A Voting Rights Odyssey
Black Enfranchisement in Georgia

Details the efforts of the white leadership in Georgia to deny blacks their voting rights.

Laughlin McDonald (Author)

9780521011792, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 27 March 2003

264 pages, 17 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.6 cm, 0.347 kg

..."McDonald's stories evoke drama, as when he relates how Georgia's white supremacist legislature expelled Julian Bond, a black, from the Statehouse in 1965 after Bond was elected to the House. McDonald's expertise as a lawyer is evident throughout the book. His story's larger point is that legislatures can't always be counted on to do the right thing. Blacks won freedom, for the most part, in the courts. In telling his adopted state's story, McDonald finds hope."...Is Knight-Ridder Newspapers, 11/23/2003

From slavery to the white backlash of the 1990s, A Voting Rights Odyssey is a riveting account of the crusade for equal voting rights in Georgia. Written by a veteran civil rights lawyer the book draws upon expert reports and other court records, as well as trial testimony and interviews with the men and women who served as plaintiffs and witnesses in litigation that helped forge a revolution in voting rights. The book explores, and repudiates, the myths of the Reconstruction era that blacks were incapable of voting and holding office. It also catalogues the attempts of the state leadership to maintain white supremacy after the abolition of the white primary, the demands of the Civil Rights Movement, and passage of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. A must read for anyone interested in the way in which race has driven and distorted the political process in the South.

1. The voting rights act of 1965: a great divide
2. After the civil war: recreating 'the white man's Georgia'
3. The dawning of a new day: abolition of the white primary
4. Passage of the civil rights act of 1957: the white response
5. One person, one vote: the end of the county unit system and the malapportioned legislature and congressional delegation
6. The election code of 1964: twilight of the county unit legislature
7. The voting rights scene outside the golden dome
8. The voting rights act: how it works
9. Increased black registration: the white response
10. 1970 extension of the voting rights act: more white resistance
11. The 1975 extension of the voting rights act: the private enforcement campaign
12. Redistricting in the 1980s
13. 1982: voting rights in the balance
14. Continued enforcement of the voting rights act
15. The demise of Georgia's nineteenth-century voter registration system: taking stock of the impact of the voting rights act
16. Recreating the past: the challenge to the majority vote requirement
17. The white backlash: redistricting in the 1990s
18. Keysville, Georgia - a voting rights crusade.

Subject Areas: Law [L], Politics & government [JP], Regional studies [GTB]