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New York Review Books
October 2014
On Sale: September 30, 2014
112 pages
ISBN: 159017769X
EAN: 9781590177693
Kindle: B00JI48WWW
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Blackballed is Darryl Pinckney’s meditation on a
century and a half of participation by blacks in US
electoral politics. In this combination of memoir,
historical narrative, and contemporary political and social
analysis, he investigates the struggle for black voting
rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement
to Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns. Drawing on the
work of scholars, the memoirs of civil rights workers, and
the speeches and writings of black leaders like Martin
Luther King and Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young and John
Lewis, Pinckney traces the disagreements among blacks about
the best strategies for achieving equality in American
society as well as the ways in which they gradually came to
create the Democratic voting bloc that contributed to the
election of the first black president. Interspersed through the narrative are Pinckney’s own
memories of growing up during the civil rights era and the
reactions of his parents to the changes taking place in
American society. He concludes with an examination of
ongoing efforts by Republicans to suppress the black vote,
with particular attention to the Supreme Court’s recent
decision striking down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Also included here is Pinckney’s essay “What Black Means
Now,” on the history
of the black middle class,
stereotypes about blacks and crime, and contemporary debates
about “post-blackness.”
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