To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906

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University of Georgia Press, 2004 - 238 páginas
After Reconstruction, against considerable odds, African Americans in Atlanta went about such self-interested pursuits as finding work and housing. They also built community, says Allison Dorsey. To Build Our Lives Together chronicles the emergence of the network of churches, fraternal organizations, and social clubs through which black Atlantans pursued the goals of adequate schooling, more influence in local politics, and greater access to municipal services. Underpinning these efforts were the notions of racial solidarity and uplift. Yet as Atlanta's black population grew--from two thousand in 1860 to forty thousand at the turn of the century--its community had to struggle not only with the dangers and caprices of white laws and customs but also with internal divisions of status and class.

Among other topics, Dorsey discusses the boomtown atmosphere of post-Civil War Atlanta that lent itself so well to black community formation; the diversity of black church life in the city; the role of Atlanta's black colleges in facilitating economic prosperity and upward mobility; and the ways that white political retrenchment across Georgia played itself out in Atlanta. Throughout, Dorsey shows how black Atlantans adapted the cultures, traditions, and survival mechanisms of slavery to the new circumstances of freedom.

Although white public opinion endorsed racial uplift, whites inevitably resented black Atlantans who achieved some measure of success. The Atlanta race riot of 1906, which marks the end of this study, was no aberration, Dorsey argues, but the inevitable outcome of years of accumulated white apprehensions about black strivings for social equality and economic success. Denied the benefits of full citizenship, the black elite refocused on building an Atlanta of their own within a sphere of racial exclusion that would remain in force for much of the twentieth century.

Dentro del libro

Contenido

An Island in the Upcountry African Americans in Early Atlanta
15
Phoenix Rising African Americans and the Economy in Postwar Atlanta
29
The Black Church in Atlanta Brush Arbors in Freedom
54
Community Action and Resistance Black Atlanta and the Fight for Education
82
Fraternity Community and Status Fraternal Organizations in Black Atlanta
101
Citizenship Denied Blacks in Atlanta City Politics
122
The Turn toward Violence The Atlanta Race Riot and Progress Curtailed
147
Epilogue
167
Appendix
171
Notes
177
Bibliography
213
Index
227
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Allison Dorsey is an associate professor of history at Swarthmore College.

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