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This chapter looks at Du Bois's efforts to correct distorted understandings of Reconstruction, by focusing on African Americans' role in abolition and by redefining the post-war era as the nation's only genuine experiment in democracy. It is argued that examining the connections Du Bois draws between historical consciousness and the disappointments of the post-Reconstruction period enlarges our understanding of the disappointments that followed the civil rights era or “second reconstruction.” Although Du Bois does not expressly advocate reparations for the former slaves and their descendants, the chapter turns to The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction to suggest the possibilities opened up by a shift from a political language of formal equality, which is premised on the erasure of the past, to a language that affirms and refigures the past as a vehicle for social change. It asks how reparations might constitute such a language.

We have come to realize that the exclusion and marginalization of the blacks in the United States illustrates a dynamic wherein this same group of people simultaneously experience the opposite — a dominant order and a privileged community as demonstrated by political deprivation and dominance in popular culture. As it can be observed that there is an existing relationship among political events that involve African American elected officials, interest groups, protest organizations, mobilization, and religious media, the author attempts to look into the linkage of popular culture, specifically black popular culture, to both formal and informal politics. In this book, the author also looks into the implications of viewing culture as politics during the post-civil rights era.

This chapter documents the life and career of the Charleston politician Joseph P. Riley Jr.—also known as “Little Black Joe”—so-called by his fellow politicians because of his comparatively more liberal views on racism. Over time, Riley's commitment to affirmative action would reshape local government, bringing more minorities and women into executive and administrative positions than most had dared to dream in the civil rights era. This dedication to multiculturalism and affirmative action was sincere, but Riley was no civil rights activist. Moreover, his life and career suggest that the popular narrative of the Republican revolution conquering the American South in the post-civil rights era does not capture the whole story of the region's political trajectory. By exploring Riley's life, the chapter shows an alternative history of white southerners' evolution from the era of segregation and black political disfranchisement through the civil rights movement and beyond.

In the preceding chapters we described the period between the Civil War and World War I as “first civil rights era.” We explored how Republicans in Congress, aided by the political activism of black citizens in the states, established an inclusive, multiracial democracy in the United States. More specifically, we illustrated how and why the GOP created and enforced legal reforms extending freedom, citizenship, and voting rights to former slaves—and how freedmen, in turn, acted on those rights by voting, running for office, and demanding their fair share of government aid. Beginning in the 1870s, however, the GOP’s political weakness throughout the South, as well as the shifting political preferences of Northern voters, allowed the white majority in the former Confederacy to degrade and ignore these reforms in ways specifically designed to deprive African Americans of their rights. In sum, we presented an explicitly Congress-centered perspective by exploring the Republican Party’s role in undermining the multiracial democracy it had helped to build. We set out alternative paths that might have been taken to demonstrate that the legal regime segregation, disenfranchisement, and systematic racial violence were based on was not inevitable. Legislators chose to enact policies that made it possible.

This concluding chapter argues that Charleston's problem was a reflection of the great paradox that defined the post-civil rights era, the increasing opportunity and even affluence of middle-and upper-income African Americans juxtaposed with the persistent poverty of African Americans in urban and rural areas like Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry. Many Charlestonians—white and black, liberal and conservative, men and women—believed that the civil rights movement changed the city for the better, but they also agreed that the city did not change nearly enough. In the post-civil rights era, economic inequality grew more salient, buttressing stubbornly resilient institutional racism to block further change.

This chapter analyzes the specific representation of Barack Obama as a fictional character in Alice Randall’s 2009 novel Rebel Yell. This chapter argues that Randall’s fictional representation of Obama as a post-racial figure or “unhyphenated man”—meaning that he is not burdened by double consciousness—embraces his election as a moment of transformative change. Randall’s novel utilizes Obama as an almost mythological character—he is, in fact, never named in the novel—to imagine a racial self-consciousness detached from structural legacies of slavery and Jim Crow segregation and absent, as well, from the proscriptive burdens of both the Civil Rights and post-civil rights eras. The chapter shows how Randall’s refusal of a racialized present echoes concepts such as post-Blackness and post-soul aesthetics.

In this chapter, the theory of relative advantage is examined using detailed case study analyses. Through state newspapers of record, archival materials, and personal interviews, the history and development of the Republican state parties in Georgia and Virginia during the pivotal period leading up to, and during, the civil rights era are documented. The case studies describe the evolution of GOP development in these two states, including leadership, issue positions and platforms, congruity with the national party, and the specific coalitions that comprised party membership over time. The descriptive results reported in this chapter provide a great deal of support for the theory of relative advantage, given historical evidence pointing to the fact that both white conservatives and blacks were acting politically in their own self-interests.

Civil rights returned to dominate the nation's domestic agenda with Brown v. Board of Education. Although not directly involved in that case, the 1866 Act furnished part of the background for this dramatic expansion of constitutional prohibitions against racial discrimination. In particular, the act offers an alternative basis for the decision in the companion case to Brown, Bolling v. Sharpe. That opinion applied to the federal government under the Fifth Amendment the same principles against racial discrimination applicable to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment. This result, although politically compelled, involved awkward reasoning that read the later amendment back into the earlier one, a step that can more easily be accommodated by the broad coverage of the 1866 Act. The scope of that coverage figured in another decision at the end of the Civil Rights Era, Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., which interpreted the act to prohibit private discrimination. This result also had political support, in the form of modern civil rights legislation enacted under the Commerce Clause, but it served to solidify prohibitions against racial discrimination without regard to the intricacies of the state action doctrine. In doing so, it also revived the 1866 Act as a source of modern civil rights claims, chiefly in the field of employment discrimination law.

This chapter outlines the paradox of the lessening of overt racial discrimination and the empirical realities of an increase in economic and social inequality. The chapter sketches out the beginnings of the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the presidency and politics since 1968.

This chapter explores the dilemmas faced by southern lawmen in communities like Charleston, in order to understand better the ways the civil rights movement succeeded and failed in altering power relations in the South. It focuses in particular on the story of Reuben Greenberg, the first black and first Jewish police chief in Charleston's history. As the Charleston police chief for nearly a quarter of a century, Greenberg came to embody both the promise and the problems of policing the South in the post-civil rights era. Greenberg's professionalism and racial identity shielded him from the kinds of allegations that had historically plagued southern lawmen, but he worked in a political environment in which coded rhetoric linked “law and order” with control and containment of minority communities.

This introductory chapter discusses how there was a racial classification scheme in America's first census (1790), as there was in the next twenty-two censuses, up until the present. Though the classification was altered in response to the political and intellectual fashions of the day, the underlying definition of America's racial hierarchy never escaped its origins in the eighteenth-century. Even the enormous changing of the racial landscape in the civil rights era failed to challenge a dysfunctional classification, though it did bend it to new purposes. Nor has the demographic upheaval of the present time led to much fresh thinking about how to measure America. The chapter contends that twenty-first-century statistics should not be governed by race thinking that is two and a half centuries out of date.

This chapter examines the civil rights era at Cornell University, with particular emphasis on the issue of race. The civil rights era at Cornell began in April 1961, when Martin Luther King Jr. urged white Cornell students to join the “freedom riders” that summer at sit-ins at segregated facilities in Mississippi. A month after King's visit, a substantial number of Cornell students joined forces with students from Ithaca College and Ithaca High School to picket the Greyhound Bus terminal, demanding that the company desegregate its facilities in the South. Cornell's new president, James Perkins, believed that the school should involve itself in the civil rights struggle. This chapter discusses the ways Cornell showed its concern with race and addressed the issue of racism, such as increasing the number of Afro-American graduate students. It considers the racial tension at Cornell and how James Turner, director of the Afro-American Studies Center and an associate professor of Afro-American studies, helped usher in a new era of racial politics at the university.

This chapter traces the U.S. Supreme Court’s mnemonic jurisprudence from Brown v. Board of Education to the present. It shows how, despite occasional instances of redemptive memory—especially during the Warren Court era (1953–1969)—the parenthetical mode of memory continued to predominate. The chapter shows how debates over the legacy of slavery and segregation gradually shifted into debates over the legacy of Brown. Anti-classification readings of Brown have been underwritten by narratives of parenthetical memory, whereas anti-subordination readings of Brown have relied on narratives of redemptive memory. The debates have been most poignant in the context of affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies for de jure or de facto race discrimination. In recent years, the parenthetical mode has once again gained the upper hand.

Published in 1975, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora emerged amid the onset of post-civil rights era politics of black respectability and neoliberal ideology and policies that rendered black communities and bodies paradoxically more “public” and “private.” This essay posits Jones’s novel as a corrective to these ideological and existential binds. Thinking through psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia, queer of color theories of identity formation, and the work of black feminist scholars, this essay explores how Jones draws on the blues aesthetic to fashion a novel that accounts for the process of racial subject formation at the intersections of buried social memory and ongoing practices of racialization and underscores the individualistic contours of racial identity without stabilizing hegemonic discourses of racial ideology.

During a luncheon that was sponsored by the Negro Trade Union Leadership Council and the Jewish Labor Committee in April 1969, Andrew J. Biemiller — legislative director of the AFL-CIO — expressed that the coalition of the labor, liberal, and civil rights had to be strengthened in order to be able to deal with the fact that most blacks were usually excluded from jobs in building construction trades. While the previous secretary of labor, Willard Wirtz, played no small part in advocating programs for union leaders that would maintain the coalition, President Nixon's secretary of labor — George Shultz — did not foster confidence in union efforts at eliminating segregation in construction sites. The book provides a history of the civil rights issue, especially during the civil rights era, and particularly in the North and in the West.

This chapter argues that it is historically significant that droves of whites are willing to embrace a black presidential candidate. Indeed, forty years ago, it would have been impossible for a black politician to become a viable presidential contender as the United States entered the racially turbulent summer of 1967 and the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner disturbed conventional racial norms by portraying a black doctor (played by Sidney Poitier) dating a white woman (Joanna Drayton). Nothing black candidates could have done or said would have prevented them from being excluded on the basis of the color of their skin. The fact that this is no longer true is a sign of some (admittedly slow) racial progress more than fifty years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But this chapter maintains that there are various reasons not to become overly excited about Obama’s cross-racial appeal from a racial justice perspective.