Courage to dissent
Subtitle: Atlanta and the long history of the civil rights movement
By: Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 578
ISBN-13: 9780195386592
Description: The Civil Rights movement that emerged in the United States after World War II was a reaction against centuries of racial discrimination. In this sweeping history of the Civil Rights movement in Atlanta--the South's largest and most economically important city--from the 1940s through 1980, Tomiko Brown-Nagin shows that the movement featured a vast array of activists and many sophisticated approaches to activism. Long before "black power" emerged and gave black dissent from the mainstream civil rights agenda a new name, African Americans in Atlanta debated the meaning of equality and the steps necessary to obtain social and economic justice. This groundbreaking book uncovers the activism of visionaries-- both well-known legal figures and unsung citizens--from across the ideological spectrum who sought something different from, or more complicated than, "integration." Local activists often played leading roles in carrying out the integrationist agenda of the NAACP, but some also pursued goals that differed markedly from those of the venerable civil rights organization. Brown-Nagin discusses debates over politics, housing, public accommodations, and schools. She documents how the bruising battle over school desegregation in the 1970s, which featured opposing camps of African Americans, had its roots in the years before Brown v. Board of Education. Exploring the complex interplay between the local and national, between lawyers and communities, between elites and grassroots, and between middle-class and working-class African Americans, Courage to Dissent tells gripping stories about the long struggle for equality that speak to the nation's current urban crisis. This remarkable book will transform our understanding of the Civil Rights era. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: pt. 1. A.T. Walden and pragmatic civil rights lawyering in the postwar era; title: "Aren't going to let a nigger practice in our courts" : the milieu of civil rights pragmatism; title: The roots of pragmatism : voting rights activism inside and outside the courts, 1944-1957; title: Housing markets, Black and White : negotiating the postwar housing crisis, 1944-1959; title: "Segregation pure and simple" : school, community, and the NAACP's education litigation, 1942-1958; title: More than "polite segregation" : Brown in public spaces, 1954-1959; title: pt. 2. The movement, its lawyers, and the fight for racial justice during the 1960s; title: Seeking redress in the streets : the student movment's challenge to racial pragmatism and legal liberalism, 1960-1961; title: A volatile alliance : the marriage of lawyers and demonstrators, 1961-1964; title: Local people as agents of constitutional change : legal dead ends, the movement against "private" discrimination, and the countermobilization, 1963-1964; title: "New politics" : law, organizing, and a "movement of movements" in the Southern ghetto, 1965-1967; title: pt. 3. Questioning Brown : lawyers, courts, and communities in struggle; title: A curious silence : community activism and the legal campaign to implement Brown, 1958-1971; title: An end to an "annual agony" : the backlash against Brown and busing, 1971-1974; title: "Bus them to Philadelphia" : a feminist lawyer and poor mothers crusade to redeem Brown, 1972-1980.