As the lobbying arm of the civil rights movement, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR)—which has operated since the early 1950s—was instrumental in the historic legislative breakthroughs of the Second Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Lobby skillfully recounts the LCCR’s professional and grassroots lobbying that contributed to these signature civil rights policy achievements in the 1950s and ’60s.

Shamira Gelbman explains how the diversity of this interest group coalition both hindered and enabled lobbyists to generate broad-based support for reforms that often seemed risky to legislators. They coordinated their efforts by identifying common ground among member organizations, developing coalitional positions on substantive and strategic questions, and exhorting organizations to mobilize professional and grassroots lobbying resources accordingly. The result was to “speak with one booming voice” to ultimately help secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

The Civil Rights Lobby concludes by reprising key lessons from the LCCR’s organizational development and participation in civil rights policymaking. Gelbman suggests new directions for research on interest group coalitions and explores how the Leadership Conference’s experience sheds light on the politics of the Second Reconstruction.

This book offers a systematic, comprehensive analysis of the rise and partial decline of racial segregation as an issue in southern electoral politics throughout the entire South over the third quarter of the twentieth century. The first comparative examination of a white political elite, the study draws upon an extraordinary breadth of data: 80 governorships, over 250 candidates, six “waves” of elections for each of the eleven southern states from 1950 to 1973.

By classifying candidates for the southern governorships according to their campaign stances on racial segregation, Earl Black maps out the changing racial attitudes of white office seekers over a critical period in southern history—the time now referred to as the Second Reconstruction. He shows that, largely because of Federal pressures, segregationist orientations have increasingly been replaced by nonsegregationist perspectives, and that the decline of segregationist rhetoric has been more evident in the peripheral south than in the deep south. Specific areas include: the segregation issue in the early 1950s; state-by-state summaries of the segregation issue after 1954; and the relationship between the candidates' campaign platform on race and their ability to run successfully at consecutive stages of the electoral process.

Black's conclusion that “stateways” can alter “folkways” is well-reasoned and persuasive. Accessible to all readers interested in public affairs, Southern Governors and Civil Rights makes a significant contribution to the literature on the consequences of national intervention to change southern racial attitudes.