with other social scientists, accuse student activists of being mentally unstable. The same sentiments were expressed against African American civil rights activists. This view was challenged in 1970 by psychiatrist Robert Coles, who cited examples of what he called a particularly “fashionable kind of slander.” By the later 1970s, another critical narrative on radicalism emerged as many former activists and members of the counterculture of the 1960s sought professional counseling to cope with an array of problems such as alcoholism and suicidal tendencies. In a strange turn of events, antipsychiatry was blamed for the destruction of the family and the rise of a therapeutic culture, and was ultimately reviled for its rejection of the medical reality of mental illness. In the course of the 1960s and through the 1970s, research focused on schizophrenia and its etiology. By the 1980s, deinstitutionalization was in place. Antipsychiatry was also criticized as the culprit for the homelessness crisis in the 1980s.

This chapter focuses on the history of race discrimination in Forrest County, Mississippi. The discussions include the early efforts of fifteen brave black men to overturn an illegal pattern of discrimination by a Forrest County registrar; and the establishment of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission on March 29, 1956, which gathered information on civil rights activists, real and imagined, investigated meetings and other activities, and made plans to subvert them.