Black Ballots is an in-depth look at suffrage expansion in the South from World War II through the Johnson administration. Steven Lawson focuses on the "Second Reconstruction"-the struggle of blacks to gain political power in the South through the ballot-which both whites and black perceived to be a key element in the civil rights process. Examining the struggle of civil rights groups to enfranchise Negroes, Lawson also analyzes the responses of federal and local officials to those efforts. He describes the various techniques-from the white primary, the poll tax, literacy tests, and restrictive registration procedures through sheer intimidation-that were developed by white southerners to perpetuate disfranchisement and the sundry methods used by blacks and their white allies to challenge them.

If postmortems of the 2016 US presidential election tell us anything, it's that many voters discriminate on the basis of race, which raises an important question: in a society that outlaws racial discrimination in employment, housing, and jury selections, should voters be permitted to racially discriminate in selecting a candidate for public office? In Whitelash, Terry Smith argues that such racialized decision-making is unlawful and that remedies exist to deter this reactionary behavior. Using evidence of race-based voting in the 2016 presidential election, Smith deploys legal analogies to demonstrate how courts can decipher when groups of voters have been impermissibly influenced by race, and impose appropriate remedies. This groundbreaking work should be read by anyone interested in how the legal system can re-direct American democracy away from the ongoing electoral scourge that many feared 2016 portended.