Assessing black political power from the start of the civil rights era to the aftermath of the 2004 election, Walters (Black Presidential Politics in America
) shows how the ongoing struggle for black voting power involves not just heroic individuals, but black-led committees and networks, some famous, some little known. Compared to the early 1960s, there are many more African-Americans in local office and in Congress, but black influence on presidential politics, Walters argues, comes only through "leverage"—when black primary candidates get enough power to bargain with the Democratic party and its nominee. The "new, bold and exciting" Jackson campaigns of 1984 (on which Walters worked) and 1988 did just that, in part because black churches supported them, in part because they felt like grassroots movements. Walters also illuminates recent electoral failures: in 2004, "difficulties Blacks experienced in attempting to vote were caused not by the mechanical aspects of voting but by human interference." Walters's prose can sound inflated or vague (he wants to "determine the impact of macro-system issues"), but his combination of statistics, theory, history and analysis puts a lot of crucial information in one place. (July)
