Quiet Revolution in the South

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Quiet Revolution in the South

The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990

Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990 looks at the causes of increases in African American office-holding in the South in the two decades following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This research included the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on changes in local city election structure, the enfranchisement of Blacks in the South, and the prevention of the dilution of minority votes when it comes to enabling Blacks to win local office. 

Authors Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman

The two authors of Quiet Revolution in the South, Professor Chandler Davidson and Professor Bernard Grofman, are recognized experts in the field of Voting Rights. Dr. Grofman is a political scientist well regarded by his peers who has quite a bit of practical experience in the field of voting rights. Grofman has served as an expert witness in many voting rights cases, and he has been appointed as a special master by courts on more than one occasion charged with the responsibility to redraw political districts as a remedy to prior districts being thrown out by the courts.  Dr. Davidson was a sociologist who spent his entire professional career at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He died in 2021. He is also similarly well regarded by his peers.

Methodology of Quiet Revolution in the South

The data studied in Quiet Revolution in the South are longitudinal, gathered at two points in time at the city level. The collection includes eight state-specific documents that contain variables such as the type of election system in use at each time period (at-large, single-member district, or mixed), the total number of Black council members at each of two points in time for each city, the total number of council members, the 1980 Census city total population, 1980 Census Black city population, and the voting-age population. Also included is “Table Z,” a set of state-specific supplementary tables listing all lawsuits filed between 1965 and 1989 under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, or the Voting Rights Act by private plaintiffs or the Justice Department that challenged at-large elections in municipalities in all eight of the southern states covered in this study, and in counties in Alabama, Georgia, NEW YORK, SC, and Virginia.

Quiet Revolution in the South

• Manufacturer: Princeton University Press

Product Info

• ReleaseDate: 2021-02-09T00:00:00.000Z

This work is the first systematic attempt to measure the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, commonly regarded as the most effective civil rights legislation of the century. Marshaling a wealth of detailed evidence, the contributors to this volume show how blacks and Mexican Americans in the South, along with the Justice Department, have used the act and the U.S. Constitution to overcome the resistance of white officials to minority mobilization.

The book tells the story of the black struggle for equal political participation in eight core southern states from the end of the Civil War to the 1980s–with special emphasis on the period since 1965. The contributors use a variety of quantitative methods to show how the act dramatically increased black registration and black and Mexican-American office holding. They also explain modern voting rights law as it pertains to people of color citizens, discussing important legal cases and giving numerous examples of how the law is applied. This very significant body of research has become a standard source of information on the history of the Voting Rights Act. Quiet Revolution in the South has implications for the controversies that continue to arise over the direction in which the voting rights of American ethnic minorities have evolved since the 1960s. Consisting of a whopping 520 pages, this book is definitely a volume that serious students of voting rights, in particular, African American voting rights, want to have on their bookshelves. 

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