Making Race, Making Power: North Carolina's Road to Disfranchisement

By: Kent Redding

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Synopsis: In this groundbreaking study, Kent Redding examines the fluid political landscape of the nineteenth-century South, revealing the complex interplay between the elite’s manipulation of political and racial identity and the innovative mobilizing strategies marginalized groups adopted in order to combat disfranchisement. Far from being a low-level, localized trend, the struggle for power in North Carolina would be felt across the entire country as race-and class-based organizing challenged the dominant models of making and holding power. Redding reveals how the ruling class operates with motivations and methods very similar to those of the black voters and Populist farmers they fought against. He tracks how the elites co-opted the innovative mobilizing strategies of the subaltern groups to effectively use their own weapons against them. At the core of Making Race, Making Power is an insightful dissection of the concrete connections between political strategies of solidarity and exclusion and underlying patterns of race relations.