Louis Mazzari brings to the fore one of the most important figures of the southern regionalist movement in the New Deal era. His is the first biography of Arthur Raper, a progressive sociologist, writer, and public intellectual who advocated racial and social justice in the South when such views were not only unpopular but dangerous, effectively laying a foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.Raper was one of the first white southern scholars to speak out against lynching, sharecropping, and tenant farming in his pioneering and highly influential books The Tragedy of Lynching(1933), Preface to Peasantry (1936), Sharecroppers All (1941), and Tenants of the Almighty (1943). He also contributed significantly to Gunnar Myrdal's important study of U.S. race relations, An American Dilemma (1944). Mazzari carefully dissects Raper's works, casting them in a larger historical context and examining both the acclaim and anger they elicited in the South. He portrays Raper as a political and social radical fighting against southern racial and economic problems during the country's transition from an agrarian culture to a modern one, in an effort to keep the region from falling even further behind in an increasingly sophisticated world. Hostility toward his beliefs eventually led Raper to leave the South. He worked on the reconstruction of Japan after World War II and in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East at the height of the Cold War, promoting the same mix of federal planning and local control he had practiced in the New Deal South.In the life of Arthur Raper, Mazzari locates a larger story of liberalism in the white South. Raised on a North Carolina tobacco farm and educated at Chapel Hill under Howard Odum, Raper was remarkable for taking up issues of race and class to advocate modern views in a part of the world where adherence to the past was almost pathological -- and then going on to advance a liberal modernist version of Jeffersonian democracy throughout the Third World. He looked critically at the causes of racial violence and successfully conveyed scientific sociology into broad circulation through mass culture.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this gripping narrative of the development of the Civil Rights movement in North Carolina, Dr. John L. Godwin brings to life the infamous case of the Wilmington Ten and the subsequent allegations of conspiracy. Through extensive research and interviews, he seeks to uncover some of the truth behind the actual events of the 1972 trial, while at the same time drawing readers in with the compelling details of the movement's origins in North Carolina and its ultimate outcome in one community. Dr. Godwin underscores his effort with a comprehensive exploration of the Civil Rights movement through the eyes of the locality, comparing it incisively to the earlier protests of the 1960s. His portrait joins that of scholars who have sought to describe the transformation brought about by black leadership on the local and state level, recounting both its victories and the frustrated hopes of local activists, in addition to how the new conservatism ultimately succeeded in co-opting the movement. For Wilmington, this is set against the background of North Carolina politics and civic culture, highlighting the role of Benjamin Chavis and his rise to national prominence. Filled with pictures that personalize this troubled era of American history, Dr. Godwin's book is an essential resource, not only to historians but also to students of public policy.

A ground-breaking collaborative study merging perspectives from history, political science, and urban planning, The Separate City is a trenchant analysis of the development of the African-American community in the urban South. While similar in some respects to the racially defined ghettos of the North, the districts in which southern blacks lived from the pre-World War II era to the mid-1960s differed markedly from those of their northern counterparts. The African- American community in the South was (and to some extent still is) a physically expansive, distinct, and socially heterogeneous zone within the larger metropolis. It found itself functioning both politically and economically as a "separate city"—a city set apart from its predominantly white counterpart. Within the separate city itself, internal conflicts reflected a structural divide between an empowered black middle class and a larger group comprising the working class and the disadvantaged. Even with these conflicts, the South's new black leadership gained political control in many cities, but it could not overcome the economic forces shaping the metropolis. The persistence of a separate city admitted to the profound ineffectiveness of decades of struggle to eliminate the racial barriers with which southern urban leaders—indeed all urban America—continue to grapple today.

Founded by white males, the interracial cooperation movement flourished in the American South in the years before the New Deal. The movement sought local dialogue between the races, improvement of education, and reduction of interracial violence, tending the flame of white liberalism until the emergence of white activists in the 1930s and after. Thomas Jackson (Jack) Woofter Jr., a Georgia sociologist and an authority on American race relations, migration, rural development, population change, and social security, maintained an unshakable faith in the "effectiveness of cooperation rather than agitation." Race Harmony and Black Progress examines the movement and the tenacity of a man who epitomized its spirit and shortcomings. It probes the movement's connections with late 19th-century racial thought, Northern philanthropy, black education, state politics, the Du Bois-Washington controversy, the decline of lynching, the growth of the social sciences, and New Deal campaigns for social justice.

WINNER OF THE LILLIAN SMITH BOOK AWARD John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, this biography explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director. Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners.