Carry It On

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 counterattacked with limited success. Her book is a major contribution to the revisionist literature on the civil rights movement.

* Author of Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post–World War II South *

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 biracial 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.

* author of The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 *

A brief review cannot do justice to Ashmore's skill in weaving together the economic and political aspects of a still-unfinished effort to remake Alabama along more just and egalitarian lines. Her book signals a new level of breadth and sophistication in civil rights scholarship.

[A] powerful indictment of the operation of the War on Poverty on the ground.

Susan Youngblood Ashmore’s book is well worth the read. It is a detailed and intricate work of history that captures a complicated and important story of the civil rights movement from the macrolevel politics of presidential edicts and congressional fights to the microlevel role of how these policies influence activists and post-1965 Alabama civil rights work.

* Journal of American Ethnic History *

Ashmore makes a compelling case in an exceptional narrative, and she provides an outstanding analysis of the intersection of politics and economics in the aftermath of federal intervention in American inequality.