Overview

In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta to budget $1.5 million for the construction of schools for black students. This victory would have been remarkable in any era, but in the context of the Jim Crow South it was revolutionary. Schooling Jim Crow tells the story of this little-known campaign, which happened less than thirteen years after the Atlanta race riot of 1906 and just weeks before a wave of anti-black violence swept the nation in the summer after the end of World War I. Despite the constant threat of violence, Atlanta’s black voters were able to force the city to build five black grammar schools and Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first publicly funded black high school. Schooling Jim Crow reveals how they did it and why it matters. In this pathbreaking book, Jay Driskell explores the changes in black political consciousness that made the NAACP’s grassroots campaign possible at a time when most black southerners could not vote, let alone demand schools. He reveals how black Atlantans transformed a reactionary politics of respectability into a militant force for change. Contributing to this militancy were understandings of class and gender transformed by decades of racially segregated urban development, the 1906 Atlanta race riot, Georgia’s disfranchisement campaign of 1908, and the upheavals of World War I. On this cultural foundation, black Atlantans built a new urban black politics that would become the model for the NAACP’s political strategy well into the twentieth century.

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9780813936147

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Reviews

Driskell's Schooling Jim Crow is a wonderful addition to the scholarship on African American politics during the early Jim Crow period, new studies on citizenship and urban life, and the literature about the operation of gender, class, and the politics of respectability in struggles for civil and human rights.... What is unique and fresh about Driskell's work is that he shows how African Americans both used the politics of respectability to negotiate racial solidarity and adapted to the ever-shifting ground beneath their feet by their willingness to jettison this politics when it no longer seemed useful. It was, after all, a politics of respectability and not a rigid ideology.--Danielle McGuire, Wayne State University, author of At the Dark End of the Street

Driskell's argument is clearly articulated, and the findings represent a substantial contribution to our understanding of Atlanta's history as well as to larger scholarly debates. The book is particularly successful in analyzing intricate cultural and political struggles among African Americans over the meanings of racial justice and the best strategies for advancing civil rights. Driskell's skill as a writer makes this book among the clearest and most engaging that I have ever encountered.-- David F. Godshalk, Shippensburg University, author of Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations

Driskell's Schooling Jim Crow is a wonderful addition to the scholarship on African American politics during the early Jim Crow period, new studies on citizenship and urban life, and the literature about the operation of gender, class, and the politics of respectability in struggles for civil and human rights.... What is unique and fresh about Driskell's work is that he shows how African Americans both used the politics of respectability to negotiate racial solidarity and adapted to the ever-shifting ground beneath their feet by their willingness to jettison this politics when it no longer seemed useful. It was, after all, a politics of respectability and not a rigid ideology.--Danielle McGuire, Wayne State University, author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power Driskell's argument is clearly articulated, and the findings represent a substantial contribution to our understanding of Atlanta's history as well as to larger scholarly debates. The book is particularly successful in analyzing intricate cultural and political struggles among African Americans over the meanings of racial justice and the best strategies for advancing civil rights. Driskell's skill as a writer makes this book among the clearest and most engaging that I have ever encountered.--David F. Godshalk, Shippensburg University, author of Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations Driskell's Schooling Jim Crow is a wonderful addition to the scholarship on African American politics during the early Jim Crow period, new studies on citizenship and urban life, and the literature about the operation of gender, class, and the politics of respectability in struggles for civil and human rights.... What is unique and fresh about Driskell's work is that he shows how African Americans both used the politics of respectability to negotiate racial solidarity and adapted to the ever-shifting ground beneath their feet by their willingness to jettison this politics when it no longer seemed useful. It was, after all, a politics of respectability and not a rigid ideology.--Danielle McGuire, Wayne State University, author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power Driskell's argument is clearly articulated, and the findings represent a substantial contribution to our understanding of Atlanta's history as well as to larger scholarly debates. The book is particularly successful in analyzing intricate cultural and political struggles among African Americans over the meanings of racial justice and the best strategies for advancing civil rights. Driskell's skill as a writer makes this book among the clearest and most engaging that I have ever encountered.-- David F. Godshalk, Shippensburg University, author of Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations

Driskell's Schooling Jim Crow is a wonderful addition to the scholarship on African American politics during the early Jim Crow period, new studies on citizenship and urban life, and the literature about the operation of gender, class, and the politics of respectability in struggles for civil and human rights.... What is unique and fresh about Driskell's work is that he shows how African Americans both used the politics of respectability to negotiate racial solidarity and adapted to the ever-shifting ground beneath their feet by their willingness to jettison this politics when it no longer seemed useful. It was, after all, a politics of respectability and not a rigid ideology.--Danielle McGuire, Wayne State University, author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

Author Information

Jay Winston Driskell Jr. is Assistant Professor of History at Hood College, USA.

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