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A Study of Racial Polarization in Tennessee
‘Losing Power’ by Sekou Franklin and Ray Block Jr.
Last month, the expulsion of two Democratic lawmakers from the Republican-led Tennessee House made national news. For more context, learn about the history of racial politics in Tennessee. A book published several years ago covers this well. It’s Sekou Franklin and Ray Block Jr.’s Losing Power: African Americans and Racial Polarization in Tennessee Politics (University of Georgia Press, 2020).
“Tennessee politics,” the authors say, “are a representation of American politics on a smaller scale,” since in the 2000s the state was more centrist than the Deep South overall but during the 2010s it increasingly leaned right.
In the 19th century, most African Americans in Tennessee were enslaved. Black men were elected to office during Reconstruction. While Black women could vote beginning in 1920 and were politically active, “few black women were elected to office until the 1970s and 1980s.”
In the mid-2000s, as faculty members at Middle Tennessee State University, Franklin and Block discussed current events with each other. Their conversations focused on the 2006 U.S. Senate election in Tennessee, which then featured an African American candidate in a state that had never before had an African American senator; the…
