The Potomac Chronicle: Public Policy and Civil Rights from Kennedy to Reagan

Fleming, Harold C.

ISBN 10: 0820336238 / ISBN 13: 9780820336237

Published by University of Georgia Press 2010-06, 2010

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-IUK-9780820336237

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Potomac Chronicle: Public Policy and Civil Rights from Kennedy to Reagan
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press 2010-06
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0820336238
• ISBN 13: 9780820336237
• Binding: PF
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

From the Kennedy administration through the end of the Reagan era, the Potomac Institute gave vital, behind-the-scenes support to countless public-and-private-sector initiatives related to equal opportunity, urban social problems, and race relations. Part history and part memoir of Harold C. Fleming, the institute’s leader, The Potomac Chronicle tells for the first time how the institute served as a creative broker of talent, ideas, and resources among minorities, activists, and interest groups. Owing to Fleming’s dedication, coolheadedness, and low-key approach, no other such organization was as well linked to—and as trusted by—both government policymakers and southern civil rights leaders. In the context of major national trends and events, The Potomac Chronicle tells of the institute’s role in the Kennedy administration’s civil rights policy debates, in helping the Defense Department set up what would become model guidelines for civil rights compliance by federal contractors, and in informing, educating, and reassuring Americans about Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act. Other accomplishments discussed include the institute’s involvement in forming the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, tying civil rights requirements to government programs and private practices in education, housing, and employment, and, in the years before it closed in 1988, helping defend affirmative action.

About the Authors

HAROLD C. FLEMING directed the Southern Regional Council in Georgia from 1957 to 1961, and led the Potomac Institute as executive vice president and then president, from 1961 to 1987.

VIRGINIA FLEMING is retired from a career in public administration and philanthropy. She lives in Mill Valley, California.

JOHN EGERTON (1935-2013) had been a “professional South-watcher” for half a century. Beginning in high school in the 1950s, through two years in the U.S. Army, five years earning two college degrees, five more as a college news bureau reporter, six as a magazine writer, and for the past thirty-five years as an independent journalist and author, he seldom strayed far from his life’s work: following the social and cultural, political and economic trends that forever have made the American South the unique place that it is, for better and worse. Until the publication of Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves, all his published writing, including more than fifteen books, has been classified as nonfiction. He called his new book "a fable ... a parable ... a cautionary tale" in the genre of "political science-fiction," and claimed that he "did not so much author it as synthesize it from hundreds of sources, compile it, and become by default the one to present it to the reading public. Fables don’t have authors. They’re found, heard, passed down."