River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865–1954

Notes

231 Notes The following abbreviations are used throughout the notes: AA Afro-American ADW Atlanta Daily World BTV Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South Collection, Special Collections, Duke University CA Commercial Appeal CD Chicago Defender Kennedy Library John F. Kennedy Library, Boston mfm microfilm MPS Memphis Press-Scimitar MSC Memphis–Shelby County Room, Memphis–Shelby County Public Library and Information Center MT Memphis Triangle MW Memphis World NYAN New York Amsterdam News NYT New York Times PC Pittsburgh Courier SC Special Collections Department, Ned McWherter Library, University of Memphis SoHP Southern oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill TSD Tri-State Defender UMoH University of Memphis oral History Research office Collection WTHSP West Tennessee Historical Society Papers Introduction 1. I interchangeably use electoral action/activity and political action/ activity to refer to formal politics throughout this book. 232 Notes to Pages 3–4 2. The Peripheral South is defined as Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia and the Deep South as Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Henry Lee Moon, Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), 176; Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: oxford University Press, 2004), 103. 3. Scholarship that looks at southern black political mobilization from the late nineteenth century until 1944 includes Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (1932; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1963); Ralph J. Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, ed. Dewey W. Grantham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas, 2nd ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003); Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights; Paul ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); Manfred Berg, Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the African American Right to Vote (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); and Lorraine Gates Schuyler, The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 4. Michael J. Klarman, “The White Primary Rulings: A Case Study in the Consequences of Supreme Court Decisionmaking,” Florida State University Law Review 29, no. 55 (Fall 2001): 55–107; Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 18. For the post–World War II years, civil rights historiography primarily emphasizes legal and direct action and, increasingly, labor activism. other scholarly works that examine sustained black political mobilization in the urban South include Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), and Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003); Kathryn L. Nasstrom, “Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women’s Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta , Georgia,” Gender and History 11, no. 1 (April 1999): 113–44; J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002); and Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 5. Matthews and Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics, 176; Notes to Pages 4–8 233 Julian Bond, “MLK in Memphis” (paper presented as part of the University of Virginia’s Civil Rights South bus tour program, Memphis, 13 March 2010, copy in author’s possession), 19. To understand southern black politics in the Jim Crow era, it is crucial to delve into the immense body of work written by social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s. Hundreds of studies speculated on the impact of increased black political activity following the Smith v. Allwright (1944) decision. In addition to Matthews and Prothro’s Negroes and the New Southern Politics, see Hugh D. Price, The Negro in Florida Politics: A Chapter of Florida History...