Challenging U.S. Apartheid

Grady-Willis Winston A. Grady-Willis

Description

Challenging U.S. Apartheid is an innovative, richly detailed history of Black struggles for human dignity, equality, and opportunity in Atlanta from the early 1960s through the end of the initial term of Maynard Jackson, the city's first Black mayor, in 1977. Winston A. Grady-Willis provides a seamless narrative stretching from the student nonviolent direct action movement and the first experiments in urban field organizing through efforts to define and realize the meaning of Black Power to the reemergence of Black women-centered activism. The work of African Americans in Atlanta, Grady-Willis argues, was crucial to the broader development of late-twentieth-century Black freedom struggles.Grady-Willis describes Black activism within a framework of human rights rather than in terms of civil rights. As he demonstrates, civil rights were only one part of a larger struggle for self-determination, a fight to dismantle a system of inequalities that he conceptualizes as "apartheid structures." Drawing on archival research and interviews with activists of the 1960s and 1970s, he illuminates a wide range of activities, organizations, and achievements, including the neighborhood-based efforts of Atlanta's Black working poor, clandestine associations such as the African American women's group Sojourner South, and the establishment of autonomous Black intellectual institutions such as the Institute of the Black World. Grady-Willis's chronicle of the politics within the Black freedom movement in Atlanta brings to light overlapping ideologies, gender and class tensions, and conflicts over divergent policies, strategies, and tactics. It also highlights the work of grassroots activists, who take center stage alongside well-known figures in Challenging U.S. Apartheid. Women, who played central roles in the human rights struggle in Atlanta, are at the foreground of this history.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• USA
• Americas
• History of the Americas
• Human rights
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 05 juillet 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387695
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

c h a l l e n g i n g u . s . a pa r t h e i d

c h a l l e n g i n g

winston a. grady-willis

u . s . a pa r t h e i d

at l a n ta a n d b l a c k s t r u g g l e s f o r h u m a n r i g h t s , 1 9 6 0 – 1 9 7 7

d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s d u r h a m a n d l o n d o n 2 0 0 6

∫2006 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Typeset in Quadraat and The Sans

by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear

on the last printed page of this book.

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contents

Acknowledgments ix Prologue xiii Abbreviations xxiii

part i: nonviolent direct action 1 The Committee on Appeal for Human Rights and Phase One of the Direct Action Campaign 3 2 Phase Two of the Direct Action Campaign and the Fall of Petty Apartheid in Atlanta 33

part ii: demanding black power 3 Bridges 59 4 The Atlanta Project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 79 5 Neighborhood Protest and the Voices of the Black Working Poor 114

part iii: the quest for self-determination 6 Black Studies and the Birth of the Institute of the Black World 143 7 The Multi-front Black Struggle for Human Rights 169

Epilogue 206 Notes 213 Bibliography 265 Index 281

acknowledgments

I owe a profound debt of gratitude to many who have provided support and moral sustenance as I have written this book. Anyone familiar with the strug- gles waged by those who hold the field of Africana Studies near and dear realizes that the responsibilities and burdens concomitant with that field require collective commitment and work. I have been fortunate to be a part of such a collective group of teaching scholars and dedicated sta√ members in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University. In particu- lar, Micere Githae Mugo and Milt Sernett have been valued mentors. I am especially grateful to Micere for her comments on an earlier draft of this book, and for her relentless work on behalf of the field. Janis Mayes provided an important professional opportunity at a key moment. I owe a great deal to Linda Carty, who assumed the most di≈cult job at virtually any academic institution—chair of an Africana department—with both tenacity and grace. Linda is a scholar whose integrity can only be matched by her commitment to the fields of Africana Studies and Women’s Studies. The women and men who consented to be interviewed are the driving force behind many of the pages of this book: Benjamin A. Brown, Joseph E. Boone, Herschelle Challenor, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Mukasa Dada, Jualynne Dodson, Jan Douglas, Gene Ferguson, Sandra Hollin Flowers, Larry Fox, Vincent Hard- ing, Beni Ivey, Lonnie King, Joyce Ladner, Emma Jean Martin, Ethel Mae Mathews, Silas Norman, Fay Bellamy Powell, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Michael Simmons, William Strickland, and Columbus Ward. (Although we never conducted a single formal interview, I also thank Dwight Williams for several informal discussions of the Atlanta Project.) Beginning with Ms. Mathews, I will be forever grateful to these grassroots community organizers, feminists, radical nationalists, and engaged intellectuals for being so incred- ibly giving of their time. Interviewing these activists has underscored the importance of lifting up the living history of Black human rights struggles. This particular journey began at Emory University and in the Black neigh- borhoods of Atlanta. I will be forever in debt to Dan Carter, Leroy Davis, and Mary Odem for their guidance and support throughout the entire dissertation process. My doctoral studies were also influenced by the teaching, scholar- ship, and support of Beverly Guy-Sheftall, James Roark, Kristin Mann, and