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This pioneering work brings together for the first time in a single reference work all of the extant, fugitive, and recently discovered registration data on African American voters from Colonial America to the present. It features election returns for African American presidential, senatorial, congressional, and gubernatorial candidates over time. Rich, insightful narrative explains the data and traces the history of the laws dealing with the enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of African Americans. Topics covered include: - The contributions of statistical pioneers including Monroe Work, W.E.B. DuBois and Ralph Bunche - African American organizations, like the NAACP and National Equal Rights League (NERL) - Pioneering African American officeholders, including the few before the Civil War - Four influxes of African American voters: Reconstruction (Southern African American men), the Fifteenth Amendment (African American men across the country), the Nineteenth Amendment (African American female voters in 1920 election), and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - The historical development of disenfranchisement in the South and the statistical impact of the tools of disenfranchisement: literacy clauses, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses. The African-American Electorate features more than 300 tables, 150 figures, and 50 maps, many of which have been created exclusively for this work using demographic, voter registration, election return, and racial precinct data that have never been collected and assembled for the public. An appendix includes popular and electoral voting data for African-American presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial candidates, and a comprehensive bibliography indicates major topic areas and eras concerning the African-American electorate. The African American Electorate offers students and researchers the opportunity, for the first time, to explore the relationship between voters and political candidates, identify critical variables, and situate African Americans' voting behavior and political phenomena in the context of America's political history.

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award An award–winning constitutional law historian examines case–based evidence of the court's longstanding racial bias (often under the guise of "states rights") to reveal how that prejudice has allowed the court to solidify its position as arguably the most powerful branch of the federal government. One promise of democracy is the right of every citizen to vote. And yet, from our founding, strong political forces were determined to limit that right. The Supreme Court, Alexander Hamilton wrote, would protect the weak against this very sort of tyranny. Still, as On Account of Race forcefully demonstrates, through the better part of American history the Court has instead been a protector of white rule. And complex threats against the right to vote persist even today. Beginning in 1876, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled both the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment and what seemed to be the right to vote in the Fifteenth. And so a half million African Americans across the South who had risked their lives and property to be allowed to cast ballots were stricken from voting rolls by white supremacists. This vacuum allowed for the rise of Jim Crow. None of this was done in the shadows—those determined to wrest the vote from black Americans could not have been more boastful in either intent or execution. On Account of Race tells the story of an American tragedy, the only occasion in United States history in which a group of citizens who had been granted the right to vote then had it stripped away. It is a warning that the right to vote is fragile and must be carefully guarded and actively preserved lest American democracy perish.