Black Existence in “Torto Arado” em Dez Dobraz

Sincerely inauthentic: zombie Republicanism and violence in France

I’m just back from France, where my direct experience of riots and looting was non-existent, although I had walked past a Montpellier branch of Swarkowski the day before it ceased to be. My indirect experience was quite extensive though, since I watched the talking heads on French TV project their instant analysis onto the unfolding anarchy. Naturally, they discovered that all their existing prejudices were entirely confirmed by events. The act that caused the wave of protests and then wider disorder was the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, 17, one of a succession of such acts of police violence against minorites. Another Arab kid from a poor area. French police kill about three times as many people as the British ones do, though Americans can look away now.

One of the things that makes it difficult for me to write blogs these days is the my growing disgust at the professional opinion-writers who churn out thought about topics they barely understand, coupled with the knowledge that the democratization of that practice, about twenty years ago, merely meant there were more people doing the same. And so it is with opinion writers and micro-bloggers about France, a ritual performance of pre-formed clichés and positions, informed by some half-remembered French history and its literary and filmic representations (Les Misérables, La Haine), and, depending on the flavour you want, some some Huntingtonian clashing or some revolting against structural injustice. Francophone and Anglophone commentators alike, trapped in Herderian fantasies about the nation, see these events as a manifestation of essential Frenchness that tells us something about that Frenchness and where it is heading to next. Rarely, we’ll get a take that makes some comparison to BLM and George Floyd.

I even read some (British) commentator opining that what was happening on French estates was “unimaginable” to British people. Well, not to this one, who remembers the wave of riots in 1981 (wikipedia: “there was also rioting in …. High Wycombe”) and, more recently, the riots in 2011 that followed the police shooting of a young black man, Mark Duggan, and where protest against police violence and racism soon spilled over into country-wide burning and looting, all to be followed by a wave of repression and punitive sentencing, directed by (enter stage left) Keir Starmer. You can almost smell the essential Frenchness of it all.

There is much to despair about in these French evenements. Police racism is real and unaddressed, and the situation people, mostly from minorities, on peripheral sink estates, is desperate. Decades of hand-wringing and theorizing, together with a few well-meaning attempts to do something have led nowhere. Both politicians and people need the police (in its varied French forms) to be the heroic front line of the Republican order against the civilizational enemy, and so invest it with power and prestige – particularly after 2015 when there was some genuine police heroism and fortitude during the Paris attacks – but then are shocked when “rogue elements” employ those powers in arbitrary and racist violence. But, no doubt, the possibility of cracking a few black and Arab heads was precisely what motivated many of them to join up in the first place.

On the other side of things, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise are quite desperate to lay the mantle of Gavroche on teenage rioters excited by the prospect of a violent ruck with the keufs, intoxicated by setting the local Lidl on fire and also keen on that new pair of trainers. (Fun fact: the Les Halles branch of Nike is only yards from the fictional barricade where Hugo had Gavroche die.) There may be something in the riots as inarticulate protest against injustice theory, but the kids themselves were notably ungrateful to people like the LFI deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo whose attempts to ventriloquise their resistance were rewarded with a blow on the head. Meanwhile, over at the Foxisant TV-station C-News, kids looting Apple stores are the vanguard of the Islamist Great Replacement, assisted by the ultragauche. C-News even quote Renaud Camus.

Things seem to be calming down now, notably after a deplorable attack on the home of a French mayor that left his wife with a broken leg after she tried to lead her small children to safety. As a result, the political class have closed ranks in defence of “Republican order” since “democracy itself” is now under threat. I think one of the most tragic aspects of the last few days has been the way in which various protagonists have been completely sincere and utterly inauthentic at the same time. The partisans of “Republican order” and “democracy” perform the rituals of a system whose content has been evacuated, yet they don’t realise this as they drape tricolours across their chests. With political parties gone or reduced to the playthings of a few narcissistic leaders, mass absention in elections, the policy dominance of a super-educated few, and the droits de l’homme at the bottom of the Mediterranean, what we have is a kind of zombie Republicanism. Yet the zombies believe, including that all French people, regardless of religion or race, are true equals in the indivisible republic. At the same time, those cheering on revolt and perhaps some of those actually revolting, sincerly believing in the true Republicanism of their own stand against racism and injustice, even as the kids pay implicit homage to the consumer brands in the Centres Commerciaux. But I don’t want to both-sides this: the actual fighting will die down but there will be war in the Hobbesian sense of a time when the will to contend by violence is sufficiently known, until there is justice for boys like Nahel and until minorities are really given the equality and respect they are falsely promised in France, but also in the UK and the US. Sadly, the immediate prospect is more racism and more punishment as the reaction to injustice is taken as the problem that needs solving.

How Colleges Admissions Might Diversify Without Affirmative Action

Harvard’s Admissions Is Challenged for Favoring Children of Alumni

Harvard’s Admissions Is Challenged for Favoring Children of Alumni

Harvard students and supporters marched through Harvard Square during a rally on Saturday to oppose the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmation action.

El fin de la discriminación positiva va a empeorar la situación para mucha gente

El fin de la discriminación positiva va a empeorar la situación para mucha gente

The ‘Unseen’ Students in the Affirmative Action Debate

The Correct Way to Argue with Richard Hanania

Attention conservation notice 1 – a long read about a simple idea. When reading trolls, focus on the anodyne-seeming starting assumptions rather than the obnoxious conclusions.

Attention conservation notice 2 – This is also available via my Substack newsletter, Programmable Mutter. I’ll still be writing on CT, but I have a book with Abe Newman coming out in a few months, so that there will be a lot of self-promotion and stuff that doesn’t fit as well with the CT ethos. And do pre-order the book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, if you think it sounds good! We’ve gotten some great blurbs from early readers including Kim Stanley Robinson, Francis Spufford, Margaret O’Mara, Steven Berlin Johnson, Helen Thompson, Chris Miller, and my mother (the last is particularly glowing, but sadly not likely to appear on the back). Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.

I’ve often had occasion to turn to Daniel Davies’ classic advice on “the correct way to argue with Milton Friedman” over the two decades since I’ve read it. The best white hat hacker is a reformed black hat hacker, and Dan (dsquared) knows both the offense and defense sides of trolling.

Dan (back in 2004!):

I’m pretty sure that it was JK Galbraith (with an outside chance that it was Bhagwati) who noted that there is one and only one successful tactic to use, should you happen to get into an argument with Milton Friedman about economics. That is, you listen out for the words “Let us assume” or “Let’s suppose” and immediately jump in and say “No, let’s not assume that”. The point being that if you give away the starting assumptions, Friedman’s reasoning will almost always carry you away to the conclusion he wants to reach with no further opportunities to object, but that if you examine the assumptions carefully, there’s usually one of them which provides the function of a great big rug under which all the points you might want to make have been pre-swept. A few CT mates appear to be floundering badly over this Law & Economics post at Marginal Revolution on the subject of why it’s a bad idea to have minimum standards for rented accommodation. (Atrios is doing a bit better). So I thought I’d use it as an object lesson in applying the Milton Friedman technique.

In the same friendly spirit, I’ll note that Jonathan Katz flounders a bit in his rebuttal of Richard Hanania. None of this is to blame Katz – Hanania is not only building on his knowledge of social science (he has a Ph.D.), but some truly formidable trolling techniques. Years ago, I upset Jonathan Chait by suggesting he was a highly talented troll of the second magnitude, if a bit crude in technique. Hanania is at an altogether different level. He’s not blessed with Friedman’s benign avuncularity, but he is as close to masterclass level as we are likely to get in this fallen world.

Hanania wants people to buy into a notion of “enlightened centrism,” where the space of reasoned debate would stretch from the left (Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Noah Smith, Jonathan Chait) through Andrew Sullivan and company to people on the right like Steven Sailer. Now, you might ask what an outright racist like Steve Sailer is doing on this list. You might even suspect that one of the rationales for constructing the list in the first place was to somehow shoehorn him into the space of legitimate debate. But to figure out how Hanania is trying to do this, you need to poke hard at the anodyne seeming assumptions, rather than be distracted by the explicitly galling conclusions.

That is where Katz stumbles. He gets upset at what Hanania says about the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action as the origin of wokeness, saying that Hanania “seems to think that the Civil Rights Act caused the civil rights movement, as opposed to the other way around,” tracing it all back to Barry Goldwater. Katz then remarks on Hanania’s claim in a podcast that “Government literally created race in America. Like not blacks and whites, but like basically everyone else — and Native Americans — basically everyone else was basically grouped according to the ways, you know, the federal bureaucracy was doing things.” Katz has some ripe prognostications about what Hanania hopes will happen if government got out of the way.

But Hanania isn’t relying on the authority of Barry Goldwater. He’s standing on the shoulders of academic research. In some cases – including much of the stuff that Katz focuses his fire on – left-leaning academic research. Even before I did a Google search, I surmised that Hanania’s civil rights arguments riffed on Frank Dobbins’ eminently respectable work of social science, Inventing Equal Opportunity. I don’t know which academics he’s invoking on the U.S. Census and the construction of categories such as Hispanic: there are just so many to choose from, ranging from moderates through liberals to fervently lefty.

You could go after the details of Hanania’s social science claims if you really wanted – I would be startled if there weren’t selective misreadings. It is hard to claim on the one hand that the state creates the structures of race, and on the other that structural racism is a gussied up conspiracy theory, without some fancy rhetorical footwork to work around the gaping logical crevasses. Getting involved in that kind of debate seems to me to be a waste of time. But disputing the broadest version of the case – that key aspects of equal opportunity, civil rights and ethnic categories emerged from modern politics and battles in the administrative state – seems even worse. The bull of Left Critique thunders towards the matador, who twitches his cape to one side, so that the poor beast careens into the side of the ring, and then staggers back with crossed eyes and mild concussion, raring for another go that will have the same unfortunate result, or worse.

More succinctly, you don’t want to be the bull in a fight that is rigged in favor of the bullfighter. Instead, as per dsquared, you want to figure out what is wrong with the terms of the fight and press back hard against them.

As best as I can make it out, Hanania’s “let us assume” moment comes in the middle of a series of apparently non-controversial claims about what “Enlightened Centrists” believe. In context, they initially appear to be things that any reasonable person would agree to, or not think unreasonable. I think most readers won’t even notice them, let alone the nasty stuff that is hiding beneath. Here’s what Hanania says:

Enlightened Centrists take what Bryan Caplan calls “Big Facts” seriously. They are kept in mind as new information about the world is brought to light. Some examples of Big Facts that ECs rely on are: the heritability of traits; the paradox of voting; the information problem inherent in central planning; the broken windows fallacy; Trivers’ theory of self-deception; the existence of cognitive biases; comparative advantage; the explanatory power of IQ; the efficient market hypothesis; and the elephant in the brain. New theories or ideas should be met with more skepticism if they contradict or are in tension with Big Facts that have been well established. ECs of different Level 3 ideologies will place more emphasis on certain Big Facts over others, though some, like the idea of historical progress, they all share.

Now, any sentence that non-ironically connects “Bryan Caplan” to “Big Facts” is a big fat warning sign. Hanania links to a Caplan essay that starts explaining what “Big Facts” are by citing Caplan’s own book attacking democracy. Many key claims in this book are less facts than factitious (my co-authors and I have written about this at some length). They suggest pervasive cognitive bias (in particular, bias against free market economists) undermines the case for regular democracy, so that we should go for markets instead, or perhaps give more votes to well educated people (who are, after all more likely to recognize that economists are right).

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. How exactly is Hanania using Big Factiness and for what purpose? He wants to define Enlightened Centrism so that it favors anti-democratic libertarianism, and brings “racial realists” like Steve Sailer into the conversation.

The apparently anodyne factual claims listed by Hanania systematically shift the terms of debate to undermine democracy and an economic role for the state, and instead promote markets and the belief that persistent inequalities result from some racial groups being systematically more stupid than others. To see this, it’s likely helpful to return to the passage in question, this time with the ideological translation function turned on. These translations are ideologically blunt, and perhaps tendentious, but I think they are pretty well on the mark.

Facts that ECs rely on are: the heritability of traits intelligence is racially inherited; the paradox of voting democracy doesn’t work; the information problem inherent in central planning socialism doesn’t work either; the broken windows fallacy Keynesianism – guess what?– it just doesn’t work; Trivers’ theory of self-deception citizens fool themselves with flattering just-so stories; the existence of cognitive biases let me tell you how citizens are biased; comparative advantage markets are teh awesome; the explanatory power of IQ have I mentioned race and intelligence already? Let me mention it again; the efficient market hypothesis markets are even awesomer than I just said a moment ago; and the elephant in the brain can I haz even more citizen cognitive bias?

As per the dsquared rule, if you stipulate to these beliefs, you’ve given the game away before it’s even begun. You have accepted that it is reasonable to believe that most people are biased fools, that democracy is inherently inferior to markets, and that differences in life outcomes for black people can largely be attributed to distribution of the genes for intelligence. Charge at the matador, if you want, but good luck to you! You’ll need it.

Or instead, as per dsquared’s advice, when you are dealing with a genuinely exceptional troll like Hanania, do not give away the underlying assumptions. Don’t be distracted by the red cape. Wedge your horns beneath the seemingly reasonable claims that are intended to tilt debate, lift those claims up, toss ‘em in the air and then gore.

This is getting too long already, and I have a life, so I am not going to do the full bullfighter-toss. Instead, at the bottom of this post, I re-order Hanania’s claims so that the underlying assumptions come out more clearly, linking to resources that provide counter-evidence at length. Read if you want, but I’m providing this mostly as a source I can come back to later, or cite as needs be in desultory spats on social media. Notably, the various prebuttals come from co-authors, co-authors plus me, or, in one case, someone who I was interviewing. You can take this commonality (very plausibly) as evidence of my own biases, and enthusiasm to work with people who share them. But even if you think this, they still provide evidence that Hanania’s purported Big Facts are drenched with their own ideology, and in many cases have been bitterly debated for decades. Which is another way of saying that they aren’t established facts at all.

And some of the facts are really not like the others. It might seem weird – if you aren’t read into debates among particular kinds of libertarians – to see that stuff about IQ and heritability in there. What work exactly is this rather jarring set of claims doing for the concept of Enlightened Centrism,? Do identified left-leaning Enlightened Centrists like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias “rely on” these facts, as Hanania seems to suggest they do?

Readers – they do not. Hanania seemingly wants to reconstruct policy and intellectual debate around a center in which questions of race and IQ are once more legitimate topics of inquiry and discussion. Back in the 1990s (a time that Hanania is nostalgic for), soi-disant centrists such as Andrew Sullivan could devote entire special issues of the New Republic to the urgent debate over whether black people were, in fact, stupider than white people. Big Scientific Facts Said That It Was So! Now, that brand of intellectual inquiry has fallen into disrepute. Hanania, apparently yearns for it to come back. That, presumably, is why those claims about heritability and IQ are in there, and why Steve Sailer makes the cut.

As it happens, Matt was one of the “CT mates” cited in the 2004 dsquared post that was excerpted right at the beginning of this post. I’ve had disagreements with Matt since, on other stuff, but I am quite sure that both he and Ezra are bitterly opposed to the whole race and IQ project that Hanania wants to relegitimize. I can’t imagine that they welcome being placed on a spectrum of reasonable thought that lumps them together with racist creeps like Steven Sailer. But I can imagine why Hanania wants so to lump them – it provides a patina of legitimacy for opinions that have rightly been delegitimated, but that Hanania wants to bring back into debate.

So to see what Hanania is up to, it’s more useful not to be distracted by the provocative and outrageous. Instead, you want to look very closely at what seems superficially reasonable, seems to be the starting point for debate and ask: is there something wrong with these premises? In this case, the answer, quite emphatically, is yes.

Still, you (for values of ‘you’ that really mean ‘I’) don’t want to get dragged in further unless you absolutely have to. As Noah Smith, another of Hanania’s involuntary inductees into the Enlightened Centrist Hall of Fame said, “”Race and IQ” racism is a DDOS attack” on the time and attention of anti-racists. This naturally provoked Hanania to pop up in replies with a sarcastic rejoinder. When I wrote that Vox article I had to spend weeks dealing with Jordan Peterson acolytes popping up to inform me of the Established Scientific Facts about race and IQ. I really don’t want to be back there again. So take this post as an attack on premises, and a statement of principles, rather than the slightest hint at a desire to get stuck back into discussion on race-IQ and similar. Very possibly (he says after 3,000+ words) the best way of arguing with Richard Hanania is simply not to argue at all.

MORE DETAILED DISCUSSION OF PURPORTED “BIG FACTS” BELOW

Markets are Awesome I: the information problem inherent in central planning (socialism doesn’t work). Indeed, central planning doesn’t work. This does not provide, however, a warrant for unleashing free market wildness. Instead, it suggests that we need social democracy, with all its messiness. Why so? Read on.

Markets are Awesome II: the efficient market hypothesis Well, up to a point Lord Copper. The unfortunate fact is that the computational critique of state planners’ information problems also bollocks up the standard efficient market claims. At greater length: “allowing non-convexity messes up the markets-are-always-optimal theorems of neo-classical/bourgeois economics, too. (This illustrates Stiglitz’s contention that if the neo-classicals were right about how capitalism works, Kantorovich-style socialism would have been perfectly viable.)” At greater length again: “Bowles and Gintis: “The basic problem with the Walrasian model in this respect is that it is essentially about allocations and only tangentially about markets — as one of us (Bowles) learned when he noticed that the graduate microeconomics course that he taught at Harvard was easily repackaged as ‘The Theory of Economic Planning’ at the University of Havana in 1969.” And if markets are imperfect, and so too the state and democracy, then we sometimes need to set them against each other, as recommended by social democracy. For elaboration of how this applies to machine learning too, see this week’s Economist.

Markets are Awesome III: The “broken windows” fallacy (Keynesianism doesn’t work). Under other reasonable assumptions, the “broken windows fallacy” is itself fallacious and misleading.

Markets are Awesome IV: Comparative Advantage. This is indeed a very important idea, but as per Dani Rodrik, “Our theories — such as the theory of value or the theory of comparative advantage — are just scaffoldings, which need a lot of context-specific detail to become usable. Too often economists debate a policy question as if one or the other theory has to be universally correct. Is the Keynesian or the Classical model right? In fact, which model works better depends on setting and context. Only empirical diagnostics can help us know which works better at any given time — and that is more of a craft than a science, certainly when it is done in real time. If we economists understood this, it would make us more humble, less dogmatic, and more syncretic.” I don’t imagine that this flavor of humility is what is being called for in Hanania’s piece

Democracy is Unworkable I: Trivers’ theory of self-deception (citizens tell themselves flattering just-so-stories). This is only half of the cognitive psychology story. People bullshit themselves all the time, but they also have an evolved capacity to detect bullshit in others. The implication is that group reasoning (under the right circumstances) can consistently produce better results than individual ratiocination, with results for democracy described below.

Democracy is Unworkable II and III: The existence of cognitive biases/the elephant in the brain (have I mentioned cognitive bias yet). Really, these are both slight restatements of Democracy is Unworkable I (the “elephant in the brain” refers to Simler and Hanson’s book of the same name). Both Caplan and Jason Brennan have written books claiming that the pervasiveness of cognitive bias undermines the case for democracy. I’ve already mentioned the pop version of the counterargument. Here’s the academic statement of what this plausibly means for democratic theory. The Simler and Hanson book is clearly aware of the key sources for these counterarguments (one of them is mentioned in a footnote) but doesn’t deign to engage with them.

Democracy is Unworkable IV: The Paradox of Voting (democracy doesn’t work). The problem with this paradox is that it relies on the assumption that voters are rational agents. This entire genre of argument is based in rational choice, which means that it does not sit well with Democracy Is Unworkable claims I, II and III. This incompatibility of ideologically attractive critiques leads a variety of anti-democrats to hop furiously from one foot to another, all the while making special claims to stave off any mean-spirited suggestion that there is lots of irrational behavior in markets too. The resulting intellectual acrobatics are quite impressive in one sense; not at all in another.

Race and IQ I: The heritability of traits (intelligence is racially inherited). Actually, heritability does not mean what most people thinks it means. Moreover, technical meaning blows up many of the standard ‘science proves my racism’ arguments that are unfortunately so common on the Internets.

Race and IQ II: the explanatory power of IQ (IQ differences across race are real). There is excellent reason to believe that IQ has little explanatory power – it is a statistical cluster rather than a single and causally consequential underlying trait. Put more succinctly, the notion that we are able to measure general intelligence is based on a “statistical myth.” Again, this has painful implications for the Internet Libertarian Race-IQ Science Complex.

There’s lots more that could be said, but I think that’s enough to drive the point home, and it’s anyway as much as I’m willing to write on this topic. Finis.

B-Sides: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides the Hurt”

“Whitehead’s satire takes aim … at a capitalist system that senses the profits to be made from proclaiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past.”

The post B-Sides: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides the Hurt” appeared first on Public Books.

The 2023 and 2024 Attorney General and Secretary of State Races

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— The once low-profile contests for attorney general and secretary of state have become increasingly important for driving policy outcomes in the states, particularly in setting the rules for how elections are run.

— The current campaign cycle doesn’t promise quite as much drama as there was in 2022, when several key presidential battleground states played host to tight contests between Republicans aligned with former President Donald Trump and more mainstream Democrats.

— For the current 2023-2024 cycle, we are starting our handicapping by assigning 18 of the 23 races to either the Safe Republican or the Safe Democratic category. Still, a number of these states will undergo wide-open primaries with different ideological flavors of candidates. And in the general election, we see three races as highly competitive: the attorney general and secretary of state races in North Carolina and the AG race in Pennsylvania.

Looming AG and secretary of state contests

The midterm election of 2022 was an unusually pivotal one for attorney general and secretary of state contests. There was a surplus of races between election-denying Republicans and more mainstream Democrats in such pivotal presidential battleground states as Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada. In our final pre-election handicapping of the 2022 cycle, we rated 12 of the 30 attorney general races and 16 of the 27 secretary of state races as competitive, meaning they were categorized either as Toss-ups or as leaning toward the Democrats or the Republicans.

The current campaign cycle isn’t promising quite as much drama: All told, 18 out of the 23 races on tap start out as either Safe Republican or Safe Democratic in our rankings.

Still, these contests will be important, because attorneys general can file lawsuits with far-reaching policy impact and because secretaries of state oversee the election process (in most states, anyway).

In the 2023-2024 election cycle, at least 6 of the 13 AG races and at least 4 of the 10 secretary of state races will be open seats, often because the incumbent is running for governor — a sign of how these lower-profile offices can serve as important political stepping stones.

Especially in states with heavily Republican leanings, these open-seat races are poised to involve a number of highly competitive primaries. In many cases, these primaries will pit more pragmatic Republicans against more aggressively populist ones. The type of nominee that emerges victorious could have a tangible impact on policy in these states, because those states’ partisanship makes it hard for Democrats to win a general election.

Meanwhile, the key matchups for the 2024 general election promise to be the AG and secretary of state races in North Carolina and the AG contest in Pennsylvania. (Pennsylvania’s secretary of state is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate rather than elected.) Both states will simultaneously be serving as presidential battlegrounds.

In the meantime, the races for both AG and secretary of state in Kentucky — which will be held later this year — bear watching, with Democrats nominating credible candidates. But because this is heavily red Kentucky, the GOP remains favored to hold both.

Here’s a rundown of each race for AG and secretary of state in the current two-year cycle, based on multiple interviews with political observers, both in the states and nationally. As in the past, we have rated contests in descending order, from most likely to be won by the Republicans to most likely to be won by the Democrats, including within each rating category (Safe Republican, Likely Republican, Leans Republican, Toss-up, Leans Democratic, Likely Democratic, and Safe Democratic). We’ll update these ratings periodically as the contests develop.

First, we’ll start with the three states that vote in 2023. Then we’ll move to the larger number of states that will be voting in 2024.

2023 ATTORNEY GENERAL RACES

Safe Republican

Louisiana: Open (Jeff Landry, R, is running for governor)

Louisiana’s office of attorney general is opening up this year as Landry runs for governor. That high-stakes race for governor, in which Landry is a leading contender, has significantly overshadowed the battle to fill the office he’s giving up.

Louisiana has an all-party primary on Oct. 14. If no one gets a majority, there will be a runoff on Nov. 18. In many such races in the past, a Democratic candidate has secured one of the two runoff slots. But in the AG contest, no Democrat has emerged yet, and the party’s bench in this solidly red state is thin. So the runoff, if there is one, might come down to what flavor of Republican voters want.

Landry’s top deputy, Solicitor General Liz Murrill, is the most conservative candidate in the race as well as the best funded. In addition to being closely aligned with the polarizing Landry, Murrill was previously a top legal advisor to then-Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who was unpopular when he left office. Murrill was also widely seen as bungling an abortion case before the U.S. Supreme Court, leading to a loss when Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the four liberals in the case (this was prior to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020).

Murrill’s leading opponent is GOP state Rep. John Stefanski, who is considered more moderate and is well-liked by state insiders for his even-handed stewardship of the House committee that oversees redistricting. Another Republican running is former prosecutor Marty Maley of Baton Rouge, who finished fifth in the 2015 primary.

Murrill could run strong in an off-year election without a well-known and popular Democrat at the top of the ticket. If no Democrat enters the race and Stefanski makes the runoff, he would have a chance of winning, if he can nail down support from Democrats and establishment Republicans. But it’s unclear how much Stefanski would actively court Democratic votes in that scenario, at the risk of alienating Republicans. And there’s still time for a Democrat to get in the race, which would call into question that strategy.

Mississippi (Republican Lynn Fitch)

Fitch is seeking her second term as attorney general. The Mississippi attorney general’s office was the last statewide office that Democrats controlled in the state; Jim Hood gave it up to make an unsuccessful bid for governor in 2019, and Fitch flipped the open seat in the general election that year. But while Democrats are pleased with their challenger — Greta Kemp Martin, the litigation director of Disability Rights Mississippi — and while they see an opening with corruption allegations against former GOP Gov. Phil Bryant and former NFL quarterback Brett Favre, the Democrats’ chances of winning the AG’s office back this year against an incumbent Republican seem small.

Likely Republican

Kentucky: Open (Daniel Cameron, R, is running for governor)

Like Republican gubernatorial candidate Cameron, GOP attorney general nominee Russell Coleman has one foot in the camp of Senate Minority Leader (and Kentucky Republican godfather) Mitch McConnell as well as one foot in the camp of former President Donald Trump. Coleman served as legal counsel to McConnell while also receiving Trump’s appointment to serve as U.S. attorney for Kentucky’s western district.

Coleman’s background in rural Kentucky and his tough-on-crime approach should serve him well in the general election. In a poll by the Republican firm Cygnal, Coleman led his Democratic opponent by double digits even though the same poll showed Cameron in a dead heat with incumbent Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.

However, many voters in the poll were undecided on the AG race, and Democrat Pamela Stevenson brings a unique personal background to the contest. In addition to serving in the state House, Stevenson spent 27 years in the Air Force, including extensive legal experience as a judge advocate general. Her campaign logo features her rank of colonel in a larger font size than her last name.

Stevenson, a Black Democrat, is running to succeed Cameron, a Black Republican. But geography could be a problem (she’s based in Louisville, a region that has often produced losing statewide Democratic candidates) and passionate speeches from the floor of the state House may provide Republicans with campaign fodder. If Stevenson catches fire, this race’s rating could shift, but for now, given the state’s red tint, we’re starting it at Likely Republican.

2023 SECRETARY OF STATE RACES

Safe Republican

Mississippi (Republican Michael Watson)

Watson, elected in 2019, is seeking a second term and should easily win it. He faces Democrat Shuwaski Young, a political organizer and former federal Department of Homeland Security staffer. He ran for Congress against Rep. Michael Guest in 2022, winning only 29% of the vote in the solidly Republican district.

Louisiana: Open seat (Kyle Ardoin is retiring)

Incumbent Republican Kyle Ardoin bowed out of seeking reelection to a second full term, citing the “pervasive lies” of election deniers.

The GOP has a sizable field seeking to succeed him. One contender is Clay Schexnayder, a mechanic and race-car driver who is term-limited in the legislature after becoming the surprise compromise choice for House Speaker in 2020. He is well-known, is considered an effective legislator, and is sitting on a sizable war chest. But some conservative activists view him with suspicion, given his pragmatic approach to working with Democrats.

Other GOP candidates include grocery store owner Brandon Trosclair, an election denier; deep-pocketed Public Service Commissioner Mike Francis; and former state Rep. Nancy Landry, who has worked in Ardoin’s office for four years (and is not related to Jeff Landry).

The lone Democrat currently in the race is attorney, accountant, and small business owner Gwen Collins-Greenup. She has already run twice for secretary of state, losing to Ardoin both times with 41% of the vote. With that kind of track record, she has a good shot at getting past the primary but losing the runoff.

Likely Republican

Kentucky (Republican Michael Adams)

Adams is a Republican who is tolerable to many Democrats. He fruitfully negotiated bipartisan electoral reforms with Beshear, a Democrat, receiving praise from across the ideological spectrum. Despite opposition from his right, Adams won a May primary with a little shy of two-thirds of the vote.

Democratic nominee Buddy Wheatley is from the region of northern Kentucky, which is in the Cincinnati orbit — this part of the state is reliably Republican at the presidential level but portions of it ended up contributing to Beshear’s winning gubernatorial coalition in 2019. Wheatley was a state representative but lost reelection after his district was redrawn to be unfavorable. Wheatley is considered a strong candidate, and he’s been attacking Adams fairly aggressively, but defeating a politician as well-liked as Adams will not be easy.

2024 ATTORNEY GENERAL RACES

Safe Republican

Utah (Republican Sean Reyes)

Reyes can seek a third full term as attorney general in 2024. No one has emerged as either a primary or general election challenger. Until someone does, Reyes should have smooth sailing. Reyes was mentioned many months ago as a potential primary challenger to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), but we have not heard anything about that recently.

Montana (Republican Austin Knudsen)

There’s no indication that Knudsen, who’s in his first term, won’t seek reelection. While Knudsen has irritated some Republicans in the state, he would be a heavy favorite in heavily Republican Montana unless he gets a primary challenge or seeks higher office. No names of potential Democratic challengers have surfaced.

West Virginia: Open seat (Patrick Morrisey, R, is running for governor)

West Virginia’s ascendant GOP has at least two credible candidates for this open-seat contest: state Sen. Ryan Weld, a member of the chamber’s leadership, and fellow state Sen. Mike Stuart, a former state Republican chairman and a former U.S. attorney appointed by then-President Donald Trump. Of the two, Weld is considered more of a pragmatist, while Stuart has positioned himself as more of a populist.

No Democrat has announced a run. Either way, the real action is expected to come in the GOP primary.

Missouri (Republican Andrew Bailey)

When Eric Schmitt left the AG office to become a U.S. senator, GOP Gov. Mike Parson appointed Bailey, his general counsel, to fill the vacancy. Now Bailey is running for a term of his own.

Bailey is continuing Schmitt’s conservative politics and is running with the aid of incumbency. But he won’t have a free ride in the GOP primary. One candidate already in the race is Will Scharf, a former federal prosecutor and onetime aide to then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican who resigned the office amid a personal scandal. Other potential Republican candidates include Tim Garrison, a former U.S. attorney and Marine Corps veteran; state Sen. Tony Luetkemeyer, a cousin once removed from GOP Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer; and John Wood, a former federal prosecutor and unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate in 2022. Wood dropped out of that race, in which he was running as an independent, after Greitens lost to Schmitt in the 2022 Senate primary.

On the Democratic side is state Rep. Sarah Unsicker and, with an exploratory committee established, Elad Gross, who lost the 2020 Democratic primary for AG. However, Missouri has become so solidly red that Democrats face huge hurdles in winning statewide office.

Indiana (Republican Todd Rokita)

Rokita has been highly visible, and controversial, including for pursuing sanctions against a physician who spoke to the media about the case of a 10-year-old rape victim that attracted national attention.

Still, Rokita should be well-funded and benefit from grassroots support. If Democrats can recruit a credible candidate, they could make this a race, but no names have emerged yet, and there are few Democrats who would make credible statewide candidates in Indiana any more.

Toss-up

North Carolina: Open seat (Josh Stein, D, is running for governor) 

Historically, North Carolina has been a competitive state in down-ballot races. Will that enable Democrats to keep their longstanding hold on the AG office as Stein runs for governor? It’s hard to say.

The leading Republican in the race is former state Rep. Tom Murry, though there is talk that GOP Congressman Dan Bishop, who is better known, might get into the contest. On the Democratic side is attorney and veteran Tim Dunn, though if new, GOP-leaning congressional lines are drawn, Democratic Rep. Jeff Jackson could enter the race rather than compete in an unfriendly district.

With the final candidate lineup in limbo, and given the state’s competitive nature down the ballot, we will start this contest as a Toss-up.

Pennsylvania: Open seat (Appointed AG Michelle Henry, D, is not running)

The Democrats have a trio of credible, declared candidates: former Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, former Bucks County Solicitor Joe Khan, and former top Philadelphia public defender Keir Bradford-Grey. Potentially in the wings are several other credible Democratic candidates: former Congressman and Senate candidate Conor Lamb, state Rep. Jared Solomon, and Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer.

No Republican is officially in the race yet, but several plausible candidates are considering bids, including former U.S. attorney and gubernatorial candidate Bill McSwain, state Reps. Natalie Mihalek and Craig Williams, former U.S. Attorney Scott Brady, York County District Attorney Dave Sunday, and Westmoreland County District Attorney Nicole Ziccarelli.

Democrats feel good about their chances of holding this seat, which was occupied by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro until he moved up in 2022. Democrats did well in the Keystone State in the 2022 midterms, and the presidential contest in 2024 should ensure high turnout. But Pennsylvania is a swingy state, with Republicans winning the state auditor general and treasurer races in 2020, and the GOP plans to take this race seriously, so we’ll start it in the Toss-up category. That could change depending on who the nominees are.

Safe Democratic

Washington state: Open seat (Bob Ferguson, D, is running for governor)

Ferguson leaves big shoes to fill as he runs for governor, but Washington state Democrats have a deep bench. Already in the race is state Sen. Manka Dhingra. Other Democrats who could join her include outgoing U.S. Attorney Nicholas Brown (who just resigned in advance of a run), state Sen. Drew Hansen, and Solicitor General Noah Purcell.

The GOP has a weak bench and, at least for now, shows no signs of competing aggressively for AG’s office.

Oregon (Democrat Ellen Rosenblum)

Rosenblum, who has held the office since 2012, would be a lock for reelection if she runs again, but she could retire. Any jockeying for the seat has taken a back seat to the legislative session in which Republican state senators have been denying the Democratic majority a quorum for months. (The walkout began May 3 and ended June 15.) But Democrats should have little to worry about, regardless of who their nominee is.

Vermont (Democrat Charity Clark)

Clark was elected AG in 2022 and should have no trouble winning a second two-year term in solidly blue Vermont.

Asterisk

Texas

Keep an eye on Texas, where GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton is facing possible removal from office after being impeached by the GOP-controlled state House.

If Paxton is ousted, which would require a 2/3rds majority vote of the state Senate, there would be a special election concurrent with the 2024 presidential election, with a March 2024 primary at the same time as that for other offices. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) would appoint an AG to serve between Paxton’s removal and the election of the new AG in 2024 (Abbott has already appointed an interim AG, John Scott, to take Paxton’s place temporarily while Paxton faces his impeachment trial). The winner would serve out the remainder of Paxton’s current term, which runs through January 2027.

2024 SECRETARY OF STATE RACES

Safe Republican

West Virginia: Open seat (Mac Warner, R, is running for governor)

So far, the top GOP contenders for this open seat race include state Del. Chris Pritt, former state Del. Ken Reed, former state Sen. Kenny Mann, and longtime Putnam County Clerk Brian Wood. None of the candidates is considered widely known across the state, but whoever wins the nomination would be heavily favored against the eventual Democratic nominee.

Missouri: Open seat (Jay Ashcroft, R, is running for governor)

On the Republican side, Greene County Clerk and former state Rep. Shane Schoeller, who also was the 2012 GOP nominee for this office, has filed to run, but observers expect the GOP field for this open seat to grow. Whoever wins the nomination would be the heavy favorite against whichever Democrat wins the nomination.

Montana (Republican Christi Jacobsen)

Jacobsen is expected to run for reelection and would be heavily favored. No Democratic names have surfaced, and the bench for Montana Democrats is thin. But Democrats hold out hope of finding a candidate who can surf the expected turnout boost from Sen. Jon Tester’s (D-MT) reelection bid.

Leans Democratic

North Carolina (Democrat Elaine Marshall)

Despite North Carolina’s slight Republican lean, Marshall has become something of an institution in the state, having first been elected as secretary of state in 1996. But she won her most recent race by only about 2 percentage points in 2020, so the election should be competitive.

The GOP field includes Darren Eustance, a political consultant and the former chair of the Wake County Republican Party, and Gaston County Commissioner Chad Brown. Neither is well known, especially compared to Marshall. Incumbency gives Marshall a slight edge, but the contest should be competitive.

Safe Democratic

Oregon (Vacant)

Democratic Secretary of State Shemia Fagan resigned in May after a scandal regarding consulting work for a cannabis company. Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek has yet to appoint someone to fill the vacancy, though by law it must be a Democrat. Kotek’s appointed incumbent would be eligible to run in 2024, but it’s unclear whether the governor favors naming a caretaker or giving someone a head start on running for a full term.

Whichever option Kotek pursues, Democrats will be strongly favored to keep the office.

Washington (Democrat Steve Hobbs)

Hobbs, who was appointed to the office in 2021 and won the remainder of an unexpired term in 2022, should have no trouble winning again in 2024.

Vermont (Democrat Sarah Copeland Hanzas)

Copeland Hanzas, who won her first term as secretary of state in 2022, will be heavily favored to win again in 2024.

Affirmative Action Shaped Their Lives. Now, They Reckon With Its Legacy.

Héctor Tobar on “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’”

“One of the things that helps define Latino identity is this sense of having a history but also not knowing the history.”

The post Héctor Tobar on “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’” appeared first on Public Books.

Juneteenth: A Conversation on Freedom

Editor’s note: This year is the second time that Americans celebrate Juneteenth as a national holiday. At Public Discourse this week, we offer essays that look back on Juneteenth’s history, and look ahead to consider its place in America’s self-understanding.

Juneteenth, now a national holiday, is an opportunity for us to engage in a conversation on freedom and the American Project in a way that we have rarely, if ever, done as a national community. This might come as a surprise to many—after all, we commemorate and celebrate the Fourth of July every year with barbecues and fireworks, and this is certainly a great freedom celebration. But July Fourth can bring up mixed emotions for some of us—and I am not at all alone among African Americans who feel torn on this date.

Framing the Fourth

We are proud to be American, and do not long to live anywhere else. My father and grandfather were both in the military for much of their lives—my father having had the honor of serving on Air Force One and Air Force Two for years before retiring at the rank of Chief Master Sergeant. But we also remember, in some ways are haunted by, the fact that at that first July Fourth, and for far too many after that, we could not exercise the freedom being celebrated all around us.

This has created some ambivalence about how to think about and commemorate the Fourth. Consider, for example, our tentative groping as parents for the best way to observe this day in our home. It was another July Fourth holiday and our children were still young, perhaps six and nine years old. I am a scholar doing historical work on race, so it is an occupational hazard for me to think deeply and carefully about such commemorations. What is the essence of the July Fourth celebration? Where were we, as African Americans, in the memory and memorialization of this world historical event? Yes, we had read of Crispus Attucks, Phillis Wheatley, and others who advocated, bled, and died for this new America—but the liberty secured for so many did not extend to our ancestors—not at that time.

And so, on that day years ago, sitting around the table, about to partake of our special July Fourth meal, we first read aloud from parts of Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” It is an intense text, powerful and bittersweet, as Douglass recounts the glories of the revolution while at the same time mourning the fact that the vast majority of Black Americans were still in chains. My oldest daughter, eyes wide as she listened, asked in a pleading voice: “But we can still have a happy Fourth of July, right?” I was torn, trying to determine how best to thread the needle between celebration and remembrance of a difficult past.

I ended up assuring her that yes, indeed, we could and would have a happy Fourth of July. The preliminary reading was to bring to our remembrance the path we have come through in this country, to remember and respect the work it has taken to bring us to where we are today.

My daughter’s question: “But we can still have a happy Fourth of July, right?” rings in my ears across the years. I think, in retrospect, I could have framed the day more fruitfully if I had introduced it as a remembrance—one that is part of a larger conversation on freedom that begins each year with the commemoration of Juneteenth a few weeks earlier, and culminates on July Fourth.

Juneteenth, coming as it does just weeks before July Fourth, provides a perfect opportunity for us—both individually and collectively—to engage in a season of contemplating and celebrating the complexities and nuances, highs and lows, of this American experiment that has at its core the achievement of freedom. This dialectical pairing of the two holidays is important, I would go so far as to say necessary, for a people who have yet to develop a vocabulary and practice for discussing its complicated relationship with the past—a past that includes just as much slavery, racism, and injustice as it does freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

An Annual Conversation

The annual conversation I envision taking place between Juneteenth and July Fourth should include a healthy representation of Black voices from the past who can help us to narrate and pass on our national story of freedom-seeking across the centuries. Central to this conversation are the extraordinary ideas contained in the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This beginning of the republic held great promise, but the vast majority of Africans in America did not yet benefit from the promises of 1776, despite the fact that many of us had supported the Revolution with both the pen and the sword.

One of these, Phillis Wheatley, was kidnapped from Africa when she was about seven years old and was a poetic genius who supported the Revolution from the home of her owners in Boston. In her letters she compared white Americans to the Egyptians who held the people of Israel in bondage. She wrote: “in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and . . . that . . . same Principle lives in us.” She even penned a letter and poem of support addressed to George Washington when he was commander in chief of the Continental Army, cheering him and others on to win independence from Britain. (Washington received her letter and poem, was impressed with her, and responded in kind by letter. See the exchange here.)

Nearly one hundred year later, Frederick Douglass made his famous speech concerning the Fourth of July when he was invited by white Americans to deliver a celebratory speech commemorating the holiday in 1852. He had escaped a brutal slave owner fourteen years earlier, the wounds on his back scarred over, still visible. He brought the incongruity of the invitation to their awareness, saying:

This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?

Almost a decade later, the issue of slavery finally came to a head with the Civil War and was followed by emancipation with the Union’s victory. Firsthand accounts from formerly enslaved people in Texas on that original Juneteenth help to bring alive the excitement, anticipation, and dynamism of this moment. Tempie Cummins explains how the newly freed resisted the slave owners who ignored the news of emancipation:

When freedom was declared, master wouldn’ tell them, but mother she hear him tellin’ missus that the slaves was free but they didn’t know it and he’s not going tell ’em till he makes another crop or two. When mother hear that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free.’ Then she runs to the field, against master’s will and told all the other slaves and they quit work.

Felix Haywood has one of the most vibrant and philosophical reflections on how he experienced this new freedom and what it meant to him. He had worked as a sheep herder and cowpuncher and was about ninety-two years old when he was interviewed. When he was asked how they knew that freedom had finally come he responded: “How did we know it! Hallelujah broke out—. . . ” He then burst into song and went on to share the feeling of exhilaration that pervaded the community:

Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that, we was free . . . right off colored folks started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know what it was—like it was a place or a city. . . .

Haywood’s image of freedom as a “place or a city” evokes larger questions and conversations about what freedom ultimately is, and how we’ll know it once we’ve attained it. Indeed, as his narrative continues, he hints at the power these questions exercised over the newly emancipated. At first, he and others assumed that they would now be rich, even richer than the whites who had owned them because they were the ones who really knew how to do the work. But then he notes: “We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.” Haywood’s reflections here highlight the many complex dimensions of freedom—the physical dimension being just the first step toward the development of political, moral, and intellectual resources and virtues that allow us to flourish.

New National Tradition

Haywood’s reflections on the expectations and realities of freedom evoke the many times when we long for something great, but it turns out to be more compelling in the imagination than in reality. Hard work often follows once we have achieved our long-anticipated goal. This brings us to the current state of our national conversation on freedom. I think it no coincidence that the decision to make Juneteenth a national holiday followed right on the heels of Black protest that swept across the country in 2020. After much striving and protest that has reshaped the national conversation on race, what will we do now that Juneteenth has achieved the status of being a national holiday?

If we are not careful, Juneteenth may simply become something that makes African Americans “proud without making us rich,” to paraphrase Felix Haywood. Our pride in recognizing and celebrating Juneteenth may rest there without going any further. We may be left “feeling good” without coming any closer to being “rich” in the deepest sense of that word. But what we desire is the kind of richness that allows us all to live fuller lives—whatever our race or ethnicity—as we seek to better exercise and enjoy the freedoms we have fought for.

There is also the danger that Juneteenth will become a holiday observed by a small segment of the population while being largely ignored by the majority of Americans. I sincerely hope this will not be the case. While the national observance is still new and nationwide traditions have yet to be formed, now is the time to initiate, to carefully cultivate, a new kind of conversation on freedom poised between the promises of the Declaration (celebrated on the Fourth) and the fitful realization of those promises across the centuries (which emerged more fully on June 19, 1865)—and that continue to unfold in new ways today. My hope is that these weeks between Juneteenth and July Fourth will become an extended time of conversation, celebration, and contemplation of our long road to freedom.

The Making of Juneteenth

Editor’s note: This year is the second time that Americans celebrate Juneteenth as a national holiday. At Public Discourse this week, we offer essays that look back on Juneteenth’s history, and look ahead to consider its place in America’s self-understanding.

Juneteenth is a linguistic compression of the date “June Nineteenth,” with the particular June 19th in view being June 19, 1865. The American Civil War was practically over by that date—the principal Confederate field army under Robert E. Lee had surrendered in Virginia on April 9, 1865, followed by the surrenders of other Confederate forces and the capture of fleeing Confederate president Jefferson Davis on May 10th. But only practically. The United States government had never recognized the Confederacy as a legal entity, and so there were no peace talks or treaty signings to mark a single end-point to the war; the Confederacy simply expired, and did so unevenly, from place to place. In Texas, there were still enough in the way of organized Confederate forces to fight a pitched battle, at Palmito Ranch on May 12th. Palmito Ranch was not a very large or significant battle, but it ended in the withdrawal of Union soldiers back to the southern Texas port of Brownsville, which they had occupied since 1863. Anyone who wanted to declare the war over might find themselves in more danger than they had imagined.

The same thing was true for slavery, which was the principal cause that triggered the war. President Abraham Lincoln had issued an Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, that declared “forever free” all the slaves in those parts of the breakaway Southern Confederacy not yet returned to Union control. This was an extraordinary step toward the ending of slavery in America, but not the final step. For one thing, Lincoln issued his proclamation on the strength of his “war power” as commander-in-chief, in order to weaken the Confederacy’s powers of resistance. But there was no body of settled law concerning presidential “war powers” in 1863, and even Lincoln was anxious that federal courts might overturn both the proclamation and the freedom it legally awarded to three and a half million black slaves in the Confederacy. For another, the proclamation—precisely because it was a “war powers” document—could only be operative against slavery in the Confederacy; it did not wipe out slavery in the four states where slavery was legal, but which had remained loyal to the Union (Missouri, Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware).

After his reelection to the presidency in November 1864, Lincoln pressed Congress to adopt a thirteenth amendment to the Constitution that would both erase slavery everywhere in the United States and put emancipation beyond the reach of the courts. Congress agreed, by a slim margin, in January 1865. But the amendment would not become legally effective until its ratification by the states, and that would not happen until December 1865. Until then, there was always the chance of a legal or political version of the Palmito Ranch battle that might upset every inch of progress made toward ending slavery.

But the hourglass on these threats was running out swiftly. On May 26th—two weeks after the collision at Palmito Ranch—Confederate General Simon Bolivar Buckner arranged a formal surrender of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, a surrender confirmed on June 2nd by the last senior Confederate officer in the west, Edmund Kirby Smith. Union commanders were eager to move into Texas as quickly as possible: the Mexican border had been in chaos since the French empire of Napoleon III occupied the former Mexican republic in 1862, and many Confederates were crossing into Mexico to join the French. On June 13th, Union Major General Philip Sheridan, who had been appointed to command the formerly Confederate southwestern states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, directed Major General Gordon Granger (who had been in command of Union troops occupying the strategic port of Mobile, Alabama) to take charge of all Union forces holding points on the Texas Gulf coast and set up his headquarters at the port of Galveston. Chief among his responsibilities would be to “notify the people of Texas” that, under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery had ceased to exist in Texas and that “all slaves are free.”

Gordon Granger was a career U.S. Army officer and a graduate of West Point in the class of 1845 (where he finished a lackluster thirty-fifth in a class of forty-one). He had served in the Mexican War in the Mounted Rifles during Lieutenant General Winfield Scott’s lightning campaign against Mexico City in 1847, and thereafter against the Apache and Comanche in southern Texas. The outbreak of the Civil War brought a demand for anyone with professional experience, and Granger found himself quickly jumped in rank from first lieutenant to command of the 2nd Michigan Cavalry, and then brigadier general of Volunteers, and major general by 1863. One of his superiors characterized Granger as “a man of brains and courage,” but also “blunt to a degree” that would be “well nigh intolerable to strangers.” When an Alabama clergyman asked if Granger intended to require prayers for the president of the United States rather than the Confederacy, Granger sarcastically replied that since the man’s prayers had evidently done little good for Jefferson Davis, “it is no sort of consequence about your prayers, any way.” Still, he served creditably with the Army of the Cumberland at the disastrous battle of Chickamauga, and followed Ulysses Grant in the compensating victory at Chattanooga in 1863, and in 1865 he seemed the perfect choice for coordinating Union occupation of formerly Confederate Texas.

Granger began forwarding troops to Galveston immediately after Sheridan’s order. An advance contingent arrived on June 16th aboard the army transport Corinthian, and Granger arrived in Galveston himself on June 19th, on board the steamer Crescent with “two or three thousand” Union soldiers, and set up headquarters in the Osterman Building. It was at the Osterman Building and other points in Galveston that Granger’s soldiers read and distributed his General Orders No. 3, which (as Sheridan had directed him to do) declared in no uncertain terms that slavery was now over as a fact in Texas, as it had been legally since the Emancipation Proclamation was issued: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Granger even took a small step beyond the ending of slavery, by declaring that the former slaves would now enjoy “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property” with their former masters, “and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.” On the other hand, Granger did not press beyond that to announce an equality of civil rights (that would not occur until the passage and ratification of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments over the next five years). He assured Galveston’s white inhabitants that “negroes fleeing from the country to this city would not be allowed to live in idleness or become a burthen to the people,” and with his characteristic brusqueness, General Orders No. 3 counseled the freedmen “to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages” and not “to collect at military posts” in any expectation of being “supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

Granger only remained in command in Galveston until August 1st, and spent the remainder of his career until his death in 1876 in otherwise routine Army assignments in the west. But celebrations of June 19th began in Galveston with “a grand turn-out and barbeque” as early as 1866, and in 1872, four black leaders in Houston—John Henry “Jack” Yates, Richard Allen, Richard Brock, and David Elias Dibble—purchased a ten-acre “Emancipation Park” that became the focus for “Juneteenth” observations. By 1902, there were “five or six barbeques given by the colored people” in Brazos County alone, despite the sniffing disapproval of disgruntled white Texans that “our carnival-like Juneteenth outings” and “burlesque parade” should be “knocked on the head and done with”—and despite the offer by the “colored people” in 1909 to “prepare a special table for their white friends … so they may have the pleasure of entertaining them.” Juneteenth became “a second Christmas” for black Texans, with “everything especially set aside for that day.”

At first, Juneteenth was only a Texas holiday (and not even a formal state holiday until 1979, even though cities like Austin made it a municipal holiday as early as 1946) and had to compete with fifteen other emancipation holidays observed elsewhere by black Americans. The earliest of these holidays, even before the Civil War, was August 1st, in recognition of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834; yet another, in the District of Columbia, was (and is still) held on April 16th, to mark the signing of the District of Columbia emancipation bill by President Lincoln in 1862. Other holidays included the official ending of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, and the ratification date of the thirteenth amendment. The most prevalent, for decades, was January 1st—“Emancipation Day”—in remembrance of Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which featured “Watch Night” church services beginning on New Year’s Eve and lasting into January 1st.

Gradually, however, Juneteenth has superseded even January 1st in importance as a black emancipation holiday. “The way it was explained to me,” recalled one black Texan, “the 19th of June wasn’t the exact day the Negro was freed,” but “that’s the day they told them that they was free,” and they “whooped and hollered and bored holes in trees with augers and stopped it up with [gun] powder and light that, and that would be their blast for the celebration.” By the 1920s, there were Juneteenth celebrations in Shreveport, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, with “a parade through the principal downtown streets … and floats showing the gradual progress of the Negro from 1865 to 1920.” Annette Gordon-Reed, a native Texan and legal historian, recalled that, “for my great-grandmother, my grandparents, and relatives in their generation, this was the celebration of the freedom of people they had actually known.”

After World War II, black migration from the rural South to northern cities carried Juneteenth celebrations with it, and black historian Peniel Joseph recalled how “Each year we would commemorate the day, often during a Sunday service and occasionally during vacation Bible school. … I imagined myself as part of the Black Texas community, which dared to believe in dreams of freedom that were once considered impossible.” Ralph Ellison’s unfinished novel, Juneteenth, captures the fiery spirit of Juneteenth celebrations when its principal character, Reverend Hickman, describes slavery as a kind of preparation for “the awe-inspiring labor of transforming God’s Word into a lantern,” a preparation that has continued because “He wants a well-tested people to work his will,” even “a new kind of human.” Opal Lee, a retired school teacher from Ft. Worth, began staging symbolic “walks” from Ft. Worth to Washington, D.C., to advocate the designation of Juneteenth as a national holiday, and in 2021, she was rewarded by the passage of a bill creating a national Juneteenth holiday.

Juneteenth has had its ups and downs as “a red-spot day on the calendar.” The foremost chronicler of black holidays, William H. Wiggins, believed that in the 1960s, interest in Juneteenth waned to the point of evaporation, only to be re-invigorated in the 1970s. The principal irony of Juneteenth, however, is that slavery was still a legal institution in the United States on June 19, 1865—if not in Texas because of the Emancipation Proclamation, then certainly in Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery would not be blotted out until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. This would not, however, be the only irony in the history of American emancipation, and certainly not the last.

Aldon Morris on the Civil Rights movement

Here is how Morris formulates the theoretical perspective that underlies his treatment of the US civil rights movement. It is a perspective on mass mobilization and social movements that gives full attention to the ordinary human beings who were the subject of racial oppression; and it emphasizes the essential role played in mobilization by effective local and regional organizations.

In the present inquiry an indigenous perspective is used to study how the modern civil rights movement actually worked. The assumption is that mass protest is a product of the organizing efforts of activists functioning through a well-developed indigenous base. A well-developed indigenous base includes the institutions, organizations, leaders, communication networks, money, and organized masses within a dominated group. Such a base also encompasses cultural elements -- music, oratory, and so on -- of a dominated group that play a direct role in the organization and mobilization of protest.... A central concern of the indigenous perspective is to examine the ways in which organizers transform indigenous resources into power resources and marshals them in conflict situations to accomplish political ends. (xii)

As this passage makes clear, Morris places organizations and an energized mass population of black Southerners at the center of his analysis. He provides information about the SCLC, NAACP, CORE, SNCC, HFS, SCEF, and FOR -- the strategies and levers of power available to each of them, and the complicated relationships that existed among them. (Full names and dates of the organizations are provided below.)

And, significantly, Morris goes into a reasonable amount of detail describing the strategies of protest organizations and their mass followers in different locations: Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Montgomery, Nashville, Shreveport, Greensboro, Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Georgia. The Birmingham experience is described in particular detail. This use of multiple case studies is important, because it establishes that Morris is not aiming merely to provide an explanatory template of mobilization; instead, he wants to use the research tools of the historian to see how mobilization unfolded in specific times and places. And this means documenting the organizations, leaders, and strategies that were present in different places.

One relative blindspot in Origins is its inclination to be urban-centered. The bulk of the protests and activism described in the book take place in cities across the South. But the struggle for racial equality -- including especially voting rights -- had an important reality in the rural South. Morris refers briefly to the circumstances of rural black people in the Jim Crow South that made mass mobilization extremely difficult in rural locations: 

The rural setting was hardly ideal for organized, sustained collective action by blacks. In the rural milieu blacks experienced grinding poverty that closely tied them to the land and to the white man. Whites usually arranged the economy so that blacks always owed them money and were forever dependent on them for food and shelter. Outnumbered, defenseless, and with no hope of protection from the law, blacks usually avoided overt conflict with whites simply to stay alive. On the rural plantations, furthermore, blacks seldom experienced themselves as a tightly knit, cohesive group, because they were widely dispersed across the countryside. The sociologist E. Franklin Frazier described rural black communities as follows (78):

"The cabins are scattered in the open country so that the development of village communities has been impossible. Consequently, communication between rural families as well as the development of rural institutions has been limited by the wide dispersion of the population."

However, some of the most difficult developments in the struggle for equality in the South took place in rural counties (for example, Lowndes County, Alabama). This is especially true in the struggle for the right to vote, and the persistent campaigns of voter registration organized by SNCC, CORE, and other organizations were a highly important step in the progress of the movement. Here is how Hasan Kwame Jeffries describes Lowndes County in Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt:

Jim Crow was a grim reality in Lowndes County, Alabama, at the beginning of 1965. African Americans attended separate and unequal schools, lived in dilapidated and deteriorating housing, and toiled as underpaid and overworked domestics and farm laborers. They were also completely shut out of the political process.  There were five thousand African Americans of voting age in the overwhelmingly black rural county, but not a single one was registered. (Introduction)

Origins gives almost no attention to these rural voter registration drives, but they were an important part of the history of the movement. Bob Moses is mentioned once, but no detail is offered for the nuts and bolts of mobilization under these special circumstances. (It is true that much of that activism occurred after the end of Morris's narrative, which is confined to 1953-1963. The SNCC Freedom Summer initiative took place in 1964.)

The special strengths of Morris's book are its detailed focus on the workings of the major civil rights organizations during this crucial period of US history; his emphasis on the essential role played in the movement by masses of highly committed ordinary people in supporting mass meetings, boycotts, demonstrations, marches, and strikes; and the strategic and facilitating role played by the Black church in almost all of these episodes of contention. The book also does an excellent job of allowing the reader to see how the struggle for equality played out somewhat differently in different locations. Different local organizations, different leaders, and different circumstances for ordinary local people led to a fascinating degree of local variation. This use of detailed cases throughout the book offsets the inclination to subsume "struggles for Civil Rights in the South" under a single template of homogeneous processes and outcomes. There were deep similarities, of course, in the experience of the Jim Crow regime across the whole region; but there were also important local differences in the way that struggles for equality were constructed and carried out. Morris also documents the ways in which experiences in one city influenced strategies and outcomes in other cities -- for example, the successful bus boycott in Baton Rouge was influential on leaders and organizations in Montgomery when the struggle to reform the bus system came to a head in Montgomery.

Is Origins chiefly a theoretical exercise, illustrating a sociological theory of social movements? Or is it a work of historical research, making use of sociological ideas but fundamentally dependent on reaching an understanding of what the facts were about successes and failures in different parts of the South? In my view, this is what differentiates Morris's book from McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Morris's book is seriously committed to uncovering the important historical details, whereas McAdam's book is an exposition of "latest thinking" on the sociology of social movements, with illustrations drawn from the history of the Civil Rights movement. McAdam's book is historical sociology; Morris's book is sociologically informed history. Both approaches are valuable. But ideally, interested readers would read both books, and keep track of both theoretical insights about mechanisms and important but contingent features of the historical experience of places as diverse as Nashville and Baton Rouge. Each work is a perfect companion to the other for anyone interested in understanding better the course of the movement for racial equality in the United States.

And for the reader in 2023, Morris's account of the full-scale effort by southern legislatures, governors, and business groups to destroy the NAACP (26-39) and to refuse compliance with Federal court mandates is disturbingly familiar from today's headlines. Today's southern governors and legislatures are highly focused on reducing voting rights for African-Americans (gerrymandering, long lines for voting, voter ID rules, limitations on absentee ballots ...). And the war on "critical race theory" and the 1619 project sounds very much like the organized resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

-----

Here is a list of the primary organizations that Morris discusses:

Southern Christian Leadership Congress (SCLC, 1957)

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1910)

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, 1942)

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, 1960)

Highlander Folk School (HFS, 1932)

Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF, 1938)

Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR, 1915) 

Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA, 1955)

Inter Civic Council  (ICC, 1956)

Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR, 1956)

Aldon Morris on the Civil Rights movement

Here is how Morris formulates the theoretical perspective that underlies his treatment of the US civil rights movement. It is a perspective on mass mobilization and social movements that gives full attention to the ordinary human beings who were the subject of racial oppression; and it emphasizes the essential role played in mobilization by effective local and regional organizations.

In the present inquiry an indigenous perspective is used to study how the modern civil rights movement actually worked. The assumption is that mass protest is a product of the organizing efforts of activists functioning through a well-developed indigenous base. A well-developed indigenous base includes the institutions, organizations, leaders, communication networks, money, and organized masses within a dominated group. Such a base also encompasses cultural elements -- music, oratory, and so on -- of a dominated group that play a direct role in the organization and mobilization of protest.... A central concern of the indigenous perspective is to examine the ways in which organizers transform indigenous resources into power resources and marshals them in conflict situations to accomplish political ends. (xii)

As this passage makes clear, Morris places organizations and an energized mass population of black Southerners at the center of his analysis. He provides information about the SCLC, NAACP, CORE, SNCC, HFS, SCEF, and FOR -- the strategies and levers of power available to each of them, and the complicated relationships that existed among them. (Full names and dates of the organizations are provided below.)

And, significantly, Morris goes into a reasonable amount of detail describing the strategies of protest organizations and their mass followers in different locations: Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Montgomery, Nashville, Shreveport, Greensboro, Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Georgia. The Birmingham experience is described in particular detail. This use of multiple case studies is important, because it establishes that Morris is not aiming merely to provide an explanatory template of mobilization; instead, he wants to use the research tools of the historian to see how mobilization unfolded in specific times and places. And this means documenting the organizations, leaders, and strategies that were present in different places.

One relative blindspot in Origins is its inclination to be urban-centered. The bulk of the protests and activism described in the book take place in cities across the South. But the struggle for racial equality -- including especially voting rights -- had an important reality in the rural South. Morris refers briefly to the circumstances of rural black people in the Jim Crow South that made mass mobilization extremely difficult in rural locations: 

The rural setting was hardly ideal for organized, sustained collective action by blacks. In the rural milieu blacks experienced grinding poverty that closely tied them to the land and to the white man. Whites usually arranged the economy so that blacks always owed them money and were forever dependent on them for food and shelter. Outnumbered, defenseless, and with no hope of protection from the law, blacks usually avoided overt conflict with whites simply to stay alive. On the rural plantations, furthermore, blacks seldom experienced themselves as a tightly knit, cohesive group, because they were widely dispersed across the countryside. The sociologist E. Franklin Frazier described rural black communities as follows (78):

"The cabins are scattered in the open country so that the development of village communities has been impossible. Consequently, communication between rural families as well as the development of rural institutions has been limited by the wide dispersion of the population."

However, some of the most difficult developments in the struggle for equality in the South took place in rural counties (for example, Lowndes County, Alabama). This is especially true in the struggle for the right to vote, and the persistent campaigns of voter registration organized by SNCC, CORE, and other organizations were a highly important step in the progress of the movement. Here is how Hasan Kwame Jeffries describes Lowndes County in Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt:

Jim Crow was a grim reality in Lowndes County, Alabama, at the beginning of 1965. African Americans attended separate and unequal schools, lived in dilapidated and deteriorating housing, and toiled as underpaid and overworked domestics and farm laborers. They were also completely shut out of the political process.  There were five thousand African Americans of voting age in the overwhelmingly black rural county, but not a single one was registered. (Introduction)

Origins gives almost no attention to these rural voter registration drives, but they were an important part of the history of the movement. Bob Moses is mentioned once, but no detail is offered for the nuts and bolts of mobilization under these special circumstances. (It is true that much of that activism occurred after the end of Morris's narrative, which is confined to 1953-1963. The SNCC Freedom Summer initiative took place in 1964.)

The special strengths of Morris's book are its detailed focus on the workings of the major civil rights organizations during this crucial period of US history; his emphasis on the essential role played in the movement by masses of highly committed ordinary people in supporting mass meetings, boycotts, demonstrations, marches, and strikes; and the strategic and facilitating role played by the Black church in almost all of these episodes of contention. The book also does an excellent job of allowing the reader to see how the struggle for equality played out somewhat differently in different locations. Different local organizations, different leaders, and different circumstances for ordinary local people led to a fascinating degree of local variation. This use of detailed cases throughout the book offsets the inclination to subsume "struggles for Civil Rights in the South" under a single template of homogeneous processes and outcomes. There were deep similarities, of course, in the experience of the Jim Crow regime across the whole region; but there were also important local differences in the way that struggles for equality were constructed and carried out. Morris also documents the ways in which experiences in one city influenced strategies and outcomes in other cities -- for example, the successful bus boycott in Baton Rouge was influential on leaders and organizations in Montgomery when the struggle to reform the bus system came to a head in Montgomery.

Is Origins chiefly a theoretical exercise, illustrating a sociological theory of social movements? Or is it a work of historical research, making use of sociological ideas but fundamentally dependent on reaching an understanding of what the facts were about successes and failures in different parts of the South? In my view, this is what differentiates Morris's book from McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Morris's book is seriously committed to uncovering the important historical details, whereas McAdam's book is an exposition of "latest thinking" on the sociology of social movements, with illustrations drawn from the history of the Civil Rights movement. McAdam's book is historical sociology; Morris's book is sociologically informed history. Both approaches are valuable. But ideally, interested readers would read both books, and keep track of both theoretical insights about mechanisms and important but contingent features of the historical experience of places as diverse as Nashville and Baton Rouge. Each work is a perfect companion to the other for anyone interested in understanding better the course of the movement for racial equality in the United States.

And for the reader in 2023, Morris's account of the full-scale effort by southern legislatures, governors, and business groups to destroy the NAACP (26-39) and to refuse compliance with Federal court mandates is disturbingly familiar from today's headlines. Today's southern governors and legislatures are highly focused on reducing voting rights for African-Americans (gerrymandering, long lines for voting, voter ID rules, limitations on absentee ballots ...). And the war on "critical race theory" and the 1619 project sounds very much like the organized resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

-----

Here is a list of the primary organizations that Morris discusses:

Southern Christian Leadership Congress (SCLC, 1957)

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1910)

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, 1942)

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, 1960)

Highlander Folk School (HFS, 1932)

Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF, 1938)

Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR, 1915) 

Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA, 1955)

Inter Civic Council  (ICC, 1956)

Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR, 1956)

How "micro" does the sociology of social movements need to go?

Increasingly, one finds scholars from various countries and nominally different theoretical traditions emphasizing the importance of the same three broad sets of factors in analyzing the origins of collective action. These three factors are: 1) the political opportunities and constraints confronting a given challenger; 2) the forms of organization (informal as well as formal) available to insurgents as sites for initial mobilization; and 3) the collective processes of interpretation, attribution and social construction that mediate between opportunity and action. (viii)

And McAdam holds that these three factors help to account for the dramatic rise in Civil Rights activism, protest, and strategic choices of the movement across the South in the 1950s into the early 1960s. He asks the key question: “What led normally accepting African-Americans both in Montgomery and throughout the South to risk their livelihoods and their lives in support of civil rights?”. This is the theoretically central issue of mobilization: what factors facilitate mass mobilization around a set of interests or grievances?

Given the diversity of local situations in cities, towns, and farms across the South, we can speculate that the answer to this question will be different in different locales. But significantly, McAdam provides very little "micro-sociology" of the development of engagement on the part of ordinary African-American people making their lives in various places. He writes about the significance of churches, colleges, and the NAACP as "the organizational base of the movement" (125), but he goes into little detail about the activities and resources associated with these institutions and organizations. He writes:

Representing the most organized segments of the southern black population, the churches, colleges, and local NAACP chapters possessed the resources needed to generate and sustain an organized campaign of social insurgency. (128)

But how did these organizations actually act during the critical period; how were their actions different in different settings; and how did this influence rising activism on the part of ordinary people? What were the local processes that led to local mobilizations? His answer is a general one:

On one level, then, the importance of the churches, schools, and NAACP chapters in the generation of insurgency can be attributed to their role as established interactional networks facilitating the "bloc recruitment" of movement participants. That is, by building the movement out of established institutions, insurgent leaders were able to recruit en masse along existing lines of interaction, thereby sparing themselves the much more difficult task of developing a membership from scratch. (129)

This is a general formulation of a social mechanism. But it is not a specific and factual account of "recruitment" in a particular time and place -- for example, Montgomery prior to the bus boycott. Rather, McAdam emphasizes the idea that ordinary people saw it as their church-created duty to participate in protest. McAdam treats the church, colleges, and local chapters of the NAACP chiefly as "network" sites, where potential participants in the activist movement were located, where they further developed their claims and commitments, and where they encouraged each other in protest.

The general hypotheses provided within the current literature of contentious politics is valuable enough. But we would like to know more about variation: were the dynamics of the Black church different in Montgomery and Little Rock? Were local NAACP chapters different in their behavior or engagement, and did these differences result in differences in level and kind of activism in their surrounding communities?

Social historians of the Civil Rights movement go into much more granular detail about the movement. In greater or lesser detail, the social historians provide readers with insight into specific episodes of mobilization, conflict, and adjustment. They provide us with relatively detailed case studies of these episodes, with a reasonable amount of detail about background circumstances, existing organizations, the leadership available to the black community, instigating events, and the level of grievance and activism present in the population. For example, Aldon Morris's Origins of the Civil Rights Movement provides substantial detail about the individuals, leaders, and organizations that played important roles in the mobilization of support for movement goals in a variety of locations; Hasan Kwame Jeffries' excellent book, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt describes the origins of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization among black rural "tenant farmers"; and Lance Hill's Deacons for Defense does similar work in his analysis of the mobilization of rural African-American people in organized self-defense. A detailed history of particular episodes -- the Montgomery bus boycott, voter registration drives in rural Mississippi, 1960 (link) -- would give the reader of McAdam's book a much more substantial understanding of the mechanisms and processes through which activism and insurgency worked out through ordinary people and local institutions. But there is very little of this kind of detail in McAdam's treatment of the Civil Rights movement. For all its emphasis on the need for accounts of the specific mechanisms through which mobilization, coordination, and protest occurred, not very much concrete detail is provided in the study. The level of aggregation at which McAdam's analysis proceeds is "the South"; whereas we might imagine that the real nuts and bolts of the movement took place in places as diverse as Selma, Little Rock, Montgomery, and the cotton fields and hamlets of Lowndes County.

This really is the point of the discussion here. McAdam's book functions largely to lay out "theories of the middle range" about the factors that facilitate or inhibit mobilization around shared grievances, and he illustrates these theories with examples from the history of civil rights activism in the South during the time period. The central interest of the book is theoretical and explanatory, and it is illuminating. But we can imagine a different kind of study that would incorporate much more attention to the specifics of the processes and events of mobilization in various places across the South. Such a study would result in a book consisting of a handful of moderately detailed case studies, along with sociological commentary on the events and processes that are uncovered in these various episodes. 

It is suggestive that Dynamics of Contention, co-authored in 2001 by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, takes just such an approach -- sociological theorizing embedded within detailed exposition of important case studies of contention. And given the emphasis that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly give in the 2001 book on contingency and variation across cases, we might argue that McAdam's study of the Civil Rights movement is couched at too high a level of generalization after all. It would be more instructive if it provided a more granular account of a number of episodes of mobilization, including successes and failures. (This is the reason for returning to Alain Touraine's research on the Polish Solidarity movement (post): Touraine's team did in fact engage in a granular and disaggregated study of the many strands of organization and activism that contributed ultimately to the national Solidarity movement.)

How "micro" does the sociology of social movements need to go?

Increasingly, one finds scholars from various countries and nominally different theoretical traditions emphasizing the importance of the same three broad sets of factors in analyzing the origins of collective action. These three factors are: 1) the political opportunities and constraints confronting a given challenger; 2) the forms of organization (informal as well as formal) available to insurgents as sites for initial mobilization; and 3) the collective processes of interpretation, attribution and social construction that mediate between opportunity and action. (viii)

And McAdam holds that these three factors help to account for the dramatic rise in Civil Rights activism, protest, and strategic choices of the movement across the South in the 1950s into the early 1960s. He asks the key question: “What led normally accepting African-Americans both in Montgomery and throughout the South to risk their livelihoods and their lives in support of civil rights?”. This is the theoretically central issue of mobilization: what factors facilitate mass mobilization around a set of interests or grievances?

Given the diversity of local situations in cities, towns, and farms across the South, we can speculate that the answer to this question will be different in different locales. But significantly, McAdam provides very little "micro-sociology" of the development of engagement on the part of ordinary African-American people making their lives in various places. He writes about the significance of churches, colleges, and the NAACP as "the organizational base of the movement" (125), but he goes into little detail about the activities and resources associated with these institutions and organizations. He writes:

Representing the most organized segments of the southern black population, the churches, colleges, and local NAACP chapters possessed the resources needed to generate and sustain an organized campaign of social insurgency. (128)

But how did these organizations actually act during the critical period; how were their actions different in different settings; and how did this influence rising activism on the part of ordinary people? What were the local processes that led to local mobilizations? His answer is a general one:

On one level, then, the importance of the churches, schools, and NAACP chapters in the generation of insurgency can be attributed to their role as established interactional networks facilitating the "bloc recruitment" of movement participants. That is, by building the movement out of established institutions, insurgent leaders were able to recruit en masse along existing lines of interaction, thereby sparing themselves the much more difficult task of developing a membership from scratch. (129)

This is a general formulation of a social mechanism. But it is not a specific and factual account of "recruitment" in a particular time and place -- for example, Montgomery prior to the bus boycott. Rather, McAdam emphasizes the idea that ordinary people saw it as their church-created duty to participate in protest. McAdam treats the church, colleges, and local chapters of the NAACP chiefly as "network" sites, where potential participants in the activist movement were located, where they further developed their claims and commitments, and where they encouraged each other in protest.

The general hypotheses provided within the current literature of contentious politics is valuable enough. But we would like to know more about variation: were the dynamics of the Black church different in Montgomery and Little Rock? Were local NAACP chapters different in their behavior or engagement, and did these differences result in differences in level and kind of activism in their surrounding communities?

Social historians of the Civil Rights movement go into much more granular detail about the movement. In greater or lesser detail, the social historians provide readers with insight into specific episodes of mobilization, conflict, and adjustment. They provide us with relatively detailed case studies of these episodes, with a reasonable amount of detail about background circumstances, existing organizations, the leadership available to the black community, instigating events, and the level of grievance and activism present in the population. For example, Aldon Morris's Origins of the Civil Rights Movement provides substantial detail about the individuals, leaders, and organizations that played important roles in the mobilization of support for movement goals in a variety of locations; Hasan Kwame Jeffries' excellent book, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt describes the origins of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization among black rural "tenant farmers"; and Lance Hill's Deacons for Defense does similar work in his analysis of the mobilization of rural African-American people in organized self-defense. A detailed history of particular episodes -- the Montgomery bus boycott, voter registration drives in rural Mississippi, 1960 (link) -- would give the reader of McAdam's book a much more substantial understanding of the mechanisms and processes through which activism and insurgency worked out through ordinary people and local institutions. But there is very little of this kind of detail in McAdam's treatment of the Civil Rights movement. For all its emphasis on the need for accounts of the specific mechanisms through which mobilization, coordination, and protest occurred, not very much concrete detail is provided in the study. The level of aggregation at which McAdam's analysis proceeds is "the South"; whereas we might imagine that the real nuts and bolts of the movement took place in places as diverse as Selma, Little Rock, Montgomery, and the cotton fields and hamlets of Lowndes County.

This really is the point of the discussion here. McAdam's book functions largely to lay out "theories of the middle range" about the factors that facilitate or inhibit mobilization around shared grievances, and he illustrates these theories with examples from the history of civil rights activism in the South during the time period. The central interest of the book is theoretical and explanatory, and it is illuminating. But we can imagine a different kind of study that would incorporate much more attention to the specifics of the processes and events of mobilization in various places across the South. Such a study would result in a book consisting of a handful of moderately detailed case studies, along with sociological commentary on the events and processes that are uncovered in these various episodes. 

It is suggestive that Dynamics of Contention, co-authored in 2001 by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, takes just such an approach -- sociological theorizing embedded within detailed exposition of important case studies of contention. And given the emphasis that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly give in the 2001 book on contingency and variation across cases, we might argue that McAdam's study of the Civil Rights movement is couched at too high a level of generalization after all. It would be more instructive if it provided a more granular account of a number of episodes of mobilization, including successes and failures. (This is the reason for returning to Alain Touraine's research on the Polish Solidarity movement (post): Touraine's team did in fact engage in a granular and disaggregated study of the many strands of organization and activism that contributed ultimately to the national Solidarity movement.)

Moving Beyond the Good Ol’ Boys Club: Recent Trends in Women’s Representation in State Legislatures

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— The percentage of women in state legislatures has increased in recent years. However, there is still a significant gender gap in most states as women have not reached parity in representation.

— The majority of women in state legislatures are Democrats. While more Republican women ran for office in 2022 than in previous years, that didn’t amount to closing the gender gap in representation.

— The percentage of women in state legislatures has increased more in Western and Northeastern states than in Midwestern and Southern states. This is likely due to a number of factors, including the political climate, the level of motivation and activism among women, and the availability of resources for women’s campaigns.

Changes in legislatures

In a special election on May 16, Democrats maintained a narrow majority in the Pennsylvania House of Delegates. As a result, the party will be able to continue to exert control over how the lower chamber of the state legislature will handle reproductive, gun, and voting rights legislation. With Republicans still holding the Pennsylvania Senate, the House could also provide an assist to Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro in budget negotiations. In House District 163, Democratic candidate Heather Boyd defeated Republican candidate Katie Ford for a vacancy created by Democratic Rep. Mike Zabel, who resigned from the legislature after multiple people, including a lobbyist and other lawmakers accused him of sexual harassment. That two women vied for the House seat is a sign of change for a state legislature that has been accused in the past by other women lawmakers of having a paternalistic culture and being an “Old Boys Club.”

But it’s not just Pennsylvania that’s changing. In early April, as the Tennessee House was about to vote on expulsion resolutions for Reps. Justin Pearson (D-Memphis), Justin Jones (D-Nashville), and Gloria Johnson (D-Knoxville) for leading a protest against gun violence on the House floor on March 30, Johnson told her colleagues in the state legislature that they should welcome a new generation of lawmakers who are going to look and do things differently because they “are fighting like hell” for their constituents. Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a bill that would ban abortion around the 6th week of pregnancy failed to get a crucial 33rd vote to break a filibuster in the technically nonpartisan and unicameral state legislature when Republican Sen. Merv Riepe abstained. When Riepe got pushback on an amendment he introduced to extend the proposed ban from 6 to 12 weeks, he told his Republican colleagues that reproductive rights will have women voting them out of office. He offered as evidence his own narrowing margins of victory against a Democratic woman challenger in a post-Dobbs election as a preview of what’s to come. In South Carolina, where women make up only 11% of the upper chamber, the opposition of all five women, including three Republicans, led to the failure of a near-total abortion ban by a 22-21 vote in April. While a comparatively less strict fetal heartbeat ban did eventually pass in May with the continued opposition of the five women, that they were able to prevent the passage of a stricter bill is another example of how women in decision-making positions can impact policy outcomes.

These vignettes got me thinking about how representation in state legislatures is (or is not) changing and prompted us to do a series examining trends. In this first installment, I examine how women’s representation has changed in American state legislatures since 1975. To analyze change in women’s representation in state legislatures from 1975 to 2023, I compiled data from several sources, including the National Conference of State Legislatures, Ballotpedia, and the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. Political science scholarship has shown that descriptive representation matters. Specifically, scholarship on gender and politics has shown that men and women have different policy preferences, and that female legislators are more likely to emphasize women’s issues and adopt women-friendly policies (see a good review of the literature here).

Now and then

According to CAWP, the number of women serving in state legislatures has more than quintupled since 1971. Figure 1 shows the change in the percentage of women legislators in lower legislative chambers of all 50 states between 1975 and 2023. Readers can hover over each state to see pop-ups with additional information for each state, including a breakdown of women legislators by party each year. Note: Nebraska has a unicameral legislature, but I include it in both upper and lower chamber figures for comparison.

Figure 1: Change in women members in lower chambers, 1975-2023

Figure 2 shows the percentage of women legislators in upper legislative chambers of all 50 states between 1975 and 2023. Readers can hover over each state to see pop-ups with additional information for each state, including a breakdown of women legislators by party each year (again, unicameral Nebraska is included on both figures).

Figure 2: Change in women members in upper chambers, 1975-2023

Although it didn’t receive much national news media attention, women scored big in the 2022 elections for state legislative seats. As of this year, almost one-third of state legislators are women, and there is a record number of women serving in state legislatures. Maps 1 and 2 below are shaded by the percentage of women’s representation in upper and lower chambers for each state as of 2023. As Map 1 shows, Nevada has the highest percentage of women serving (61.9%) in lower legislative chambers, while Mississippi has the lowest (11%). Map 2 shows that Nevada also has the highest percentage of women in upper chambers (61.9%), while South Carolina has the lowest (10.9%).

While the increase in representation is a positive sign, there is still a significant gender gap in most states. Women have reached parity in representation in just 3 lower state legislative chambers (Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada) and in just 3 upper chambers (Arizona, New Hampshire, and Nevada). Compare that to the fact that women make up about 50.7% of the population nationally, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Women also have higher reported voter registration and voting rates than men for every federal election since 1984, according to data from the Current Population Survey.

As of 2022, the most recent year for which race and ethnicity data is available, the majority of women legislators are white (73.2%). Women of color make up 24.6% of women legislators, with Black women comprising 16.1%, Latinas 6.7%, Middle Eastern .5%, and Native American/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian 1.3%.

Map 1: Women’s representation in lower legislative chambers, 2023

Map 2: Women’s representation in upper legislative chambers, 2023

Maps 1 and 2 contain pop-up information with additional details by state, including the percentage point change from 2010 to 2023 of women serving in upper and lower chambers. The change in the percentage of women in lower legislative chambers since 2010 ranges from a decrease of 9 percentage points in West Virginia to an increase of 31 percentage points in Nevada. The top 10 states with the greatest percentage point increase in women’s representation in lower legislative chambers are Nevada (+30.9 percentage points), Oregon (+21.6), New Mexico (+21.4), Rhode Island (+20), Colorado (+19.9), Delaware (+19.5), Virginia (+19), Washington (+18.4), Florida (+17.5), and Kentucky (+17). Lower legislative chambers in 6 states experienced no growth or decline: Wyoming (0 pp increase), Kansas (-2.4), North Carolina (-4.2), Mississippi (-4.9), Tennessee (-6.1) and West Virginia (-9), all of which are controlled by Republicans.

Not surprisingly, it has been more challenging for women to break barriers in upper legislative chambers than lower chambers. While women’s representation has increased in 40 of 50 states since 2010, there are still states with relatively low percentages of women serving in the upper chamber. Women have 20% or less of representation in 10 states, all controlled by Republicans: South Carolina (10.9%), Alabama (11.4%), West Virginia (11.8%), Louisiana (12.8%), Arkansas (14.2%), North Dakota (17%), Indiana (18%), Mississippi (19.2%), Utah (20.7%), and Oklahoma (20.8%). And our home base of Virginia, which will have legislative elections later this year, is just barely ahead, with 22.5% of women in the Democratic-controlled state Senate.

There are 10 states that experienced an increase of 15 percentage points or more in women’s representation in upper legislative chambers since 2010: Nevada (+28.6 percentage points), Rhode Island (+23.6), North Carolina (+20), Illinois (+18.7), Florida (+17.5), Wyoming (+16.6), Nebraska (unicameral, +16.3), Michigan (+15.8), New York (+15.7), and California (+15). Upper legislative chambers in 10 states experienced no growth or decline since 2010: Delaware (0 percentage point increase), Hawaii (0), Massachusetts (0), Tennessee (0), Arkansas (-2.9), Colorado (-3), Oregon (-3.3), New Hampshire (-4.1), Alabama (-5.6), Minnesota (-7.5), Indiana (-12), and Louisiana (-12.8).

Why the variation?

The variation in the percentage of women in state legislatures and change can be attributed to a variety of factors, including the political climate, the level of motivation and activism among women, and the availability of resources for women to run and serve in office.

Since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election and as issues affecting women’s rights to self-determination have been at the forefront in the last couple election cycles, there has been a renewed interest for women to run for office and serve in politics. In general, there have been more efforts to recruit and train Democratic candidates to run for office. However, the Republican Party is doing a better job of recruiting women than in the past. In 2022, the Republican State Leadership Committee reported that 769 Republican women and minority candidates were elected to state legislative positions, an increase over 2020. The RSLC also said that it spent $5.3 million recruiting, training, and supporting diverse candidates. While more Republican women ran for office in 2022 than in previous years, that didn’t amount to closing the gender gap in representation, especially in Republican-controlled legislatures in the South. As of 2023, one-third of all women state legislators are Republican, and Republican women account for 10.9% of all state legislators.

Overall, the increase in women elected to state legislatures has particularly come from the Democratic Party, with 1,580 Democratic women lawmakers serving in upper and lower state legislative chambers. Two-thirds of all women legislators are Democrats, and Democratic women account for 21.4% of all state legislators. The biggest increase for Democratic women legislators occurred in the 2018 election cycle — we’ll call that the Trump effect.

In addition to the political parties, there are organizations and PACs at the national and state levels focused on recruiting and supporting women. I reviewed a database of organizations that CAWP maintains and found that the majority of the organizations are nonpartisan (65.7%), while 20.5% of them are Democratic-affiliated and 13.8% are Republican-affiliated. Organizations with a national focus make up 15.3% of the total, and the remaining are state-focused (including state-based chapters of national organizations). California (6.2% of all organizations) and Texas (4.2%) stand out with the greatest percentage of state-based organizations. Still, not all women who go through political leadership programs run for office. And the percentage of organizations in a state doesn’t translate to parity.

Conclusions

Good politics and policy depend on diverse perspectives and lived experiences, but women remain underrepresented at all levels of government. As this analysis shows, the number of women in state legislatures is increasing, and this is a positive trend. However, as this analysis also demonstrates, progress is not a given and there are clearly states where more attention to closing the gender gap in representation is needed.

For women to achieve parity in representation, there are structural challenges that states can address, including for example, by increasing salaries for legislators and providing stipends for childcare. There are also ways in which political parties and organizations can address the challenges women and other minoritized candidates face by expanding recruitment, encouragement, and training efforts, while increasing financial support for women to run for office. Openings and incumbency are also issues, and may require encouraging more women to challenge candidates from their own parties in primaries.