ISBN-13: 978-0813936147
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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.
Editorial Reviews
“Schooling Jim Crow provides a masterful account of the emergence of mass urban black politics in Atlanta, Georgia, in the early twentieth century, a time in which earlier generations of historians assumed that little or no such politics existed … [Driskell provides] an analysis of black politics in early twentieth-century Atlanta that is both significant and compelling. He has shown us, above all, that mass black protest politics in places like Atlanta was not a product of “arid intellectual debate over the best way for the race to advance” but rather emerged through concrete political struggles in the specific material circumstances of the New South city … a very impressive piece of work—conceptually sophisticated yet grounded in a practical understanding of how grassroots politics and community organizing actually works in practice”
– Joel M. Sipress, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History
“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 has produced a fine-grained analysis of how one city’s black elite grappled with the limits of the politics of respectability and formulated a new urban politics …. The chief strength of Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics is its granular attention to the evolving black response to Jim Crow in one city. The book will be most useful to scholars interested in learning how Atlanta’s black elite struggled to adapt the politics of respectability, while in the process building ‘a new framework for black politics in the South as well as the foundation for the NAACP’s political strategy for much of the rest of the twentieth century’ … This meticulously argued and informative study provides a foundation for comparative work on urban black politics during the Progressive era.”
– David F. Krugler, The Journal of Southern History
“Jay Driskell Jr.’s Schooling Jim Crow … [focuses] on the continued accomplishments of urban African Americans through the depths of Jim Crow. The culminating event of this book is the success of black Atlantans in securing a new public high school by mobilizing black turnout in four municipal bond referenda between 1918 and 1921. In explaining this victory, Driskell offers an impressively broad analysis of the evolution of Atlanta’s racial, class, and gender politics.”
– Cristina V. Groeger, The Journal of Urban History
“This detailed and persuasively written book contributes to the growing literature on local activism that makes civil rights history such a rich field and one of continual surprises.”
– Lee Sartain, The Journal of American History
“Carefully argued and clearly written, Jay Driskell’s Schooling Jim Crow explains how black Atlantans achieved the solidarity and modern political consciousness necessary to win [their] battles …. Driskell’s analysis parallels Glenda Gilmore’s account in Gender and Jim Crow of black women’s work as ambassadors to the white power structure in the wake of disfranchisement. But it also goes further to speak to an implicit gender divide in scholarship on black middle-class respectability that finds works that focus primarily on men, such as Kevin Gaines’s Uplifting the Race, lamenting a debilitating intra-racial classism while works that focus primarily on women, such as Gilmore and Rouse’s books and Deborah Gray White’s Too Heavy a Load, are more sympathetic and optimistic about the liberating potential of ‘uplift’ strategies.”
– Jennifer Ritterhouse, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
“Schooling Jim Crow is an important text for … scholars interested in African American education, politics, and protest in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban South.”
– Hilary Green, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
“This nuanced study …. is a fine addition that covers an impressive array of topics: the politics of respectability, interracial politics, gender and Jim Crow, early Jim Crow formal politics, the NAACP, Progressivism, and the South more generally.”
– Elizabeth Gritter, The American Historical Review
“Schooling Jim Crow is a well-written and well-argued text in which the author displays an eye for nuance and subtlety in his analysis …. His discussion of the activities of Atlanta’s Neighborhood Union highlights the often-overlooked efforts of African-American clubwomen in this period. The author admirably does not romanticize black political unity; even though African Americans obtained a high school through coordinated political action, their schools remained segregated, poorly funded, and inadequate to the task of providing a quality education to the mass of black Atlantans.”
– Daniel W. Aldridge III, Georgia Historical Quarterly
“This short monograph represents an excellent example of the use of the history of Atlanta to illustrate larger themes in US life. Driskell has used numerous primary resources and a deep reading of the secondary literature to trace African American protest politics from the early 20th century through the Atlanta race riot of 1906 and ultimately to the turbulence that followed WWI. Though the focus is on efforts to leverage the black vote on bond issues (first against and then for) that ultimately brought about the building of the Booker T. Washington High School, the larger story is the way in which the black community moved from the “politics of respectability” to confrontational politics as the basis of protest. Driskell gives attention to the ongoing divisions within the black community, the role of African American women through the neighborhood unions (an Atlanta version of the settlement house movement), the work of the NAACP, and the impact of African American military service during the war. Readers will benefit from the nuanced argument and will be well served to understand an emerging national civil rights movement, which had significant roots in Atlanta. Recommended.”
– Thomas F. Armstrong, Choice Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
- “Manhood Rights”: Progress and the Politics of Respectability, 1899-1906 24
- “To Humiliate the Progressive Negro”: The Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 61
- “Respectable Militants”: The Neighborhood Union and the Transformation of the Politics of Respectability, 1908-1913 106
- “Close Ranks”: World War I as a Crucible for Black Solidarity, 1913-1919 148
- “A Satisfied Part of Our Composite Citizenship”: The Fight for Booker T. Washington High School, 1918-1924 196
Epilogue: “Self-Determination at the Ballot Box” 235