UGA Press: Carry It On • Ashmore


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Carry It On
The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972
Susan Youngblood Ashmore

Civil rights, economic justice, and the competition for political power after the Voting Rights Act

Carry It On is an in-depth study of how the local struggle for equality in Alabama fared in the wake of new federal laws-the Civil Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, and the Voting Rights Act. Susan Youngblood Ashmore provides a sharper definition to changes set in motion by the fall of legal segregation. She focuses her detailed story on the Alabama Black Belt and on the local projects funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the federal agency that supported programs in a variety of cities and towns in Alabama. Black Belt activists who used OEO funds understood that the structural underpinnings of poverty were key components of white supremacy, says Ashmore. They were motivated not only to end poverty but also to force local governments to comply with new federal legislation aimed at achieving racial equality on a number of fronts.

Ashmore looks closely at the interactions among local activists, elected officials, businesspeople, landowners, bureaucrats, and others who were involved in or affected by OEO projects. Carry It On offers a nuanced picture of the OEO, an agency too broadly criticized; a new look at the rise of southern Black Power; and a compelling portrait of local citizens struggling for control over their own lives. Ashmore provides a more complete understanding of how southerners worked to define for themselves how freedom would come during the years shaped by the civil rights movement and the war on poverty.

Susan Youngblood Ashmore is an associate professor of history at Oxford College of Emory University.

July 2008

ISBN 0820330515 paper • $24.95

ISBN 0820330078 cloth • $64.95

• 6 x 9 in. • 22 b&w photos • 1 map

"Susan Ashmore's well-written and researched analysis of the war on poverty in Alabama reveals how white leaders and bureaucrats subverted equal opportunity programs to serve their racist agenda and how African Americans counter-attacked with limited success. Her book is a major contribution to the revisionist literature on the civil rights movement."
—Pete Daniel, author of Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the South, 1945-1970

"Carry It On is right at the forefront of the next frontier of civil rights historiography: the period after the passage of national civil rights legislation and the great set-piece confrontations but before the advent of a New South bi-racial politics in the 1970s. Ashmore shows how the War on Poverty in Alabama was both a training ground for future African-American politicians and a setting for the southern variant of Black Power."
—Tony Badger, author of The New Deal: The Depression Years

"In Carry It On, Ashmore details the myriad ways white Alabama leaders-and some middle class blacks, too-obstructed attempts to bring poor blacks into the organizations that were seeking Great Society funding. Students of civil rights and poverty programs should know about this book. It makes a real contribution to the history of a vital era, an era that, despite all odds, did help bring about enormous change."-Kay Mills, author of This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, winner of the Julia Spruill Book Prize

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