After Freedom Summer: How Race Realigned Mississippi Politics, 1965–1986 (New Perspectives on the History of the South)

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“A brilliant history of black politics and white resistance in post-civil rights era Mississippi. Danielson’s work helps to fill the yawning gap in the black politics historiography between the Black Power movement and up to date black politics. Additionally, he makes a critical contribution to the literature of the racial realignment of the two major political parties. A will have to-read!”–G. Derek Musgrove, University of the District of Columbia

“A sobering account of what happened after the singing and marching stopped. Danielson’s masterful analysis of Mississippi’s racially divided electorate proves that, in spite of the election of hundreds of blacks to public office, whites still hold all of the levels of political power.”–John Dittmer, creator of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi

No one disagrees that 1964–Freedom Summer–eternally 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 used to be practically zero. After twenty years, black candidates had made numerous electoral gains. Concurrently, white resistance had manifested itself in growing Republican dominance of the state.
    
Danielson demonstrates how race–not class or economics–used to be the dominant factor in white Mississippi voters’ partisan realignment, at the same time 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.

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