Delaying the Dream

Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938-1965

De: Keith M. Finley

Narrado por: Shawn Zuzek

Few historical events lend themselves to such a sharp delineation between right and wrong as does the civil rights struggle.

In Delaying the Dream, Keith M. Finley, explores gradations in the opposition, by examining how the region's principal national spokesmen - its United States senators - addressed themselves to the civil rights question, and developed a concerted plan of action to thwart legislation: the use of strategic delay.

Prior to World War II, Finley explains, southern senators recognized the fall of segregation as inevitable, and consciously changed their tactics to delay, rather than prevent defeat, enabling them to frustrate civil rights advances for decades. As public support for civil rights grew, southern senators transformed their arguments to limit the use of overt racism and appeal to northerners. They granted minor concessions on bills only tangentially related to civil rights, while emasculating those with more substantive provisions. They garnered support by nationalizing their defense of sectional interests, and linked their defense of segregation with constitutional principles to curry favor with non-southern politicians. While the senators achieved success at the federal level, Finley shows, they failed to challenge local racial agitators in the South, allowing extremism to flourish.

©2008 Louisiana State University Press (P)2017 Redwood Audiobooks

The Senators who Delayed Civil Rights Legislation

Good history of the Southern senators who thwarted various pieces of Civil Rights legislation from the late 1930s thru the 1960s. Several times anti-lynching or voting rights measures passed relatively easily in the House but were then defeated or gutted in the Senate. Before reading this book, I really didn't realize how unlikely some of these defeats were at the time especially in 1957 and 1960 when a majority of Senators likely wanted strong bill but couldn't get a straight vote. A bit tempting to be impressed by the small band of senators who pulled this off but not only was their cause bad but some of them (Thurmond, Eastland) were just bad people. The book also highlights the shortcomings of the Senate as an institution. How can so few people block such badly needed legislation?

The narrator is not bad but he mis-pronounces a few names and words. One of these is cloture which instead of clochur becomes clo-tour. This was very annoying at first but I got used to it after awhile and even found it somewhat amusing - of all the books on Audible the guy who doesn't know how to pronounce cloture gets the one about Southern senators filibustering.