Making Race, Making Power: North Carolina's Road to Disfranchisement

Introduction

Introduction The U.S. civil rights movement is among the most-studied and best-understood political movements, as scholars have tried to learn how a seemingly powerless group mobilized to challenge racial segregation and retrieve a most fundamental right, the right to vote. It is curious, then, that we know comparatively less about the collective mobilization to implement disfranchisement and segregation in the South than we know about the social movement to end them. It may seem odd to center attention on how powerful southern whites collectively mobilized to disfranchise poor and powerless southern blacks in the late nineteenth century.To many,the story of southern politics may seem so obvious that it hardly needs explaining.Accounts of late-nineteenth-century southern politics, as in many political narratives, often make use of a contest model that explains outcomes in terms of institutional position,economic resources, or numbers of voters,1 rather than in terms of processes involving the collective mobilization of power.These accounts tend to assume the preexistence of categorical interests that array themselves into clear battle lines: white versus black; landlord versus tenant; Democrat versus Republican . In these contests, the eventual victories of southern whites, landlords, and Democrats in imposing a one-party racial caste system look easily predictable , in retrospect, a result of the apparent deployment of overwhelming power of one group over another. That these clear victories generally did not come until the 1890s and early 1900s,long after the end of Reconstruction—long after white Democrats had regained control over southern state governments—raises interesting questions . Why did it take so long? Why did the dominant race, class, and party 2 Introduction fail to fully impose formal disfranchisement and segregation earlier, after regaining control of state governments at the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s? Why were blacks allowed to vote at a rate of greater than 60 percent through the 1880s and better than 40 percent in 1892 even as they challenged elite white rule? This book’s answer to such questions is that white Democratic elites in North Carolina (and to some extent elsewhere in the South) were initially divided with respect to political motivations and strategies. Gaining and maintaining power under changed and changing postwar conditions was no simple task, no simple product of clearly delineated class, race, or even partisan interests. Elites had to adapt their methods of organizing political support as well as their methods of demobilizing opponents. These adaptations in elite political mobilization strategies developed only in opposition to the surprisingly powerful and innovative challenges of blacks and Populists,even as Democrats sometimes learned from and mimicked them. Disfranchisement came “late” in part because the lines of battle and even the goals were initially unclear. The paths to political power would have to be reconstructed on new terrain. That reconstruction required new ways of collectively mobilizing political support not only by southern insurgents but by southern elites as well.2 If we put the problematic of mobilization at the center of the analysis of southern disfranchisement we learn new things about southern history. Examining how elites, not just challengers, collectively organize is central. To get the full benefit of the insights from previous civil rights–based and other mobilization studies we must go beyond them to focus on elite collective action and its interaction with challengers. In attempting to create power in the course of electoral, and later, disfranchisement campaigns, white Democratic elites faced collective action problems much like those of insurgent black Republicans and Populists. Their eventual victories, the adoption and implementation of legal disfranchisement and segregation, resulted not merely from the deployment but from the making of power. This study analyzes southern elites as power makers rather than as mere power holders. By implication, the power of elites (as well as the insurgents) can be understood as a consequence of collective action rather than of mere institutional position or control of resources. The payoffs from focusing on mobilization extend beyond answering questions about how southern disfranchisement came about when it did, beyond new insights into southern history. For if southern elites faced real collective action problems,if they could not simply deploy their class or race (or even partisan) power to carry the day, then analytic conceptions of class, Introduction 3 race, and gender must be more fluid and relational than fixed and categorical ; their political salience must be created and can be done...