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

Abstract

The race relations of no American city have been as thoroughly scrutinized historically as those of Atlanta, and with good reason. As progressive as any southern city, Georgia's capital touted a cluster of black colleges and served as the operational base of intellectual, political, and religious leaders from W. E. B. Du Bois to Martin Luther King, Jr. It was the first major city to elect black mayors, who, along with moderate white leadership, earned the city a reputation as one “too busy to hate” during the civil rights era and since. Such claims overshadowed far more complex racial dynamics that in 1906 included one of the most brutal of the South's race riots. All of this has been extensively documented and analyzed in a wealth of scholarship—including three new books on the riot—over the past few years (so much so that Stephen G. N. Tuck sought to distinguish his 2001 study of modern race relations in Georgia as a whole by entitling it Beyond Atlanta). Much of Allison Dorsey's story therefore covers familiar ground. And yet, Dorsey's perspective on the formative era of the city's African‐American community adds significant new layers to our understanding of what made Atlanta exceptional.