Race and Politics in the American Postwar Era

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel takes a broad view of important political developments in the American postwar era and their significance for the trajectory of civil rights and racial politics. Keneshia Grant focuses on the lesser-studied Return Migration of the return of many Black Americans to the South and its political and electoral impact. Focusing on related sectional and partisan shifts in the North, Kumar Ramanathan compares the trajectories of fair employment and fair housing within the Democratic Party coalition in Congress. Desmond King and Robert Lieberman explore how this period marked the emergence of a kind of “forced federalism,” when a major wave of democratization transformed the state into an agent of racial equality. Finally, Katie Rader looks to the significance of opposition to Taft-Hartley in the courts in shaping the efforts of civil rights and labor advocates. Taken together, these papers provide an important combination of “from below” and “from above” accounts of race and American political development in the shifting postwar political landscape.

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Individual Presentations

• Great Migration Politics in the South - Keneshia N. Grant, Howard University

• The American Civil Rights State: Federal Power and the Pursuit of Racial Justice - Desmond King, University of Oxford; Robert C. Lieberman, Johns Hopkins University

• The “Slave-Labor Law:” A Thirteenth Amendment Response to Taft-Hartley - Katie Rader, Christopher Newport University

• Racial Liberalism and the Divergent Paths of Fair Employment and Fair Housing - Kumar Ramanathan, Northwestern University

Chair

• Sidney M. Milkis University of Virginia

Discussant

• David Alexander Bateman Cornell University