Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement (eBook)

1. The first edition of this book was very successful, selling nearly 19,000 copies in cloth and paper.

2. First published in 1987, a new edition of this work is timely, especially now with issues of class again being raised and with new generations of Americans, in need of reminders of the history behind current discussions of race and civil rights.

3. This book looks at how race, class, the economy, and political systems in the South have interacted over time, leading to racial stratification. The author has revised his original text and added new chapters bringing this history up to present day.

It will make an excellent general text to welcome undergraduates and reintroduce old-timers to the social ferment that surrounded the civil rights movement.–Contemporary Sociology

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Revised and updated: the award-winning historical analysis of the civil rights movement examining the interplay of race and class in the American South. In Race, Class, and the Civil Rights Movement, sociologist Jack M. Bloom explains what the civil rights movement was about, why it was successful, and why it fell short of some of its objectives. With a unique sociohistorical analysis, he argues that Southern racist practices were established by the agrarian upper class, and that only when this class system was undermined did the civil rights movement became possible. He also demonstrates how the movement was the culmination of political struggles beginning in the Reconstruction era and influenced by the New Deal policies of the 1930s. Widely praise when it was first published 1987, Race, Class, and the Civil Rights Movement was a C. Wright Mills Second Award–winning book and also won the Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award. In this second edition, Bloom updates his study in light of current scholarship on civil rights history. He also presents an analysis of the New Right within the Republican Party, starting in the 1960s, as a reaction to the civil rights movement.