There was a time when African American political culture in the Jim Crow South could be framed in terms of a polar debate between the accommodationist disciples of Booker T. Washington and the advocates of a more assertive brand of protest politics typified by W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. From this perspective, the disenfranchisement of African American men at the turn of the twentieth century marked the end of mass black politics in the South and its replacement with two rival forms of elite politics: one that emphasized private deal making with white paternalists and one that called for public protest against the indignities of Jim Crow. Eventually, as this story goes, groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which advocated public resistance to white supremacy, triumphed over the accommodationists, thereby planting the seeds for the civil rights revolution of the...

You do not currently have access to this content.