Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma by Karlyn Forner (review)

Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma is a dynamic contribution to the history of the African American working class. Karlyn Forner offers a local study of Selma, Alabama, as a window into the convoluted relationship between economics and politics in the racially divided twentieth-century South. In this study, the author examines the significance of African American labor while highlighting how working-class African Americans experienced both empowerment and oppression.

Systematic racial segregation became the springboard for the economic oppression, political exclusion, and social marginalization that defined the African American experience throughout the south in the twentieth century. Selma was no exception. Forner sheds light on the white-supremacist power structure at the core of Southern politics. The author reveals the complex nature of Selma's race relations by juxtaposing the story of the local police captain running for sheriff and campaigning at a 1958 Ku Klux Klan rally with a discussion of the vital role African American labor played in the evolution of the city's cotton industry. White planters relied on Black labor, almost exclusively, to support the cotton industry, yet Black workers were relegated to the lowest rungs of the workforce with regard to income and position. Forner argues that Selma's history of racism and racial segregation highlights the contradictory nature of twentieth-century southern society: white supremacy inadvertently supported by Black labor. Laurie B. Green raises a similar point in Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle, in which she discusses Memphis, Tennessee, factory workers, the driving force of local industry, who were forced to use a bucket and dipper to drink rather than the water fountains reserved for white workers. Forner asserts that Selma's race relations were complicated by the fact that White Southerners relied on the Black working class to provide the labor that supported their economic upward mobility and therefore their ability to gain and maintain political power.

The author explores the paternalism inherent in the intertwined relationship between Black labor and white supremacy. As we know, in response to systematic racism and racial segregation, African Americans developed their own spaces and resources such as local grocery stories, funeral homes, and mutual aid funds. While it is clear that Black Selmians lived on the margins of Southern society, Forner's work draws attention to the critical nature of their contributions to the local economy and the measures white citizens employed to secure traditional race relations. The author highlights the relationship between the president of the Selma Chamber of Commerce and his stable hand in the early 1900s in which the former provided secondhand suits and financial assistance to his Black employee. On the surface this relationship appears to be a wonderfully atypical experience for African Americans in the segregated South. However, Forner offers this example to demonstrate the perpetuation of a paternalistic attitude toward African Americans where they were offered support to live better but only within the parameters of what white Selmians deemed appropriate for them. Further, that support often came at the cost of their dignity and autonomy.

While Forner draws attention to the influence of Selma's Black working class, she also reminds us of the obstacles they faced in their efforts to organize in defense of themselves. The author highlights the emergence of Alabama's Sharecroppers Union in the mid-1930s and the strike initiated by its Dallas County members in 1935. African American sharecroppers banded together to challenge the racist system that kept them in a cycle of debt and poverty. Unionized sharecroppers experienced violent resistance at the hands of white Selmians, including local law enforcement and white landlords. This violence revealed a staunch commitment to the traditional racial order that kept African Americans subservient and their labor at the foundation of white supremacy. Chana Kai Lee (For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer) explores this opposition to African American freedom through her retelling...