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This text reshapes how we think about the origins of the civil rights era. The book paints a complex portrait of racial politics in the South in the first half of the 20th century and shows how the weaknesses in the Jim Crow system allowed reformers to lay some of the groundwork that would lead to the system's eventual collapse

This article uses a political developmental approach to examine African American poll-tax registration and voting in Virginia from 1940 to 1954. Using the concept of multiple orders, the article traces how changes in the state's political system of managed race relations created an opening for African American political mobilization. The Virginia Voters League (VVL), in alliance with other African American political, civic, and social organizations, conducted voter education and poll-tax payment campaigns in order foster political efficacy among the state's disenfranchised black voters. The VVL met with mixed success, affected by past political mobilizations, the impact of NAACP mobilization, and local and statewide political competition between the state's main political machine and insurgents. The VVL campaign was successful in achieving short-term victories, including the election of a few African Americans to local office. By 1954, the VVL's internal weakness coupled with the emergence of "massive resistance" stymied further black electoral mobilization through politics and made protest a more viable option for achieving political and civil rights for black Virginians. By tracing the path from politics to protest, this article shows how a political developmental approach can be successfully used to develop a nuanced understanding of the emergence of the civil rights movement and Southern politics in the pre–Brown v. Board of Educationera.

AbstractThis article argues that African American hair is a political matter by examining the little-known role of state occupational licensing of African American hair care. By focusing on recent legal challenges and legislative battles over state regulation of hair-care provision for African Americans, the article traces state authorities' responses to struggles over market share between licensed, and often native-born, African American beauticians, and typically unlicensed, and often recent African immigrant, hair braiders. Hair braiders challenged state regulatory oversight by invoking racial deference claims, in which they argued that braiding was a "cultural practice" that should be exempt from state regulation. A statistical analysis of state regulatory decision making revealed that states varied widely in addressing the issue of African American hair care. While racial deference claims, in the form of legal cases, put pressure on states to exempt hair braiders from regulatory oversight, by and large, most states did not choose this path. For states that did choose to address the demands for market protection or market relief, the choices were mostly in the direction of enacting new regulations or actively incorporating hair braiders under existing regulations. Despite the invocation of racial deference claims, African American hair care was not freed from state oversight—state regulators became more flexible in their oversight of Black hair care rooted in their concerns over public safety as well as the demands from a variety of interest groups. The analysis reveals that when race/gender and state regulation intersect, traditional economic theories of occupational licensing are not sufficient; an intersectional approach can better explain policy outcomes.

One of the key questions posed by analysts of modern, twentieth-century agricultural politics is, "How and when did agrarian democracy end and the dominance of agribusiness interests begin?" In this article I argue that the roots of this transformation lie in the origins of the agricultural welfare state and the overlapping of its birth with distinct eras in America's racial orders—those moments in time when political players mobilized coalitions and institutions around racial issues such as slavery, Reconstruction, or the segregated state of the Jim Crow order. As a result of these historical overlaps, the agricultural welfare state was shaped in surprising and not-well-understood ways by America's racial orders. In order to trace these two intertwining aspects of racial governance and agricultural welfare state development, I provide a reinterpretation of the development of the agricultural welfare state from its Civil War origins to its New Deal transformation. I show that, from 1865 to 1964, the confluence of racial orders, partisan alignments, and congressional orders created an agricultural welfare state in which African Americans were variously included and excluded in a pattern of "two-tier" citizenship. The broader racial governance aims of the Jim Crow order also had a significant role in shaping the development of the organizational ethos and administrative structures and practices within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The practice of "two-tier" agricultural citizenship, which initially affected only African American and other minority farmers, was gradually extended to reflect the divide between large commercial farmers and the rural poor (including small farmers). The results from this analysis strengthen our understanding of how the American welfare state has been shaped—in particular, the ways in which racial governance and racial orders are deeply embedded in the American state building process.

American states disappeared from the public administration research agenda during the Progressive Era. This article explores how this disappearance was related to the field's need to consolidate its claim of scientific knowledge and expertise. Progressive Era concerns over modernity and authority led to a misreading of state capacity. Two common state governance practices, courts-based administration and state boards and commissions, are evaluated. Results suggest that a reevaluation of this period of state governance can help public administration gain valuable insights about state governments and American political development during this critical period in American state development.