| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Making Race, Making Power: North Carolina's Road to Disfranchisement. By Kent Redding. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. x, 180 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02808-2.)
In this short but incisive book, the sociologist Kent Redding examines a subject familiar to many scholars. Historians have studied closely the political revolution that brought Populists and Republicans briefly to power in North Carolina in the 1890s and then ended in violence, disfranchisement, segregation, and Democratic supremacy. Redding posits a different approach. He is less concerned about motives, ideology, and political debate than about the mechanisms that create political control. In Redding's opinion, patterns or networks of social relations—identities, interests, and organization—help define how people contend for power. To mobilize the electorate, political organizers must tap into those social networks.	1
During the 1880s Democrats used "vertical" (p. 10) organization to marshal voters. That type of organization depended on networks of kin, neighborhood, and local patronage. With counties as the locus of political power, laws affecting the fencing of stock, crop liens, landlord-tenant relations, education, and local government benefited white economic elites. Vertical organization, according to Redding, mitigated great inequalities among whites. Whereas Democrats made occasional appeals to racial sentiments, the race question did not resonate as strongly as it had earlier and would later.	. . .

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