Blackballed: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy

This is the story of a century and a half of participation by black people in US electoral politics from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to Barack Obama. Drawing scholars, civil rights workers, and black leaders like Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young and John Lewis, Pinckney traces the disagreements about the best strategies for achieving equality and the ways they gradually created the Democratic voting bloc that led to the first black president. The narrative draws on memories of growing up during the civil rights era and his parents reactions to the changes in American society. He concludes with an examination of ongoing efforts by Republicans to suppress the black vote, and includes his essay “What Black Means Now,” on the history of the black middle class and contemporary debates about “post-blackness.”

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