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Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics. By Jay Winston Driskell Jr. Carter G. Woodson Institute Series. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. [xiv], 300. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-3614-7.)
In early-twentieth-century Atlanta, urban reform contributed to disenfranchisement, antiblack violence, and racial segregation. Suspicious of activist government, white southerners resisted Progressivism until black political power had been eradicated. From the late 1890s through World War I, Atlanta's black elite led efforts, based on the politics of respectability, to halt disenfranchisement and to ensure that improvements to public infrastructure and education did not exclude black residents. Jay Winston Driskell Jr.'s primary interest is the limits of the politics of respectability and its replacement with black protest politics. Drawing on archival research and a close reading of a wide selection of secondary sources, Driskell has produced a fine-grained analysis of how one city's black elite grappled with the limits of the politics of respectability and formulated a new urban politics.
Driskell defines...