Doug McAdam’s Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 chronicles the development and growth of the black protest movement through that changing political and social conditions that both created and denied political opportunities for black protest and contributed to the growth of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s onward. McAdam first traces the origins of the political and social conditions that denied blacks the political opportunities to organize and protest to “King Cotton” and Compromise of 1876 that ended Radical Reconstruction. To southern cotton suppliers and northern industrialists, the degree of political and economic freedom granted to blacks with emancipation and promised with Reconstruction raised
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The evidence he presents firmly supports the idea, black protest was able to grow with the opening of political opportunities. Prior to 1930, political opportunities for blacks to enact racially favorable social change were nonexistence as Jim Crow made voting and/or organizing both dangerous and virtually impossible for a majority of the population. Voting opportunities were crucial in fostering change that would lead to protest. Political factors that contributed to social changes in the north and south that protest action possible. Moving north also gave blacks voting opportunities previously denied to them in the south. Northern industrialists and southern planters no longer had the same interests and elite opinion of the “Negro Problem” diverged. The backbone of the southern economy, the cotton industry, began to decline at the turn of the century as prices fell and declined further with New Deal policies that made the crop less lucrative. White suppression in the south made it impossible for the black voice and the black vote to be heard across the nation. Voting opportunities in the north suddenly made the black vote matter. Case in point, it was the black vote that turn the 1932 Presidential Election in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favor and has an even greater impact with the electoral shift towards the Democratic Party. Fear over communism in America also forced the American public to critique the status of racial equality in America as racial inequality became a platform for communists to gain support in Western capitalist states. Favorable government action also created new protest opportunities. Beginning in the early 1930s McAdam recalls that Supreme Court decisions began reversing earlier, narrow interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment. Truman also establishes committees and commissions to examine the state of civil rights in
The evidence he presents firmly supports the idea, black protest was able to grow with the opening of political opportunities. Prior to 1930, political opportunities for blacks to enact racially favorable social change were nonexistence as Jim Crow made voting and/or organizing both dangerous and virtually impossible for a majority of the population. Voting opportunities were crucial in fostering change that would lead to protest. Political factors that contributed to social changes in the north and south that protest action possible. Moving north also gave blacks voting opportunities previously denied to them in the south. Northern industrialists and southern planters no longer had the same interests and elite opinion of the “Negro Problem” diverged. The backbone of the southern economy, the cotton industry, began to decline at the turn of the century as prices fell and declined further with New Deal policies that made the crop less lucrative. White suppression in the south made it impossible for the black voice and the black vote to be heard across the nation. Voting opportunities in the north suddenly made the black vote matter. Case in point, it was the black vote that turn the 1932 Presidential Election in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favor and has an even greater impact with the electoral shift towards the Democratic Party. Fear over communism in America also forced the American public to critique the status of racial equality in America as racial inequality became a platform for communists to gain support in Western capitalist states. Favorable government action also created new protest opportunities. Beginning in the early 1930s McAdam recalls that Supreme Court decisions began reversing earlier, narrow interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment. Truman also establishes committees and commissions to examine the state of civil rights in