WINNER OF THE LILLIAN SMITH BOOK AWARD John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, this biography explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director. Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners.

Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. In Banking on Freedom, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores this rich period of black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women. Banking on Freedom offers an unparalleled account of how black women carved out economic, social, and political power in contexts shaped by sexism, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation. Garrett-Scott chronicles both the bank’s success and the challenges this success wrought, including extralegal violence and aggressive oversight from state actors who saw black economic autonomy as a threat to both democratic capitalism and the social order. The teller cage and boardroom became sites of activism and resistance as the leadership of president Maggie Lena Walker and other women board members kept the bank grounded in meeting the needs of working-class black women. The first book to center black women’s engagement with the elite sectors of banking, finance, and insurance, Banking on Freedom reveals the ways gender, race, and class shaped the meanings of wealth and risk in U.S. capitalism and society.

WINNER OF THE LILLIAN SMITH BOOK AWARD John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, this biography explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director. Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners.

This book is the first systematic scholarly study on the business history of Turkey from the nineteenth century until the present. It aims to place the distinctive characteristics of capitalism in Turkey within a global and comparative perspective, dealing with three related issues. First, it examines the institutional context that shaped the capitalist development in Turkey. Second, it focuses on the corporate actors, entrepreneurs and business enterprises that have led the national economic growth. Third, it explores the ethical foundations and social responsibility of business enterprises in the country. The comparative and historical approach sets the volume apart from previous books on the subject. Business, Ethics and Institutions aims to strengthen scholarly and policy understanding of Turkish capitalism and the diversified business groups which dominate the economy by providing a deep analysis of the evolution of political and social institutions which shaped corporate activity. It demonstrates the key role played by large family-owned business groups in Turkey’s development. It also seeks to identify both the similarities and the differences in the Turkish pattern of economic development, making comparisons with Japan, an early example of catch-up, and a more successful model than Turkey. The comparative perspective makes the book highly relevant to a wide range of scholars interested in the institutional foundations of modern capitalism and will be of value to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of business and economic history, ethics, organizational studies, and entrepreneurship.

What happened to the Democratic Party after the 1960s? In many political histories, the McGovern defeat of 1972 announced the party’s decline—and the conservative movement’s ascent. What the conventional narrative neglects, Patrick Andelic submits, is the role of Congress in the party’s, and the nation’s, political fortunes. In Donkey Work, Andelic looks at Congress from 1974 to 1994 as the Democratic Party’s stronghold and explores how this twenty-year tenure boosted and undermined the party’s response to the conservative challenge. If post-1960s America belongs to the conservative movement, Andelic asks, how do we account for the failure of so much of the conservative agenda—especially the shrinking of the federal government? Examining the Democratic Party’s unusual durability in Congress after 1974, Donkey Work disrupts the narrative of inexorable liberal decline since the 1970s and reveals the ways in which liberalism and conservatism actually developed in tandem. The book traces the evolution of ideologies within the Democratic Party, particularly the emergence of “neoliberalism,” suggesting that this political philosophy was as much an anticipation of America’s “right turn” as a reaction to it; as factions vied for control of the party, Congress itself both strengthened and weakened liberal resistance to the conservative movement. By putting the focus on Congress and legislative politics, in contrast to the “presidential synthesis” that dominates US political history, Andelic’s book offers a new, deeply informed perspective on two turbulent decades of American politics—a perspective that alters and expands our understanding of how we arrived at our present political moment.

Louis Austin (1898–1971) came of age at the nadir of the Jim Crow era and became a transformative leader of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina. From 1927 to 1971, he published and edited the Carolina Times, the preeminent black newspaper in the state. He used the power of the press to voice the anger of black Carolinians, and to turn that anger into action in a forty-year crusade for freedom. In this biography, Jerry Gershenhorn chronicles Austin's career as a journalist and activist, highlighting his work during the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar civil rights movement. Austin helped pioneer radical tactics during the Depression, including antisegregation lawsuits, boycotts of segregated movie theaters and white-owned stores that refused to hire black workers, and African American voting rights campaigns based on political participation in the Democratic Party. In examining Austin's life, Gershenhorn narrates the story of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a new vantage point, shedding new light on the vitality of black protest and the black press in the twentieth century.