The African American Electorate Vol.1 & 2 - Hardcover

Walton, Hanes; Puckett, Sherman C.; Deskins, Donald R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0872895084 ISBN 13: 9780872895089

Publisher: CQ Press, 2012

Synopsis

How have African Americans voted over time? What types of candidates and issues have been effective in drawing people to vote? These are just two of the questions that The African American Electorate: A Statistical History attempts to answer by bringing together all of the extant, fugitive and recently discovered registration data on African-American voters from Colonial America to the present. This pioneering work also traces the history of the laws dealing with enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of African Americans and provides the election return data for African-American candidates in national and sub-national elections over this same time span.

Combining insightful narrative, tabular data, and original maps, The African American Electorate offers students and researchers the opportunity, for the first time, to explore the relationship between voters and political candidates, identify critical variables, and situate African Americans’ voting behavior and political phenomena in the context of America’s political history.

About this title

About the Authors

Hanes Walton, Jr. is Professor of Political Science and senior research scientist in the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan.

Sherman C. Puckett is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of Michigan in urban and regional planning.

Donald R. Deskins, Jr. is a political geographer and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Michigan.

Reviews

This unique and original resource investigates the African American voting experience from colonial times to the present. Relying on well-known as well as rare and newly discovered archival data on voter registration, the set’s stated intent is to provide a unique longitudinal analysis that presents numerical data in tables, graphs, pie charts, and maps. Although it is organized chronologically—beginning with a table on “Voting Rights of Free-Men-of-Color in the Thirteen Original Colonies” and ending with “Percentage Point Gain or Loss in White Support for Obama in the South”—there is a strong emphasis on connections across time periods. An example chapter is “The 1965 Voting Rights, Expansion and Renewals, 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006,” which contains statistical tables including “Number of Southern Republicans Voting For and Against Civil Rights and Voting Rights Legislation in the House and Senate, 1957–2006.” All of the statistical information here is illuminated by brief but articulate narrative passages explaining the significance of the data. There are also in-depth analyses of unique events, like the Mississippi Freedom Vote of 1963 and the electoral revolts that occurred in 1920 and 1921. Worth noting in the appendixes are the nearly 200 pages of tables, which correspond to earlier chapters in the set. These mostly deal with the painstaking breakdown of election votes by state, county, gender, and race. There is also a cumulative bibliography of a dozen pages listing crucial primary and government data sources, both online and in print. Overall, this source is a cross between a reference work and an in-depth academic analysis. With its hundreds of charts and footnotes, it has elements of both. The level of depth here makes this resource more appropriate for academic libraries. --Michael Tosko

Edition details

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0872895084
• ISBN 13: 9780872895089
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 1024