Chandler Davidson

Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990.

This work is the first systematic attempt to measure the impact of the US Voting Rights Act of 1965, commonly regarded in the USA as the most effective civil rights legislation of the century. The contributors show how blacks and Mexican-Americans in the South, along with the Justice Department, have used the Act and the US Constitution to overcome the resistance of white officials to minority mobilization. The book tells the story of the black struggle for equal political participation in eight core southern states from the end of the Civil War to the 1980s, emphasizing the period since 1965. The contributors use a variety of quantitative methods to show how the Act dramatically increased black registration and black and Mexican-American office-holding. They also explain modern voting rights law as it pertains to minority citizens, discussing important legal cases and giving numerous examples of how the law is applied.

Ethnic Jokes: An Introduction to Race and Nationality.

I begin a course in Race and Nationality with a skit depicting an angry confrontation between a white professor and a black student over a racial joke. I do so in order to create immediate interest in the question of how to interpret jokes. The students are asked to fill out a questionnaire dealing with matters raised in the skit. Then they are assigned a field project designed to measure the incidence of ethnic joking on campus and to collect other information on the subject. The skit, in combination with the field research, findings of which are discussed in class, provide an important link between common student experiences and rather abstract issues in race relations. The five-session introduction to racial joking is a provocative introductory section to the