Traditional notions of national politics in the years after the civil rights movement state that the Democratic Party lost its hold on its established southern base and retreated as a liberal party of the North due to LBJ's overt support for the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). In this narrative Nixon's southern strategy in 1968 began to successfully peel the old Confederate states away from the Democratic Party and into a Republican Party orbit for the first time by deliberately adopting policies that would appeal to those in the South who were uncomfortable with civil rights and those who feared where it might lead. Boyd's study of Georgia Democrats and state politics and Musgrove's examination of the harassment of black elected officials by the federal government both explore this narrative, albeit from distinct perspectives.

Boyd's study focusses on how the Democratic Party in Georgia survived and adapted to civil rights debates. This “perception that the Democratic Party collapsed in the South … has had far-reaching consequences for our view of the contemporary South” especially in politics, and rather than a new and more liberal South emerging in the 1970s from the ashes of Jim Crow a “pathologically conservative region” was seen to emerge (3). However, Boyd argues that this is too simple a view and obscures a vibrant Democratic Party of the New South that attempted to reconcile itself to civil rights. While the height of this New South may have been with Carter's election of 1976, the longer-term changes date back to the 1930s. New South concepts in the 1930s were based on ideas of more education funding and reforming its political system to enable greater prosperity so that the south could remove itself as the “nation's number one economic problem” (9). The constant challenge presented to reformist Democrats was that any changes affected the one-party system in the South, albeit the crux of the issue always came down to race.

Boyd's work is a detailed tome and his main argument reflects on the electoral system of Georgia that led to all manner of polarized outcomes in elections which did not always necessarily reflect the electorate's more nuanced views. Indeed, any reforms undertaken by the Democratic Party often led to conservative Democratic politicians being elected, thus leading the way for Republican Party advances later. The careful detail that Boyd undertakes in explaining the unit system of elections is a real strength of the book – although it also makes it a highly specialized text that I cannot imagine maintaining an appeal beyond a narrow academic niche. The short explanation is that the US Supreme Court Brown decision of 1954 on desegregating schools had a significant impact on politics in Georgia, essentially in rallying “the white electorate behind a policy of massive resistance to civil rights” (85) and temporarily halting political reforms in the state. Brown elevated “race to the number one concern of the electorate” which favoured Regulars (racially conservative Democrats), while Loyalists (reform-minded Democrats) wanted to keep the “debate centered on education and the economy” (86). Boyd suggests that while this was a stalemate for “several years” it was actually a “short-lived advantage” (87) and this conservative unity was a “façade” (89). That this was an aberration in Georgian politics is a key contention of Boyd's thesis. However, while Boyd gives detailed explanations it is difficult not to conclude that race was the number one issue in Georgian, southern and national politics – not just in the civil rights era but before and, most definitely, after. The tension was often between “racial traditionalism” and “economic modernization” of the South, although it is difficult not to be persuaded that race invariably lost out. Julian Bond's election to the Georgian state legislature and subsequent rejection from that body and Republican Barry Goldwater's winning of Georgia in the 1964 presidential election show the profound issue of race in the south. Carter as governor and as a presidential candidate had to marginalize race so as not to alienate the polarizing electorates of the 1970s (210–11); indeed, Carter defeated a modernist as governor in 1966 by his “common man” campaign and an “occasionally racially charged strategy” (153). The South eventually tended toward ideas of a “color blind” political strategy which, Boyd states, has meant “conservative color blindness” (12) – essentially ignoring race whenever possible – which was a familiar historical position for the American nation to take as a whole. Race was omnipresent, therefore, despite all of Boyd's detail of electoral systems and the attempts to modernize the regional economy. By 1976 Carter could “openly associate with the leadership of the civil rights movement” despite “whatever racial preferences southern voters still held” (241) to win ten of the eleven southern states. Carter could be for desegregation, therefore, but against “forced bussing” (249), which meant little further momentum for civil rights in the 1970s.

Musgrove's book deals with the direct impact of race and American politics in the immediate post-civil rights era and concludes with the start of the Clinton administration in 1993 – neatly highlighting the Republican dominance in presidential politics and its corrosive effect on race relations. The book intelligently highlights the disproportionate focus on African American officials and corruption issues, at state and national level, by the federal Department of Justice (DOJ). By the mid-1980s “black elected officials were five times more likely than their white counterparts to be investigated by the DOJ on corruption charges” and investigated by the IRS (2). Musgrove is exceptionally careful not to sound hysterical – although the overwhelming evidence presented here suggests that he is being overly cautious in this concern, even though conspiracy theory opprobrium was used to undermine the charges at the time (106–7). Indeed, the period from Nixon to Bush Senior (1969–93) reads like a classic racist Reconstruction handbook on how to brand black people corrupt and unable to cope with democratic principles of governing after their emancipation (71). Nixon's surveillance and counterintelligence practices give plenty of evidence of this process of “harassment ideology” against black officials (8–9). Musgrove does not say that corruption did not exist, but that it was practised with fervent tradition by white politicians and that generally they got away with it. Vice president Agnew's resignation for corruption in his time as governor of Maryland and Nixon's resignation in 1974 over the Watergate scandal reinforced the public's view of a corrupt political system, yet this, ironically, punished a group that had been in the mainstream political system for the shortest period, and Musgrove sees this as part of general white backlash politics. It is also suggested that accusing black politicians of corruption, as well as consolidating the white Republican coalition, also underpinned the Black Power movement and alienated communities from the mainstream system just as desegregation (via nonviolence) was achieving some of its objectives (14).

Some of the corruption cited by the DOJ was the use of public money by black officials for personal trips – albeit these were “primarily speaking engagements before civil rights organizations” (74). This was a general political warfare against the Democratic Party and its base in which black officials became the frontline casualties (110). Indeed Jesse Jackson's runs for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1984 and 1988 can be seen in this context as an “eloquent critique of Reaganism” by a black leader. Musgrove similarly sees links to House speaker Newt Gingrich's “bomb thrower” tactics of the 1990s (and beyond), with wild accusations against Democrats being asserted so that a general air of ethical suspicion would fall on the party, and this ended with an attempted presidential impeachment (136). It was in 1993 that Clinton ordered his “attorney general to replace all sitting U.S. attorneys named by his Republican predecessors” and the “racial disparity in investigations” between black and white officials was “all but eliminated” (5). Returning the favour in 1998 Jesse Jackson gave political body cover for the attempted impeachment of Clinton in which many African Americans saw that the attempt to besmirch the President was a reflection on their political status.

These two books help to explain the post-civil rights political era. Boyd's work examines a state case and tries to displace race as a topic, whereas Musgrove more convincingly explores the fallout of the white backlash upon black officials.