Rumor, repression, and racial politics
Subtitle: how the harassment of Black elected officials shaped post-civil rights America
By: George Derek Musgrove
Series: Since 1970 : histories of contemporary America
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9780820334592; 9780820341217
Subjects: History; Governmental investigations; African American politicians; Prosecution; Race; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations; Harassment; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Civil Rights; HISTORY / United States / 20th Century
Description: "Historians have exhaustively documented how African Americans gained access to electoral politics in the mid-1960s, but few have scrutinized what happened next, and the small body of work that does consider the aftermath of the civil rights movement is almost entirely limited to the Black Power era. In Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics, George Derek Musgrove pushes much further, examining black elected officials' allegations of state and news media repression--what they called "harassment"--to gain new insight into the role of race in U.S. politics between 1965 and 1995.Drawing from untapped sources, including interviews he conducted with twenty-five sitting and former black members of Congress, Musgrove tells new stories and reinterprets familiar events. His cast of characters includes Julian Bond, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Alcee Hastings, Ronald Dellums, Richard Arrington, and Marion Barry, as well as white political figures like Newt Gingrich and Jefferson Sessions. Throughout, Musgrove connects patterns of surveillance, counterintelligence, and disproportionate investigation of black elected officials to the broader political culture. In so doing, he reveals new aspects of the surveillance state of the late 1960s, the rise of adversary journalism and good government reforms in the wake of Watergate, the official corruption crackdown of the 1980s, and the allure of conspiracy theory to African Americans seeking to understand the harassment of their elected leadership. Moving past the old debate about whether there was a conscious conspiracy against black officials, Musgrove explores how the perception of harassment shaped black political thought in the post-civil rights era. The result is a field-defining work by a major new intellectual voice"--

"While historians have devoted an enormous amount of attention to documenting how African Americans gained access to formal politics in the mid-1960s, very few have scrutinized what happened next, and the small body of work that does consider the aftermath of the civil rights movement is almost entirely limited to the Black Power era. In Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics, Derek Musgrove pushes much further, presenting a powerful new historical framework for understanding race and politics between 1965 and 1996. He argues that in order to make sense of this recent period, we need to examine the harassment of black elected officials - the ways black politicians were denied access to seats they'd won in elections or, after taking office, were targeted in corruption probes. Musgrove's aim is not to evaluate whether individual allegations of corruption had merit, but to establish what the pervasive harassment of black politicians has meant, politically and culturally, over the course of recent American history. It's a story that takes him from California to Michigan to Alabama, and along the way covers a fascinating range of topics: Watergate, the surveillance state, the power of conspiracy theories, the plunge in voter turnout, and even the strange political campaigns of Lyndon LaRouche"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : "a sense of history, not hysteria"; title: The white backlash and the roots of harassment ideology, 1965-1968; title: Black elected officials, white resistance, and the surveillance state, 1965-1974; title: Discovering "harassment" in the post-Watergate period, 1975-1980; title: Prosecution as political warfare in the Reagan and Bush years, 1981-1992; title: The "selective prosecution" of Black elected officials in Alabama, 1981-1992; title: The Center for the Study of the Harassment of African Americans and the decline of antiharassment organizing, 1987-1995; title: Conclusion : political warfare ascendant; title: Appendix. State Scrutiny of Black Congresspeople, 1929-2010.