"This book compares the rights and social inclusion of two racialized minority groups: Roma in Central and Southeast Europe ("CSEE") and African Americans in the United States ("U.S."), primarily in the American South. We couch those attempts loosely in the frameworks of Roma rights and civil rights, though we will focus primarily on Roma rights in post-Communist CSEE (from 1991 until the present) and civil rights during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement (roughly 1954-1968). Scholars have made fleeting comparisons between Roma and African Americans for years, and in the last decade, the Roma rights-Civil Rights comparison has recurred with increasing frequency. Despite the burgeoning recognition of the broader similarities between Roma and African Americans, including the systems that facilitate their marginalization and the barriers to their representation, no book-length work has sustained these comparisons"--.