Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia 1940-1980

About this book

This sweeping history of the civil rights movement in the Souths largest state tells of many Georgias. On one extreme is Atlanta a metropolitan center of relative black prosperity and training ground of many movement leaders. On another is Albany. A city deep in the "black belt" of the plantation South it is the site of Martin Luther King Jr.s greatest civil rights setback. Somewhere in between is yet another Georgia a Georgia whose communities once constituted hundreds of Jim Crow fiefdoms. In places like "Bad" Baker County near the southern border or in the relatively moderate town of Rome in the northern hills black-white relations were as crude or as nuanced as the outlook of the local sheriff. Beyond Atlanta draws on interviews with almost two hundred peopleblack and whitewho worked for or actively resisted the freedom movement. Among the topics Stephen Tuck covers are the absence of consistent support from the movements national leadership and the frustration and innovation it alternately inspired at the local level. In addition Tuck reveals friction along urban-rural and poor-prosperous lines about movement goals and tactics and he highlights the often unheralded roles played by African American women veterans masons unions neighborhood clubs and local NAACP branches. Tucks narrative begins before and continues after the well-documented years of direct action protest in the 1960s. Though grounded in local and state matters it is attuned to such national developments as World War II the 1954 Brown decision the Civil Rights Acts of 1964-65 and the growth of the Black Power movement. Perhaps most important Beyond Atlanta makes clear the exorbitant cost of racial oppression in terms of hampered economic and social progress for all Georgians.