Jane E. Dailey

"Sex and Civil Rights" puts issues of sex - particularly interracial sex - at the center of the story of the modern civil rights movement. Stretching from emancipation to the present, the book shows how much of the civil rights struggle may be seen as an effort to work around the consequences of white anxiety about interracial sex without confronting it directly: to dismantle the structure of segregation from its superstructure rather than by assaulting its foundational fears of sexual danger and the state anti-miscegenation laws that articulated and legitimated those fears. Cumulatively, the chapters of "Sex and Civil Rights" reveal the centrality of sex to each moment in the creation of black rights as well as to the sustained resistance to those rights.