In this Book
- After Freedom Summer: How Race Realigned Mississippi Politics, 1965-1986
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: University Press of Florida
No one disagrees that 1964--Freedom Summer--forever changed the political landscape of Mississippi. How those changes played out is the subject of Chris Danielson’s fascinating new book, After Freedom Summer.
Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, black voter participation in Mississippi was practically zero. After twenty years, black candidates had made a number of electoral gains. Simultaneously, white resistance had manifested itself in growing Republican dominance of the state.
Danielson demonstrates how race--not class or economics--was the dominant factor in white Mississippi voters' partisan realignment, even as he reveals why class and economics played a role in the tensions between the national NAACP and the local Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (an offshoot of SNCC) that limited black electoral gains.
Using an impressive array of newspaper articles, legal cases, interviews, and personal papers, Danielson's work helps fill a growing lacuna in the study of post-civil rights politics in the South.
Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- p. ix
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-xii
- Introduction
- pp. 1-6
- 4. Fused but Not Healed
- pp. 79-108
- 8. City Wards and Jacksonian Democracy
- pp. 171-190
- Bibliography
- pp. 271-278