Black Victory: the Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas.Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas. By Darlene Clark Hine. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press The University of Missouri Press, founded in 1958, is a university press that is part of the University of Missouri System. External link
, c. 1979, 2003. Pp. xii, 283. $34.95, ISBN ISBN abbr. International Standard Book Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISBN n abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m 0-8262-1462-2.) The white primary of the Progressive era was the most effective of the southern disfranchisement The removal of the rights and privileges inherent in an association with a group; the taking away of the rights of a free citizen, especially the right to vote. Sometimes called disenfranchisement. subterfuges. Texas, inspired by the Ku Klux Klan Ku Klux Klan (k  ' klŭks klăn), designation mainly given to two distinct secret societies that played a part in American history, although other less important groups have also used , codified the racist rule in 1923, leaving itself open to
legal attack. It took two decades of arduous legal challenges by the
NAACP NAACPin full National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Oldest and largest U.S. civil rights organization. It was founded in 1909 to secure political, educational, social, and economic equality for African Americans; W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. , as well as activist black communities in El Paso and Houston, to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the whites-only Texas Democratic primary. Smith v. Allwright Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944), was an important decision of the United States Supreme Court with regard to voting rights and, by extension, racial desegregation. Lonnie E. (1944) doomed all the South's white primaries and stands as a decision that launched the modern civil rights movement. This second edition of Darlene Clark Hine's history of the white primary in Texas includes new essays by Steven F. Lawson and Merline Pitre, as well as one by Hine herself. Lawson's essay reminds the reader that Hine's work was a breakthrough in 1979, given her emphasis on the black freedom movement within one state and her illumination of a case that changed the political map of the country in the 1940s and 1950s. The essay is an excellent bibliographic update of relevant books and articles published since 1979. Lawson also observes that the voting ordeal was hardly over in 1944, since two-thirds of southern blacks still could not vote in 1960. It took the Voting Rights Act Voting Rights Act Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1965 to ensure the voting rights of African Americans. Though the Constitution's 15th Amendment (passed 1870) had guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” of 1965 and court-ordered single-member legislative and city council districts to bring true enforcement of black suffrage. Moreover, few anticipated that enfranchisement The act of making free (as from Slavery); giving a franchise or freedom to; investiture with privileges or capacities of freedom, or municipal or political liberty. Conferring the privilege of voting upon classes of persons who have not previously possessed such. of black southerners would lead to massive counter-mobilization by southern whites, largely in the Republican Party. The dream of a liberal South remains only a dream. Pitre also regards Hine's book as an inspirational beginning for examining black leadership in the struggle to regain the ballot but cites her own book about Lulu B. White, published twenty years after Hine's, to depict the vital organizational role of black females in Houston's early civil rights movement. These women had to take on gender discrimination by black and white males as well as racism. Pitre also shows how other interest groups, such as organized labor, were part of the movement. In addition, Pitre's essay and Hine's own brief one discuss other post-1979 scholarship on race, gender, and class. Several errors are not corrected in the new edition. It should have been specified, for instance, that legal research noting that only two Democratic nominees in Texas were defeated between 1859 and 1941 apparently refers only to campaigns for the U.S. Senate, or at least that is its best claim to accuracy. A defensive Democrat's 1930 quote (on page 147) should read, "... negroes will not be allowed to vote in our primaries." One original reviewer--Neil Sapper sapper Military engineer. The name is derived from the French word sappe (“trench”), which became connected with military engineering in the 17th century, when attackers dug covered trenches to approach the walls of a besieged fort and also undermined the walls in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly--observed that Hine did not discover Texas Tech dissertations on black Texans, and none of the three new essays corrects that lapse. Still, Hine expresses the hope that the three essays will "extend the shelf life of Black Victory (p. 5)," and, indeed, this is a worthy new edition. University of Texas, Arlington GEORGE N. GREEN |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion