Andrews, Kenneth T.

(Andy Andrews)

PERSONAL:

Education: Millsaps College, B.S.; State University of New York at Stony Brook, M.A., 1993, Ph.D., 1997.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, 209 Hamilton Hall, CB 3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27699. E-mail—kta@unc.edu.

CAREER:

Millsaps College, Jackson, MS, instructor, 1994-96; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, assistant professor, 1997-2001, associate professor, 2001-03; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, assistant professor, 2003-07, associate professor, 2007—. Visiting scholar, Russell Sage Foundation, 2003-04.

AWARDS, HONORS:

National Science Foundation Grant, 1996; George Kahrl Award for Excellent in Teaching, 2002, Harvard University; Distinguished Book Award, 2005, American Sociological Association, for Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy.

WRITINGS:

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2004.

Contributor to scholarly journals, including Social Forces, American Sociological Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology.

SIDELIGHTS:

Kenneth T. Andrews's first book, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy, explores the fight for equality in a state over which racism long had a stranglehold. Looking at events that transpired prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act and those that followed, Andrews conveys how the political and social landscape of the state was altered over time. Of great concern to Andrews is how violent white supremacy and a strong Ku Klux Klan were countered with a surge of black activism and the formation of the NAACP. Even though the Freedom Summer led to an increase of African American voters and ultimately to the desegregation of public schools, Mississippi's racial divide was still palpable in the early twenty-first century, as evidenced by a number of all-white private schools and widespread economic disenfranchisement among African Americans.

Andrews uses both qualitative and quantitative analysis of election data and county records to determine how much the civil rights movement affected daily life for blacks in Mississippi. While national civil rights events in Mississippi were numerous and well-documented, Andrews believes local events and individuals were more successful in bringing about permanent change. Toward that end, he researches demographic differences between counties to determine which social factors seemed to play the greatest role in fostering change. Populous urban counties with high-earning, land-owning blacks, he believes, were able to organize more effectively than counties in which blacks were dispersed throughout smaller communities.

Andrews concludes "that a movement with a strong infrastructure will be able to employ different strategies to meet the needs of different situations," summarized Edwin Amenta in Social Forces, who wrote that Andrews's "ability to shed new light on a topic that is so well studied and important is an inspiration to us all." Sharon D. Wright Austin, writing in the Journal of Southern History, said that "the author's expertise on social movement literature, Mississippi politics, and the heights of the Mississippi civil rights movement is obvious" and called Freedom Is a Constant Struggle "an excellent book of superior quality."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Journal of Sociology, November, 2005, Michael P. Young, review of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy, p. 911.

Choice, April, 2005, K.D. Lyon, review of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, p. 1476.

Contemporary Sociology, July, 2006, Aldon Morris, review of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, p. 413.

Journal of African American History, spring, 2006, Mary N. Oluonye, review of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, p. 230.

Journal of American History, September, 2005, review of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, pp. 689-690.

Journal of Southern History, May, 2006, Sharon D. Wright Austin, review of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, p. 520.

Social Forces, March, 2006, Edwin Amenta, review of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, p. 1846.