Looks at the 2002 Newark mayoral race between Cory Booker and the more established black incumbent Sharpe James, which articulated how moderate black politicians are challenging civil rights veterans for power.

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, Atlanta had the South's largest population of college-educated African Americans. The dictates of Jim Crow meant that these men and women were almost entirely excluded from public life, but as Karen Ferguson demonstrates, Roosevelt's New Deal opened unprecedented opportunities for black Atlantans struggling to achieve full citizenship. Black reformers, often working within federal agencies as social workers and administrators, saw the inclusion of African Americans in New Deal social welfare programs as a chance to prepare black Atlantans to take their rightful place in the political and social mainstream. They also worked to build a constituency they could mobilize for civil rights, in the process facilitating a shift from elite reform to the mass mobilization that marked the postwar black freedom struggle. Although these reformers' efforts were an essential prelude to civil rights activism, Ferguson argues that they also had lasting negative repercussions, embedded as they were in the politics of respectability. By attempting to impose bourgeois behavioral standards on the black community, elite reformers stratified it into those they determined deserving to participate in federal social welfare programs and those they consigned to remain at the margins of civic life.

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a new vanguard in African American political leaders. They came of age after Jim Crow segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, they were raised in integrated neighborhoods and educated in majority white institutions, and they are more likely to embrace deracialized campaign and governance strategies. Members of this new cohort, such as Cory Booker, Artur Davis, and Barack Obama, have often publicly clashed with their elders, either in campaigns or over points of policy. And because this generation did not experience codified racism, critics question whether these leaders will even serve the interests of African Americans once in office. With these pressing concerns in mind, this volume uses multiple case studies to probe the implications of the emergence of these new leaders for the future of African American politics. Editor Andra Gillespie establishes a new theoretical framework based on the interaction of three factors: black leaders’ crossover appeal, their political ambition, and connections to the black establishment. She sheds new light on the changing dynamics not only of Black politics but of the current American political scene.

Since the election of President Barack Obama, Americans have struggled to understand a world of race relations that has changed profoundly since the 60s-era struggles for equality. For this incisive, accessible volume, a group of the nation's eminent public intellectuals explore what, in fact, has changed—or not. The contributors, including Lani Guinier, Glenn Loury, Paul Butler, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Elizabeth Alexander, Orlando Patterson, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Lawrence Bobo, and many others, took this as an invitation to think well beyond the debates prompted by the civil rights movement and its aftermath, challenging conventional wisdom on all fronts. In a book with relevance for all Americans, The New Face of Race shows how the deep social transformations since the 1960s, in such areas as immigration patterns, the image of black women, and the changing political power of African Americans and other groups, have shifted the ground beneath our feet even as the terms of debate over race and inequality have largely stayed the same. A major new effort to move this debate forward—and to address the real and persistent inequalities more effectively—this book offers a vital set of fresh ideas and intellectual tools for facing the new century.

Reflects on black politics in America and what it will take to to see equality.

The struggle for civil rights among black Americans has moved into the voting booth. How such a shift came about--and what it means--is revealed in this timely reflection on black presidential politics in recent years. Since 1984, largely as a result of Jesse Jackson's presidential bid, blacks have been galvanized politically. Drawing on a substantial national survey of black voters, Katherine Tate shows how this process manifested itself at the polls in 1984 and 1988. In an analysis of the black presidential vote by region, income, age, and gender, she is able to identify unique aspects of the black experience as they shape political behavior, and to answer long-standing questions about that behavior. How, for instance, does the rise of conservatism among blacks influence their voting patterns? Is class more powerful than race in determining voting? And what is the value of the notion of a black political party? In the 1990s, Tate suggests, black organizations will continue to stress civil rights over economic development for one clear, compelling reason: Republican resistance to addressing black needs. In this, and in the friction engendered by affirmative action, she finds an explanation for the slackening of black voting. Tate does not, however, see blacks abandoning the political game. Instead, she predicts their continued search for leaders who prefer the ballot box to other kinds of protest, and for men and women who can deliver political programs of racial equality. Unique in its focus on the black electorate, this study illuminates a little understood and tremendously significant aspect of American politics. It will benefit those who wish to understand better the subtle interplay of race and politics, at the voting booth and beyond.

In late-nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post-Civil War nation. In his fresh in-depth study of black partisanship and politics, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood demonstrates that party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America's democracy.