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Using Charlotte, North Carolina, as a case study of the dynamics of racial change in the 'moderate' South, Davison Douglas analyzes the desegregation of the city's public schools from the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision through the early 1970s, when the city embarked upon the most ambitious school busing plan in the nation. In charting the path of racial change, Douglas considers the relative efficacy of the black community's use of public demonstrations and litigation to force desegregation. He also evaluates the role of the city's white business community, which was concerned with preserving Charlotte's image as a racially moderate city, in facilitating racial gains.

Charlotte's white leadership, anxious to avoid economically damaging racial conflict, engaged in early but decidedly token integration in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the black community's public protest and litigation efforts. The insistence in the late 1960s on widespread busing, however, posed integration demands of an entirely different magnitude. As Douglas shows, the city's white leaders initially resisted the call for busing but eventually relented because they recognized the importance of a stable school system to the city's continued prosperity. ... Read more

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In 1987 Judge Russell Clark mandated tax increases to help pay for improvements to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District in an effort to lure white students and quality teachers back to the inner-city district. Yet even after increasing employee salaries and constructing elaborate facilities at a cost of more than $2 billion, the district remained overwhelmingly segregated and student achievement remained far below national averages.

Just eight years later the U.S. Supreme Court began reversing these initiatives, signifying a major retreat from Brown v. Board of Education. In Kansas City, African American families opposed to the district court's efforts organized a takeover of the school board and requested that the court case be closed. Joshua Dunn argues that Judge Clark's ruling was not the result of tyrannical "judicial activism" but was rather the logical outcome of previous contradictory Supreme Court doctrines. High Court decisions, Dunn explains, necessarily limit the policy choices available to lower court judges, introducing complications the Supreme Court would not anticipate. He demonstrates that the Kansas City case is a model lesson for the types of problems that develop for lower courts in any area in which the Supreme Court attempts to create significant change. Dunn's exploration of this landmark case deepens our understanding of when courts can and cannot successfully create and manage public policy. ... Read more

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'The Law's Conscience' is a history of equity in Anglo-American jurisprudence from the inception of the chancellor's court in medieval England to the most recent civil rights and affirmative action decisions of the United States Supreme Court. ... Read more

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For over a century, the idea that African Americans are psychologically damaged has played an important role in discussions of race. In this provocative work, Daryl Michael Scott argues that damage imagery has been the product of liberals and conservatives, of racists and antiracists. While racial conservatives, often playing on white contempt for blacks, have sought to use findings of black pathology to justify exclusionary policies, racial liberals have used damage imagery primarily to promote policies of inclusion and rehabilitation.

In advancing his argument, Scott challenges some long-held beliefs about the history of damage imagery. He rediscovers the liberal impulses behind Stanley Elkins's Sambo hypothesis and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Negro Family and exposes the damage imagery in the work of Ralph Ellison, the leading anti-pathologist. He also corrects the view that the Chicago School depicted blacks as pathological products of matriarchy. New Negro experts such as Charles Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, he says, disdained sympathy-seeking and refrained from exploring individual pathology. Scott's reassessment of social science sheds new light on Brown v. Board of Education, revealing how experts reversed four decades of theory in order to represent segregation as inherently damaging to blacks.

In this controversial work, Scott warns the Left of the dangers in their recent rediscovery of damage imagery in an age of conservative reform. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A passionate and erudite work.
Mr Scott has demonstrated that the left and right have often distorted the African-Americans' humanity. This study serves to correct the position of Black folk and to return their humanity. Black folk are neitherpathological as agroup or helpless victims. Rather the African-Americanhas faced discrimination and continues to face discrimination. Yet thesolution to the African-Americans problems aren't exceptional, but ratherare the result of years of discrimination. The African-American responsehas been admirable considering the discrimination we have faced. We havebuilt our own institutions and thrived, irrespective of racism. Still agroup with such baggage can go so far--so quickly. However, we deserveneither contempt nor pity--just a fair shake.

Essential to the History of Racial Progress
Scott's book is a comprehensive and insightful overview of the story surrounding the Black psyche as it has been understood by those that create American race policy.It is an invaluable text to anyone seriouslyinterested in the intellectual history of Psychology, and/or race inAmerica.

A Big Disappointment
This author does a half... job at tearing down the accomplishments of social science - particularly sociology. He often fuses ideas of the individual (psychology) and the social reformers (I suppose hemeans sociologists). Moreover, while it appears that his sources areabundant his examinations at best are remedial. This work is the epitome ofthe kind of subjective methodology one can expect from scholars of history.I found his work to be completely bias and often times contradictory. ... Read more

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In 1942 Pauli Murray, a young black woman from North Carolina studying law at Howard University, visited a constitutional law class taught by Caroline Ware, one of the nation's leading historians. A friendship and a correspondence began, lasting until Murray's death in 1985. Ware, a Bostonian born in 1899, was a scholar, a leading consumer advocate, and a political activist. Murray, born in 1910, with no resources except her intelligence and determination, graduated from college at 16 and made her way to law school, where she organized student sit-ins to protest segregation. She pulled her friend Ware into this early civil rights activism. Their forty-year correspondence ranged widely over issues of race, politics, international affairs, and—for a difficult period in the 1950s—McCarthyism.

In time, Murray became a labor lawyer, a university professor, and the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Ware continued her work as a social historian and consumer advocate while developing an international career as a community development specialist. Their letters are products of high intelligence and a gift for writing, revealing portraits of their authors as well as the workings of an unusual female friendship. They also provide a wonderful channel into the social and political thought of the times, particularly regarding civil rights and women's rights. ... Read more

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Rebecca de Schweinitz offers a new perspective on the civil rights movement by bringing children and youth to the fore. In the first book to connect young people and shifting ideas about children and youth with the black freedom struggle, de Schweinitz explains how popular ideas about youth and young people themselves—both black and white—influenced the long history of the movement.

If We Could Change the World brings out the voices and experiences of participants who are rarely heard. Here, familiar events from the black freedom struggle are examined in new ways, and the explanations and motivations for getting involved and taking action are told, often in the words of young people themselves.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, de Schweinitz argues that examining historical constructions of childhood and the roles children have played in history changes the way one understands the past. With de Schweinitz's analysis, young people—elementary age, adolescent, and young adult—take their place as significant historical and political actors in the black freedom struggle. ... Read more

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In the American South at the turn of the twentieth century, the legal segregation of the races and psychological sciences focused on selfhood emerged simultaneously. The two developments presented conflicting views of human nature. American psychiatry and psychology were optimistic about personality growth guided by the new mental sciences. Segregation, in contrast, placed racial traits said to be natural and fixed at the forefront of identity. In a society built on racial differences, raising questions about human potential, as psychology did, was unsettling.

The introduction of psychological thinking into the Jim Crow South, however, produced neither a clear victory for racial equality nor a single-minded defense of traditional ways. Instead, professionals of both races treated the mind-set of segregation as a hazardous subject. Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South examines the tensions stirred by mental science and restrained by southern custom.

Anne Rose highlights the role of southern black intellectuals who embraced psychological theories as an instrument of reform; their white counterparts, who proved wary of examining the mind; and northerners eager to change the South by means of science. She argues that although psychology and psychiatry took root as academic disciplines, all these practitioners were reluctant to turn the sciences of the mind to the subject of race relations. ... Read more

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African American freedom is often defined in terms of emancipation and civil rights legislation, but it did not arrive with the stroke of a pen or the rap of a gavel. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

battling the plantation mentality
One of the best studies of the civil rights movement at a local level. Most engagingly argued. ... Read more

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Volume 10 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture combines two of the sections from the original edition, adding extensive updates and 53 entirely new articles. In the law section of this volume, 16 longer essays address broad concepts ranging from law schools to family law, from labor relations to school prayer. The 43 topical entries focus on specific legal cases and individuals, including historical legal professionals, parties from landmark cases, and even the fictional character Atticus Finch, highlighting the roles these individuals have played in shaping the identity of the region.

The politics section includes 34 essays on matters such as Reconstruction, social class and politics, and immigration policy. New essays reflect the changing nature of southern politics, away from the one-party system long known as the "solid South" to the lively two-party politics now in play in the region. Seventy shorter topical entries cover individual politicians, political thinkers, and activists who have made significant contributions to the shaping of southern politics. ... Read more

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In this fascinating study of race, politics, and economics in Mississippi, Chris Myers Asch tells the story of two extraordinary personalities--Fannie Lou Hamer and James O. Eastland--who represented deeply opposed sides of the civil rights movement. Both were from Sunflower County: Eastland was a wealthy white planter and one of the most powerful segregationists in the U.S. Senate, while Hamer, a sharecropper who grew up desperately poor just a few miles from the Eastland plantation, rose to become the spiritual leader of the Mississippi freedom struggle. Asch uses Hamer and Eastland's entwined histories, set against a backdrop of Sunflower County's rise and fall as a center of cotton agriculture, to explore the county's changing social landscape during the mid-twentieth century and its persistence today as a land separate and unequal. Asch, who spent nearly a decade in Mississippi as an educator, offers a fresh look at the South's troubled ties to the cotton industry, the long struggle for civil rights, and unrelenting social and economic injustice through the eyes of two of the era's most important and intriguing figures. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Impressive and moving
Review for the Senator and the Sharecropper

Chris Myers Asch's book "The Senator and the Sharecropper" came to me as a gift from my sister.I had no idea what a gift it would be.
Asch took me, as the reader, on an unflinchingly honest journey into the depths of Mississippi, the Civil Rights era, and the United States.What is remarkable about this book is that Asch uses two key historical figures, who are living two very disparate lives, and illustrates how their presence impacted each other and those around them.
The story of Senator James Eastland and Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer is told not through the dry prism of historical facts and numbers.Make no mistake, Asch provides thorough and well-researched data explaining the state of the country at the time.Rather, the stories of both protagonists are told through the personal traits that make Eastland and Hamer who they were.The author is able to do this by talking to those who knew either Eastland, or Hamer, or both.The history is a mere backdrop. The revelation of each individual brings the story to life.
Asch's immersion in the historical fabric of the state is evident in this story, after he spent many years in Mississippi as a volunteer (first with Teach for America, and later as co-founder of The Freedom Project).His experience offers an authenticity not usually found in historical books.
This is a well-written, comprehensive look at a Senator and a Sharecropper who made an indelible mark on United States history.For anyone looking to learn about a part of history in a part of the country that they think they know, this book will bring you the gift of a new perspective.

Great book on the Delta, on civil rights, on America
This is one amazingly good book. If you have any interest in American history, the South, race relations, racism, sharecropper, Mississippi, African American history, this is a great book to read.

I have an interest in southern history and in the history of Mississippi (visited there twice, which is a lot for a liberal northerner) and there was so much I learned from Chris Myers Asch.First, I was shocked to learn that the Mississippi Delta, home of the blues, home of huge cotton plantations, did not have much of a slave history.Why? Because the land was too forbidding until much later after the end of enslavement. It's so easy to read about sharecroppers picking cotton on plantations and to think, "Oh, these must be old plantations from the days of slavery." Wrong.

The sections on James Eastland presiding over the Senate Judiciary Committee were highly informative and infuriating (no fault of the author). Anyone who wants to think that racism, direct, blatant, evil racism, was somehow a "blot" on American history--well read about Eastland heading one of the most powerful committees in Congress and you will see that there was nothing "exceptional" about racism in American history.It cut right through the center of American history. To think that my father and other Negro (yes, I'll go old-fashioned here) veterans of World War II came home from serving their country and faced a man like James Eastland as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee--I just find that shameful.

Chris Myers Ash does a great job of linking cotton to the world economy.He also does a great job of outlining the massive crop subsidies Eastland and the cotton planters got from the U.S. Government. These folks were the worst type of citizens.They fought like hell to get major subsidies for themselves. They fought like hell to prevent colored folks from getting anything. And yet there is a paternalistic worldview at work and Myers Ash does a great job of explaining that view.I was perhaps most taken with the fact that he interviewed Eastland's children. One of his daughters tells Myers Asch that her father never had to explicitly speak about the inferiority of black people. It was just so much a part of her world that it was assumed.They didn't have to talk about it.Eastland's son makes a great appearance in the book and he talks about how liberating it was to escape the racism of his father's generation.

As a Democrat I have to point out another aspect of James Eastland's political maneuvers that Myers Asch picks up on so well.At some point in the 50's or so, Eastland cleans up his racist language. He opposes every piece of civil rights legislation, harasses and disrespects every civil rights advocate who comes to speak before the Judiciary Committee and yet he stops explicitly calling blacks inferior.I read this and I thought, well the modern Republican Party sure figured out how insidiously slick this maneuver was.The Republicans from Reagan on (I'll do something strange and give George W. some credit for breaking this pattern) attacked black folks in all kinds of ways without every explicitly calling us names. But every one and every white southern voter knew exactly who the Republicans were speaking of when they let loose their attacks on welfare recipients and "criminals."

The sections on Mrs. Hamer as quite good as well.Mrs. Hamer really became an icon to the movement, but Myers Asch captures the real pain and agony and sense of defeat that she suffered, especially in her last agonizing days of cancer.Though Mississippi did see change as a result of the civil rights movement, the change never quite addressed the depth of the poverty and powerlessness of the descendants of the sharecroppers.Mrs. Hamer wanted to really deeply address these inequities. She was stymied in the political system, in her education fight and in her heart-breaking attempt to create a cooperative called Freedom Farm. It's all here captured brilliantly and poignantly by Myers Asch.

Final word, Asch is bold for a white writer in that he implicates African Americans in their own oppression. He shows how a sharecropper mentality definitely hindered efforts of black people to organize, start businesses and to develop into full citizens in the aftermath of the movement. I am African American and I found Myers Asch thoroughly persuasive (not to mention courageous) here.If we are to really deeply heal the racial divide, it will require courage and imagination of the type Myers Asch displays in this book.

Readers should know: Myers Asch was a member of Teach for America and he lived in Sunflower County for a number of years, and still has friends and former students down there.All told an excellent effort. I found this to be an indispensable book in helping me make sense of an important era of American history.

I have met the author, and he is the real deal. In fact, Myers Asch is currently at work on starting a United States Public Service Academy as a counterpart to the military academies, this one focused on civilian and public sector service. In my estimation, he has the wisdom and understanding of American history that befits such an undertaking.

Wow.
I am not a reader of History. Correction... I WAS not a reader of History. I dare say that Chris Myers Asch has made me one. His exceptional book, "The Senator and the Sharecropper," leaves me wanting to learn so much more about this rich and tragic land called the Mississippi Delta -- indeed, about America.

I admit with some reticence that themere mention of History has always left me bleary-eyed, conjuring recollections of random date memorization and arcane facts. But Asch breathes life into it. As I read "The Senator and the Sharecropper," I felt as though I were seated at the knee of a grandfatherly raconteur telling me tales of yesteryear.

His writing has the easy gait of a natural storyteller. His economy of wordsbelies a depth and complexity to his thoughts. How joyous to witness a gifted writer tackle such fascinating subjects with such passion.

Asch resists the easy moralizing that has always frustrated me about grade-school History. As we immerse ourselves in the worlds of Senator Eastland and Ms. Hamer, we realize how much they were each products of their time and circumstances, and how inextricably linked they were to the land. "The Senator and the Sharecropper" challenges our preconceptions and invites us to explore the remarkably disparate lives of two contemporaries. We emerge with a much richer understanding ofa complex land and people.

And I emerged with a newfound desire to explore History!

A remakable example of parallel lives
This is an extraordinary books which charts the contrasting life experiences of Senator James Eastland and Fanny Lou Hamer.Eastland was definitely a product of privilege who managed throughout his life to make the most of a comfortable existence.As a leading recipient of federal agricultural largess he was certainly a proponent of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor. This arrangement was part of the natural order of things in his mind and a way of life which supported a deeply ingrained racist view of the world, down to supporting the Ian Smith regime of Rhodesia, all in the name of Eastland's view of "freedom."

Fanny Lou Hamer had a different background all together.The one advantage she acquired, the job of time keeper at a local plantation in Sunflower country, was due to the fact that she was literate. She lost this job when she attempted to register to vote. For attending a Civil Rights conference, Mrs. Hamer was beaten, along with other women, nearly to death. Despite these horrors, she clung to a vision of racial equality and racial harmony which though difficult to realize in her own and possibly even our own time are inspiring just the same.

Chris Asch has written a history of an aspect of the Civil Rights era which probably is unique in its scope.To take two polar opposites and contrast their response to the social changes is probably one of the most original approaches to the writing of history.However Asch's book also recalls the author Plutarch in his parallel lives (however these figures are not as closely connected as Eastland and Hamer).In this work, I believe that Asch comes close to revealing great truths about the human spirit. Eastland gradually became more and more fanatical, Hamer sought to help the widest scope of poor and disadvantaged members of society.Eastland sought to undermine the advances of the civil rights movement, preferring a more sharply hierarchical society, Hamer sought to expand them for all.

This book does contain a number of horrific passages. Early on there is a description of a lynching carried out by Eastland's father.It is murderous and sadistic.Had any person carried out a similar act today, he would have been locked up in a home for the criminally insane.While this section of the book is disturbing, it is history and it explains a great deal, both about Eastland and his background. It also underscores the greatness of a woman such as Hamer. For someone to come from such a cruel, meanspirited and wicked environment and to emerge with her generosity of spirit speaks volumes of her fundamental greatness of spirit and kindness. It is clear when one concludes reading "The Senator and the Sharecropper" who is the greater person.

The Senator and the Sharecropper
This book tells the story of two very different people, both residents of Sunflower County, Mississippi from the early 1900s to the turbulent decades of the 1940s, 50s and 60. If you like history, you'll love the book; it is factual, well researched and full of meaningful anecdotes. If you don't like history, you'll love this book, too. It is great fun to read because Myers includes reflections about his personal experiences as a teacher in Sunflower County.

At first, the two protagonists seem to be a study in contrasts. James Eastland was a wealthy planter and segregationist U.S. Senator with an enormous influence in Washington. Fanny Lou Hamer, the daughter of a poor black sharecropper, became a leading figure in the civil rights movement. Surprisingly, Myers finds common ground. He treats both subjects with sensitivity.

It's nice to read a history from someone who unabashedly says in the first sentence of the preface: "I love Sunflower County, Mississippi." As you read this book, you'll see why and you'll gain an understanding of the problems, prospects and beauty of this corner of the world.

... Read more