I Shared the Dream: The Pride, Passion, and Politics of the First Black Woman Senator from Kentucky

I Shared the Dream: The Pride, Passion, and Politics of the First Black Woman Senator from Kentucky Review

In this landmark autobiography by one of the very first women treated as a peer by the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, former Kentucky State Senator Georgia Davis breaks her long silence to reveal her fascinating life story, including the truth regarding her often hinted about relationship with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A veteran of the Selma and Frankfort marches, she reveals new insights not only on King, but also on Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Vernon Jordan, Benjamin Hooks, and others. She also cast new lights, from the feminine perspective, on the influence of the Baptist Ministry and the role of women in the Civil Rights Movement.

Named "one of the black women who changed America" and "one of the 50 who made Kentucky', she recounts her extraordinary journey from the two-room cabin where she was born the niece of a Wilson County slave, to the Senate floor where when introduced and championed such bills as the first Open Housing Law in Kentucky, Displaced Homemaker Legislation, and Prohibition of Employment Discrimination; the call from King on his way to Memphis - "Senator, I need you, please come" - and her memories of the tragedy at the Lorraine Hotel.

I Shared the Dream is an important book with a compelling new vision of a major period in history, and the remarkable woman who was part of it

Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938-1965 (Making the Modern South)

Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938-1965 (Making the Modern South) Review

Winner of the D. B. Hardeman Prize for Congressional History

Few historical events lend themselves to such a sharp delineation between right and wrong as does the civil rights struggle. Consequently, many historical accounts of white resistance to civil rights legislation emphasize the ferocity of the opposition, from the Ole Miss riots to the depredations of Eugene "Bull" Conner's Birmingham police force to George Wallace's stand on the schoolhouse steps. While such hostile episodes frequently occurred in the Jim Crow South, civil rights adversaries also employed other, less confrontational but remarkably successful, tactics to deny equal rights to black Americans. In Delaying the Dream, Keith M. Finley explores gradations in the opposition by examining how the region's principal national spokesmen--its United States senators--addressed themselves to the civil rights question and developed a concerted plan of action to thwart legislation: the use of strategic delay.

Prior to World War II, Finley explains, southern senators recognized the fall of segregation as inevitable and consciously changed their tactics to delay, rather than prevent, defeat, enabling them to frustrate civil rights advances for decades. As public support for civil rights grew, southern senators transformed their arguments to limit the use of overt racism and appeal to northerners. They granted minor concessions on bills only tangentially related to civil rights while emasculating those with more substantive provisions. They garnered support by nationalizing their defense of sectional interests and linked their defense of segregation with constitutional principles to curry favor with non-southern politicians. While the senators achieved success at the federal level, Finley shows, they failed to challenge local racial agitators in the South, allowing extremism to flourish. The escalation of white assaults on peaceful protesters in the 1950s and 1960s finally prompted northerners to question southern claims of tranquility under Jim Crow. When they did, segregation came under direct attack, and the principles that had informed strategic delay became obsolete.

Finley's analysis goes beyond traditional images of the quest for racial equality--the heroic struggle, the southern extremism, the filibusters--to reveal another side to the conflict. By focusing on strategic delay and the senators' foresight in recognizing the need for this tactic, Delaying the Dream adds a fresh perspective to the canon on the civil rights era in modern American history.