Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics

Abstract

By 1919, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), a ten-year-old fledgling national civil rights organization, had organized across the South and—in some cities—pursued a more militant strategy of rights activism. In Atlanta, Georgia, the local naacp branch organized the community in a surprisingly successful campaign to compel the city council to budget $1.5 million for a black school. Jay Winston Driskell Jr. contends that in certain areas in the South during this time a more radical politics emerged that subverted the politics of respectability and helped the rise of an early form of black political militancy. Driskell's book, however, covers much more ground than the title suggests. It looks at a grassroots effort to adapt to city politics and organize progressive impulses at the start of the twentieth century. He explores the uses and constraints of the politics of black respectability—the tactic of excessive reflection of white concerns of black morality in the period—and argues that this strategy evolved by the end of World War I into a more direct and radical form of civil protest in which respectability gave way to a language of economic parity and a demand for a share of the city tax revenue. This led to a remarkable victory: tax dollars were spent on a black school despite persistent resistance from white authorities (p. 221).