Stripping party affiliation from the ballots and holding municipal elections in off months from all others help suppress turnout in local contests. “I wanted to tie all the strings together to show the depth of the horrific policies, operating under the cloak of democracy, that black Americans confront while doing all the right things to be part of our democracy,” Anderson says.įor instance, she explains the voting requirements that help keep even majority-black towns under white control, as was the case in Ferguson. “White Rage” was the culmination of her scholarly work as a historian, life experience as a black woman and even time as a professor who taught at the University of Missouri for 13 years. The blending of African American political and international history made her 2009 move to Emory seamless given the university’s strengths. She spent the early part of her academic career specializing in Cold War policies and the 20th-century American history it dominated. “I wanted to put my expertise in the public domain so that there was more historical knowledge to understand what we see today and to be clear that it’s not black pathology that’s driving this.”Īnderson grew up in the era of white flight from many of the nation’s cities but saw a wider pattern to African American history.
“It was important for me to reframe the discussion,” Anderson says. The book, now in its ninth printing, went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and help Anderson earn Emory’s 2017 Scholar/Teacher Award, supported by the United Methodist Church's General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. Anderson worked quickly to expand the national conversation and published “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide” last May. The piece went viral, drawing 5,000 comments on the newspaper’s site and the attention of a literary agent. Her reaction and historical expertise came together in a Washington Post op-ed explaining Ferguson as the result of white backlash against gains by African Americans. Anderson, Emory's Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and chair of African American Studies, found herself shaking her head at news anchors referring to the “black rage” the cameras were capturing. Louis in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown, a young black man, by a white police officer. Protests were rocking the small city near St. Carol Anderson was already an award-winning historian, with two books published and an honor for teaching excellence, when she saw Ferguson burning.
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