Review by Choice Review
This concise work focuses narrowly on the rise and fall of the first civil rights era through the prism of the US Congress. The authors traverse the exhaustively studied history of the period from the emancipation age through the age of Jim Crow. Jenkins (Univ. of Southern California) and Peck (Wesleyan Univ.) underscore the role of congressional Republicans in establishing a multiracial democracy--creating and enforcing legal reforms and extending freedom, citizenship, and voting rights to formerly enslaved persons. In the 1870s, however, Republicans' political weakness in the South, simultaneous with shifting political programs among northerners, allowed conservative white southerners to deprive Black southerners of their civil rights. The Republicans' civil rights agenda continued to decline thereafter. Into the new century state-level enforcement failed to protect the hard-won civil rights gains of Reconstruction. Although much of this subject appears in major historical works, the authors nonetheless raise a significant point questioning the salience of the Panic of 1873 and its ensuing depression in impeding civil rights legislation for the former freed people. Had the Panic not occurred, they ask, could the moderate two-party system in the South have continued and succeeded? It did not, of course, and Jim Crow soon hovered over the South. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty. --John David Smith, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review