One of the most significant events in the struggle for black civil rights in America was the integration in 1957 of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation was unconstitutional. The South's campaign of massive resistance against this ruling culminated in a showdown at Little Rock's Central High School, where President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect nine black students as they entered the school. Although numerous studies have analyzed the Little Rock school crisis from a variety of perspectives, one striking omission in existing accounts is the role played by local black activists who were at the very center of events. This is the first book to contextualize the events in Little Rock within the unfolding struggle for black rights at local, state, regional, and national levels between 1940 and 1970. Early civil-rights scholarship focused almost exclusively on the role played by national civil rights organizations between 1955 and 1965. John Kirk argues that only by understanding the groundwork laid by black activists at the grassroots level in the 1940s and 1950s can we fully understand the significance of later protests. Moreover, Kirk shows that local-level black activists and black organizations were not homogeneous, but differed significantly in their goals and strategies, thereby adding a multi-dimensional facet to a complex struggle that was more than just white against black. Drawing upon oral history interviews and new material garnered from activists' privately-owned collections, as well as extensive documentation from local, state, regional, and national public archives, Redefining the Color Line charts new territory in the study of the Little Rock school crisis and forces a reevaluation of that familiar event and its place in the history of the civil rights struggle.

“The first work on foreign officers in the U.S. Colored Troops deals extensively with the relationship between black soldiers and white officers in these units... An important contribution to the history of the Civil War and the issue of ‘what they fought for,’ of the political and ideological stance of German ethnics, and of the history of black Americans in the era of emancipation.”—Walter D. Kamphoefner, Texas A&M University While the experiences of ethnic minorities in the Civil War have received increased attention in recent decades, the varied and not always easy relations between immigrants and African-Americans participating in the struggle have attracted scant notice. This study explores the motivations of German-speaking immigrants in the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) and the sometimes hostile, sometimes sympathetic reactions of their American comrades and enemies in the conflict. Some immigrants were ardent abolitionists, others just color-blind enough to accept African-Americans as their new fellow countrymen, and still others adopted racist views. The story of German officers in the USCT is an important facet of the history of race relations between immigrants and African-Americans in the 19th century. Apart from explaining how many German-Americans reflected on issues such as emancipation or the Union, Öfele also raises contemporary questions about national and ethnic identity and assimilation of minorities in white societies. The USCT substantially contributed to many Union victories and helped shape relationships between whites and blacks in the army for many decades to come. It also offered new possibilities for advancement for foreigners who, owing to nativist tensions, were often barred from promotion in the volunteer forces. Drawing mainly on primary sources and personal documents including letters, diaries, memoirs, and military service and pension records, Öfele provides a new perspective on the role of German-Americans in the Civil War and the reasons for and consequences of their decision to join the minority corps of the Union Army. Martin Öfele is assistant professor of American history at the University of Munich and the author of four books on the U.S. Civil War published in Germany.

During the 1930s and 1940s, when America had little interest in addressing racial inequality, Luther P. Jackson became a loading voice in the struggle for racial Justice. This biography tells the story of the professor and political activist who cajoled, implored, and lobbied black Virginians to vote - a man who fervently believed that education was at the core of the search for social change. Long before the sit-Ins and freedom marches of the 1960s, Jackson strove to erase the assumptions of racial inferiority that infected African Americans. Understanding that blacks had to change their minds before they could change their world, he set out to make people vote conscious. Descended from ex-slaves, Jackson was born in 1892, attended school in Lexington, Kentucky, and received bachelor's and master's degrees from Fisk University in Tennessee and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Petersburg. Convinced that teachers could sow the seeds of racial equality, he mobilized them along with their students and families. By publishing, organizing, and proselytising on behalf of voting, Jackson stimulated a political awakening among black Virginians. As a target for racial recrimination and hostility, Jackson walked a tightrope of protest and accommodation, one that jeopardized his health, family, and career. Yet he was a tenacious optimist with faith in the political process. legislative maneuvers did not render conventional institutions useless. Largely forgotten, even in Virginia, until the author resurrected his story, Jackson was involved in almost every important civil rights and liberal initiative in the South in the second quarter of the 20th century. His forceful program of political education laid the ground-work for the full-fledged assault on segregation of the 1950s, when Marlin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement emerged to stand on Jackson's shoulders.

Joan Marie Johnson investigates how the desire to create a distinctive southern identity influenced black and white clubwomen at the turn of the 20th century and motivated their participation in efforts at social reform. Often doing similar work for different reasons, both groups emphasized history, memory, and education. Focusing particularly on South Carolina clubs, Southern Ladies, New Women shows that white women promoted a culture of segregation in which southern equaled white and black equaled inferior. Like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, they celebrated the Lost Cause and its racial ideology. African-American clubwomen fought for the needs of their communities, struggled against Jim Crow, and demanded recognition of their citizenship. For both groups, control over historical memory thus became a powerful tool, one with the potential to oppress African-Americans as well as to help free them. This ambitious book illuminates the essence of what South Carolina's clubwomen of both races were thinking, feeling, and attempting to accomplish. It considers the entwined strands of race and gender that hampered their attempts to bridge their differences and that brought tension to their relations with northern clubwomen. It also addresses the seeming paradox of the white clubwomen who belonged simultaneously to tradition-minded organizations, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution or the Colonial Dames, and to a variety of forward-looking associations that engaged in impressive social reform. Although Johnson looks most closely at the Progressive Era in South Carolina, her comparative study of race, gender, reform, and southern identity reveals that women's clubs, both white and black, contributed to the creation of the new cultural climate and social order that emerged throughout the post-Civil-War South. This book will be important for all who are interested in a better understanding of race relations in contemporary America.

Zebulon B. Vance, governor of North Carolina during the devastating years of the Civil War, has long sparked controversy and spirited political comment among scholars. He has been portrayed as a loyal Confederate, viciously characterized as one of the principal causes of the Confederate defeat, and called “the Lincoln of the South.” Joe A. Mobley clarifies the nature of Vance’s leadership, focusing on the young governor’s commitment to Southern independence, military and administrative decisions, and personality clashes with President Jefferson Davis. As a confirmed Unionist before the outbreak of the war, Vance endorsed secession reluctantly. Elected governor in 1862, Vance managed to hold together the state, which was divided over support for the war and for a central government in Richmond. Mobley reveals him as a man conflicted by his prewar Unionist beliefs and the necessity to lead the North Carolina war effort while contending with widespread fears created by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and such issues as the role of women in the war, lawlessness and desertion among the troops, the importance of the state’s blockade-runners, and the arrival of Sherman’s troops. While the governor’s temperament and sensitivity to any perceived slight to him or his state made negotiations between Raleigh and Richmond difficult, Mobley shows that in the end Vance fully supported the attempt to achieve southern independence.

Planters' Progress is the first book to examine the profoundly transformative industrialization of a southern state during the Civil War. More than any other Confederate state, Georgia mixed economic modernization with a large and concentrated slave population. In this pathbreaking study, Chad Morgan shows that Georgia's remarkable industrial metamorphosis had been a long-sought goal of the state's planter elite. Georgia's industrialization, underwritten by the Confederate government, changed southern life fundamentally. A constellation of state-owned factories in Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, and Macon made up a sizeable munitions and supply complex that kept Confederate armies in the fields for four years against the preeminent industrial power of the North. Moreover, the government in Richmond provided numerous official goads and incentives to non-government manufacturers, setting off a boom in private industry. Georgia cities grew and the state government expanded its function to include welfare programs for those displaced and impoverished by the war. Georgia planters had always desired a level of modernization consistent with their ascendancy as the ruling slaveowner class. Morgan shows that far from being an unwanted consequence of the Civil War, the modernization of Confederate Georgia was an elaboration and acceleration of existing tendencies, and he confutes long and deeply held ideas about the nature of the Old South. Planters' Progress is a compelling reconsideration not only of Confederate industrialization but also of the Confederate experience as a whole.

This compelling book offers important new insights into the connections among radio, race relations, and the civil rights and black power movements in the South from the 1920s to the mid-1970s. For the mass of African Americans—and many whites—living in the region during this period, radio was the foremost source of news and information. Consequently, it is impossible to fully understand the origins and development of the African American freedom struggle, changes in racial consciousness, and the transformation of southern racial practices without recognizing how radio simultaneously entertained, informed, educated, and mobilized black and white southerners. While focusing on civil rights activities in Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., and the state of Mississippi, the book draws attention to less well-known sites of struggle such as Columbus, Georgia, and Columbia, South Carolina, where radio also played a vital role. It explains why key civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and organizations such as the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC put a premium on access to the radio, often finding it far more effective than the print media or television in advancing their cause. The book also documents how civil rights advocates used radio to try to influence white opinions on racial matters in the South and beyond, and how the broadcasting industry itself became the site of a protracted battle for black economic opportunity and access to a lucrative black consumer market. In addition, Ward rescues from historical obscurity a roster of colorful deejays, announcers, station managers, executives, and even the odd federal bureaucrat, who made significant contributions to the freedom struggle through radio. Winner of the AEJMC award for the best journalism and mass communication history book of 2004 and a 2004 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award, this book restores radio to its rightful place in the history of black protest, race relations, and southern culture during the middle fifty years of the 20th century.

The Confederate Steam Ship Shenandoah is renowned as the last vessel to surrender after the Civil War, and the young officers on board—who didn’t learn of the war’s end for three months—consequently suffered extraordinary physical and emotional stress. This first-hand account of the crew’s hazardous last year, told through shipboard diaries and postwar journals, reveals the heavy personal toll they paid during the cruiser’s transition from commissioned commerce raider to hunted fugitive. Many of the Shenandoah’s officers had resigned commissions in the United States Navy to fight for the South. Curry examines how their social and professional backgrounds shaped them as leaders and how their expectations clashed with the realities of military rule, chronic personnel shortages, and harsh conditions at sea. He explores the ethical problems faced by Confederate naval personnel who participated in attacks on civilian maritime commerce, and he describes the kinds of rationale employed by the Southern officers to justify their duties. He also reveals the tension that developed between the cruiser’s commander, Lieutenant James I. Waddell, and his subordinates. In frequent public and private outbursts, the officers expressed dissent about the manner in which Waddell operated. After learning of the Confederacy’s defeat and being forced into exile, they argued over the appropriateness of their actions, and for years after the war were plagued by accusations of “mutiny” and “piracy.” Curry also follows the process by which the former naval officers concealed controversial aspects of the last voyage of the CSS Shenandoah in their public recollections, showing how postwar experiences shaped and reconstructed their memories of sea duty.

Hoffschwelle tells the story of a remarkable partnership to build model schools for black children during the Jim Crow era in the South. The Rosenwald program, which erected more than 5,300 schools and auxiliary buildings between 1912 and 1932, began with Booker T. Washington, then principal of Tuskegee Institute, who turned for financing to Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Company. By requiring communities to raise matching funds, the two men inspired a grassroots movement that built schools in 15 southern states. The Rosenwald schools, scores of which still stand, exemplified the ideal educational environment—designed for efficiency, making full use of natural light to protect children’s eyesight, and providing sufficient space for learning. Ironically, these schools, which represented the social centers of their African American communities, also helped to set standards for white schools. Though the program’s funding ended with Rosenwald’s death in 1932, many continued as public institutions. The National Trust for Historic Preservation named Rosenwald Schools to its list of America’s Most Endangered Historic Places in 2002. Hoffschwelle examines these buildings as exemplars for school architecture and design, as community institutions and partnerships, and as a means of formalizing a state education program that, finally, would include black children. This story of extraordinary generosity and sacrifice will interest scholars of American and African-American history, educators, school planners, and preservationists.

Born a slave in 1850s South Carolina and elected to Congress in the 1890s, George W. Murray appeared to be the antithesis of the African American male in the Jim Crow South and served as a beacon for African Americans who saw their hopes crushed in the aftermath of the Civil War. Early in the twentieth century, however, tragically defeated by corrupt Reconstruction politics and white supremacist attitudes he could not escape, Murray was driven from office and from the state. Drawing on extensive research to reconstruct Murray’s life story, Marszalek defines an age and its people through the compelling battle of one man and shows how and why the nation’s efforts to reconstruct the South into a biracial democracy failed. Murray’s career, which spanned a quarter of a century, included two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and leadership of South Carolina’s Republican party. He was an investor as well as a landed property owner who sold tracts to poor blacks in order for them to qualify to vote. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, with his party in shambles, he found himself on trial for alleged forgery in a land deal with two of his black land purchasers. Murray was found guilty, and the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the verdict. Sentenced to hard labor on a chain gang, he escaped to Chicago where he spent the rest of his life in obscurity.

By focusing on specific communities, these essays examine the efforts of individuals and small groups to build their vision of the New South. Ranging across the region, from Texas to Virginia, the essays examine specific events at the city or state level. Naturally, politics and race play a major role, from white Republicans in post-emancipation North Carolina to Northern Mississippi Rural Legal Services in the 1970s. Depression-era Atlanta, segregated Louisville, South Carolina governors, and the way memory affects race in twentieth-century Waco are among the broad range of studies offered in this collection. The contributors to Making a New South explore how white southerners attempted to rebuild their society after suffering defeat during the Civil War and how black southerners worked to establish themselves as free people with all the rights they believed that emancipation had promised to them. Collectively, these essays reveal the public endeavors of idealistic and pragmatic southerners of all races, including preachers, politicians, and public servants, to remake their world in the century following Reconstruction.

Rich with the voices of black and white southern workers, From Rights to Economics shows how ardently African Americans have had to continue fighting for economic parity in the decades since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Using oral histories and case studies that focus on black activism throughout the entire South, award-winning historian Timothy Minchin examines the work of grassroots groups—including the Southern Regional Council and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund—who struggled with the economic dimensions of the movement. While white workers and managers resisted integration, activists' efforts gradually secured a wider range of job opportunities for blacks. Minchin shows, however, that the decline of manufacturing industry in the South has been especially difficult for the African American community, wiping out many good jobs just as blacks were gaining access to them. Minchin also offers a detailed discussion of a major school integration battle in Louisville, Kentucky, and examines the role of affirmative action in the ongoing black struggle.

Focusing on the NAACP's campaign for voting rights, Manfred Berg challenges the legalistic and bureaucratic image of the NAACP and reveals a resourceful, dynamic, and politically astute organization that did much to open up the electoral process to greater black participation.

Public welfare in the United States has existed in one form or another since the colonial period. Most historical investigations into the practice tend to focus on urban settings, mostly in the North. Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South offers a much-needed counterpoint, revealing both the breadth of how southerner elites helped their poor, even in rural areas, and the racial impetus behind their actions. In the nineteenth century, private benevolence was almost exclusively for whites. Public welfare in the South was disproportionately targeted at poor whites, and included the founding of state-supported schools, orphan and health care, and efforts to ameliorate starvation. As a result, poor whites' resentment of the rich was diminished, and they were, as a group, more willing to cast their lot with slaveholders as the Civil War loomed large. This work ranges over the entire South and makes important comparisons between the upper and lower South, between urban and rural areas, and between welfare efforts in the South and in the North, where charity typically—and incorrectly—has been seen as more widespread.

"Will soon stand with such classic works as those by William R. Taylor and Michael O'Brien in the realm of Southern letters."—Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Southern Honor " Counterfeit Gentlemen captures a volatile region laughing (uneasily) at itself, and it is the freshest interpretation of the Old South to come along in a decade."—Stephen Berry, author of All That Makes a Man Counterfeit Gentlemen is a stunning reappraisal of Southern manhood and identity that uses humor and humorists to carry the readerinto the very heart of antebellum culture.. What does it mean to be a man in the pre–Civil War South? And how can we answer the question from the perspective of the early twenty-first century? John Mayfield does so by revealing how early nineteenth-century Southern humorists addressed the anxieties felt by men seeking to chart a new path between the old honor culture and the new market culture. Lacking the constraints imposed by journalism or proper literature, these writers created fictional worlds where manhood and identity could be tested and explored. Preoccupied alternately by moonlight and magnolias and racism and rape, we have continually presented ourselves with an Old South so mirthless it couldn't breathe. If all Mayfield did was remind us that Old Southerners laughed, he would have accomplished something. But he also offers a sophisticated analysis of the social functions humor performed and the social anxieties it reflected.

Informed by feminist analysis, Hornsby-Gutting uses gender as the lens through which to view cooperation, tension, and negotiation between the sexes and among African American men during an era of heightened race oppression. Her work promotes improved understanding of the construct of gender during these years, and expands the vocabulary of black manhood beyond the "great man ideology" which has obfuscated alternate, localized meanings of politics, manhood, and leadership.

"I applaud Judkin Browning for identifying this very useful source. The Rumley diary offers a rare glimpse into the mind of an ardent Confederate sympathizer living under Union control."—Richard M. Reid, University of Guelph James Rumley was nearly fifty years old when the Civil War reached the remote outer banks community of Beaufort, North Carolina. Comfortably employed as clerk of the Superior Court of Carteret County, he could only watch as a Union fleet commanded by General Ambrose Burnside snaked its way up the Neuse River in March 1862 and took control of the area. In response to laws enacted by occupying forces, Rumley took the Oath of Allegiance, stood aside as his beloved courthouse was used for pro-Union rallies, and watched helplessly as friends and neighbors had their property seized and taken away. In public, Rumley appeared calm and cooperative, but behind closed doors he poured all his horror, disgust, and outrage into his diary. Safely hidden from the view of military authority, he explained in rational terms how his pledge of allegiance to the invading forces was not morally binding and expressed his endless worry over seeing former slaves emancipated and empowered. This constantly surprising diary provides a rare window onto the mind of a Confederate sympathizer under the rule of what he considered to be an alien, unlawful, and "pestilent" power.

How did the political party of Lincoln—of emancipation—become the party of the South and of white resentment? How did Jefferson Davis’s old party become the preferred choice for most southern blacks? Most scholars date these transformations to the administrations of Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. Edward Frantz challenges this myopic view by closely examining the complex and often contradictory rhetoric and symbolism utilized by Republicans between 1877 and 1933. Presidential journeys throughout the South were public rituals that provided a platform for the issues of race, religion, and Republicanism for both white and black southerners. Frantz skillfully notes the common themes and questions scrutinized during this time and finely crafts comparisons between the presidents’ speeches and strategies while they debated the power dynamics that underlay their society. This fresh and fast-paced volume brings new voices to the forefront by utilizing the rich resources of the African American press during the administrations of Presidents Hayes, Harrison, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Hoover. Although these Republicans ultimately failed to build lasting coalitions in the states of the former Confederacy, their tours provided the background for future GOP victories.

“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 contemporary black politics. Additionally he makes a critical contribution to the literature of the racial realignment of the two major political parties. A must-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, despite the election of hundreds of blacks to public office, whites still hold all the levels of political power.”—John Dittmer, author of Local The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi No one disagrees that 1964—Freedom Summer—forever 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 was practically zero. After twenty years, black candidates had made a number of electoral gains. Simultaneously, white resistance had manifested itself in growing Republican dominance of the state. ?Danielson demonstrates how race—not class or economics—was the dominant factor in white Mississippi voters’ partisan realignment, even 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. Chris Danielson is assistant professor of history at Montana Tech University.

"There are few, if any, state-level prison histories that are as impressively researched. This is an authoritative account that contributes a great deal to our understanding of the politics and practice of modern punishment."—Joseph F. Spillane, University of Florida "Miller's extraordinary research into the history of Florida's prisons illustrates the fundamental disjuncture between a rural southern penal system that grew from chain gangs, turpentine camps, and a Jim Crow penal farm and the carceral needs of a modernizing urban sunbelt state. Yet, as her book demonstrates, the unsavory history of punishment still hangs over the Sunshine State like a dark cloud."—Alex Lichtenstein, author of Twice the Work of Free The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South Hard Labor and Hard Time is a history of continuity and change in Florida's state prison system between 1910 and 1957, exploring conditions at the state prison farm at Raiford (the third largest prison farm in the South at this time) as well as in the chain gangs and road prisons. Vivien Miller examines the experiences of the prisoners as well as the guards and other prison personnel in this comprehensive, groundbreaking study. She demonstrates that despite progressive changes in the treatment of inmates (better diet, better structuring of work and leisure activities, better medical provision, and the like), these improvements were matched by continued brutality and mistreatment, unequal or discriminatory treatment according to race and/or gender, and neglect.

“Examines the history of the civil rights movement and the criminal justice system beyond the court rooms and into the arrests, jail cells, and prisons that were the locus of grassroots protests and organizing.”—Robert Cassanello, coeditor of Migration and the Transformation of the Southern Workplace since 1945 Beyond Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” there has been little discussion on the incarceration experiences of civil rights activists. In this book, Zoe Colley does what no historian has done before by following civil rights activists inside the southern jails and prisons to explore their treatment and the different responses that civil rights organizations had to mass arrest and imprisonment. Imprisonment became a way to expose the evils of segregation and highlighted to the rest of American society the injustice of southern racism. Protestors shifted from seeing jail as something to be avoided to seeing it as a way to further the cause. Colley examines the many factors that shaped how an individual interpreted their race, gender, age, class, or whether one was from the North or the South. While some found imprisonment to be an energizing or inspiring experience and celebrated jail-going as liberating and honorable, others struggled to find a positive value. By drawing together the narratives of many individuals and organizations, Colley paints a clearer picture how the incarceration of civil rights activists helped shape the course of the movement. She places imprisonment at the forefront of civil rights history and shows how these new attitudes toward arrest continue to impact contemporary society and shape strategies for civil disobedience. Zoe A. Colley is lecturer in American history at the University of Dundee. A volume in the series New Perspectives on the History of the South, edited by John David Smith

“Is there really anything new to say about Reconstruction? The excellent contributions to this volume make it clear that the answer is a resounding yes. Collectively these essays allow us to rethink the meanings of state and citizenship in the Reconstruction South, a deeply necessary task and a laudable advance on the existing historiography.”—Alex Lichtenstein, Indiana University In the popular imagination, freedom for African Americans is often assumed to have been granted and fully realized when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation or, at the very least, at the conclusion of the Civil War. In reality, the anxiety felt by newly freed slaves and their allies in the wake of the conflict illustrates a more complicated dynamic: the meaning of freedom was vigorously, often lethally, contested in the aftermath of the war. After Slavery moves beyond broad generalizations concerning black life during Reconstruction in order to address the varied experiences of freed slaves across the South. Urban unrest in New Orleans and Wilmington, North Carolina, loyalty among former slave owners and slaves in Mississippi, armed insurrection along the Georgia coast, and racial violence throughout the region are just some of the topics examined. The essays included here are selected from the best work created for the After Slavery Project, a transatlantic research collaboration. Combined, they offer a diversity of viewpoints on the key issues in Reconstruction historiography and a well-rounded portrait of the era.

Shepherd McKinley presents the first-ever book on the role of phosphates in economic, social, and industrial changes in the South Carolina plantation economy. Fueling the rapid growth of low-country fertilizer companies, phosphate mining provided elite plantation owners a way to stem losses from emancipation. At the same time, mining created an autonomous alternative to sharecropping, enabling freedpeople to extract housing and labor concessions. Using extensive research, McKinley shows how the convergence of the phosphate and fertilizer industries carried long-term impacts for America and the South. Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold develops an overarching view of what can be considered one of many key factors in the birth of southern industry. This top-down, bottom-up history (business, labor, social, and economic) analyzes an alternative path for all peoples in the post-emancipation South.

By examining the development of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs—two early civil rights organizations that have been overlooked and marginalized by the historiography of the period—Lindsey Swindall reveals how the discourse on civil rights in the southern United States also employed an internationalist, anticolonial agenda during the mid-twentieth century. The escalating spread of fascism before World War II coupled with the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the mobilization of the Communist Party against segregation and colonialism helped expand the international awareness of many African American activists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. The SNYC and the Council on African Affairs were part of the efforts to address race and labor issues within a leftist framework, employing a global, Pan-African perspective to fight against disenfranchisement, segregation, labor exploitation, and colonialism. Swindall highlights the cooperation that occurred between progressive activists involved in coalition-building during the Popular Front and also adds to our understanding of the intergenerational nature of civil rights and labor organizing. Furthermore, she shows the ways in which pockets of resistance survived McCarthyism and reconnected later with activists in the 1960s.