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Sharing the Prize Gavin Wright

Sharing the Prize By Gavin Wright

Sharing the Prize by Gavin Wright


$14.69
Condition - Very Good
Only 1 left

Summary

Southern bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins were famous acts of civil disobedience but were also demands for jobs in the very services being denied blacks. Gavin Wright shows that the civil rights struggle was of economic benefit to all parties: the wages of southern blacks increased dramatically but not at the expense of southern whites.

Sharing the Prize Summary

Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South by Gavin Wright

The civil rights movement was also a struggle for economic justice, one that until now has not had its own history. Sharing the Prize demonstrates the significant material gains black southerners made--in improved job opportunities, quality of education, and health care--from the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. Because black advances did not come at the expense of southern whites, Gavin Wright argues, the civil rights struggle was that rarest of social revolutions: one that benefits both sides. From the beginning, black activists sought economic justice in addition to full legal rights. The southern bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins were famous acts of civil disobedience, but they were also demands for jobs in the very services being denied blacks. In the period of enforced desegregation following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the wages of southern black workers increased dramatically. Wright's painstaking documentation of this fact undermines beliefs that government intervention was unnecessary, that discrimination was irrational, and that segregation would gradually disappear once the market was allowed to work. Wright also explains why white southerners defended for so long a system that failed to serve their own best interests. Sharing the Prize makes clear that the material benefits of the civil rights acts of the 1960s are as significant as the moral ones--an especially timely achievement as these monumental pieces of legislation, and the efficacy of governmental intervention more broadly, face new challenges.

About Gavin Wright

Gavin Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History at Stanford University.

Additional information

GOR013790764
9780674049338
0674049330
Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South by Gavin Wright
Used - Very Good
Hardback
Harvard University Press
20130225
368
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

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