If there is a hero in Cowie’s story, it is the local Black organizers in Barbour County who challenged almost every attempt at voter suppression in federal court.
White voters in Barbour Country reacted similarly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Forced by federal law to purge the thicket of state and local laws that disenfranchised Black residents for nearly a century, they crafted ingenious methods to dilute the Black vote. By now, most Black Americans had switched to the Democratic Party, but in Barbour County the party was still controlled by pro-segregation whites. To prevent Blacks from winning any primaries, local party officials changed the voting rules so that the entire county could vote for all the Democratic candidates the party would run in the upcoming elections. Because white residents made up a slight majority of voters, party officials knew no Black Democrats would win. Indeed, all six Black Democrats who ran in the 1966 local primary lost. In addition, local white officials started to aggressively gerrymander the district, guaranteeing that even if any Black officials did win, they would be few and far between.
If there is a hero in Cowie’s story, it is the local Black organizers in Barbour County—most of them Black women—as well as the NAACP’s local Black lawyer, Fred Gray, who challenged almost every one of these sly maneuvers in federal court. More often than not, Cowie shows, the federal courts ruled in their favor, and in 1970 Gray even won the congressional seat representing Barbour County: the first Black Alabaman to represent the district since Reconstruction.
Freedom’s Dominion is a remarkable achievement, but it will likely engender considerable debate. Cowie’s most daring move is to make the federal government the central “protagonist” in the fight against the “racialized, anti-statist” vision of freedom nurtured in places like Barbour County. As Cowie knows, many members of the marginalized communities he sympathizes with—Black Americans, Indigenous nations, white working-class men and women—have a well-earned skepticism of the federal government. After all, prior to the Civil War it was Southern slaveholders who most effectively used the federalgovernment to prolong slavery. During Reconstruction, it was the federal government—dominated by anti-slavery Republicans—that used the U.S. military to violently seize land from Indigenous nations in the West. And during the Gilded Age, it was the federal government that bent over backward to appease corporations and capitalists at the expense of workers.
Cowie’s emphasis on the federal government’s role in ensuring civic equality also leads him to de-emphasize or ignore more radical political movements. There is no mention, for instance, of the Black radical tradition—most conspicuously, Black Communists in Alabama—that has offered, and continues to offer, a far more expansive critique of federal power and the economic system it sustains. It is easy to make a fetish of Black radicals, but it is also easy to mistake their relatively small numbers for irrelevance. As scholars like Robin D.G. Kelley, Nell Irvin Painter, and Glenda Gilmore have shown, Southern Black socialists and Communists in the 1920s and 1930s were instrumental in bringing international attention to the legal lynching of the Scottsboro boys—nine Black teenagers in Alabama who, in 1931, were falsely accused of raping two white women. It was local Black Communists who helped get the American Communist Party to pay for their legal defense and, in turn, shine an international spotlight on America’s version of apartheid.
Even the successes of more moderate, mainstream groups like the NAACP can in part be attributed to pressure from radicals: Mainstream civil rights activists often absorbed and reformulated the ideas promoted by radical organizers, be they Black Communists or Black Panthers. The threat these often militant activists posed was not infrequently leveraged by mainstream activists to make their own demands for racial and economic justice appear more palatable.
The white elites in Cowie’s book battled against these radical groups as well as the federal government, and the ideology and language they developed still permeates our politics. When you hear conservatives calling for a defense of “freedom” against federal overreach, demanding more local controls of schools, casting themselves as victims of a radical “woke” culture war addled by overeducated elites, you’re not simply hearing a racist dog whistle: You’re hearing a sincere defense of what many Americans have long understood freedom to mean—the freedom to dominate others.
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