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ISR Issue 53, May–June 2007


Atlanta’s Black liberation movement


Winston A. Grady-Willis
CHALLENGING U.S. APARTHEID: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960–1977
Duke University Press, 2006
288 pages $23


Review by LEE WENGRAF

We are the victims of America’s colonialism or American imperialism, and that problem is not an American problem, it’s a human problem. It’s not a Negro problem, it’s a problem of humanity. It’s not a problem of civil rights, but a problem of human rights.

WITH THESE words, Malcolm X helped reframe the struggles of the 1960s from one of legal equality in the U.S. to one of Black and anti-colonial liberation. The exclusion of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party from the 1964 Democratic Party Convention spurred Malcolm X’s intention to bring human rights charges to the United Nations, declaring “these Northern crackers will smile in your face and knife you in the back.” But it was the “front-line” battles of the South that shaped Malcolm’s—and a whole generation’s—fight for global change to uproot racism.

Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles, 1960–1977 tells the stories of resistance in the face of Southern white supremacy. Equally, it documents the evolution of the early civil rights movement, including the influence of voices such as Malcolm X’s and the emerging solidarity with movements around the world. As Grady-Willis says in his prologue:

An eclectic group of Black activists from the city, region, nation, and larger global African world embarked on an incredibly important series of journeys in Atlanta as they lent form and definition to the varied dimensions of the Black struggle for human rights. This study seeks to chronicle and illuminate those journeys.

In 1960, a sea change took place as the desegregation movement spread to Atlanta. Martin Luther King Jr. remarked, “a revolutionary destiny of a whole people [with] the extraordinary willingness to fill the jails as if they were honors classes.” Grady-Willis draws out the details of Atlanta’s battles, from sit-ins at lunch counters and desegregation of public hospitals to the fight to seat Georgia’s first Black legislator, Julian Bond.

But these struggles were not isolated from the larger radicalization connected to anticolonial movements and the growing U.S. presence in Vietnam, not to mention local battles against police brutality and poverty. Against a backdrop of King’s evolving position linking racism and imperialism, Grady-Willis describes two strands epitomized in the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—local organizing and a sharpening internationalism. Alongside agitation and education at a local military recruitment center, activists established the political centrality of Africa by insisting that South African and Rhodesian systems of white supremacy were akin to Jim Crow. By 1967, SNCC had issued a major policy statement declaring itself a human rights organization.

For these Atlanta activists, “grassroots urban organizing” represented a conscious shift from voter registration to organizing poor urban neighborhoods. Along with the growth of community-based organizations—from tenants’ groups to Black Panther Party breakfast programs to the National Welfare Rights’ Organization—Black neighborhoods rebelled against poverty and police brutality. Denunciations from moderate Black leaders drew a line between the poor and the middle class, and strengthened the left wing of the local civil rights movement.

Leading activists were veterans of battles of the rural South who returned to Atlanta to organize. Grady-Willis pays particular attention to women organizers such as Fay Bellamy, Emma Jean Martin, and Ethel Mathews. Women were leaders in the short-lived but critical Atlanta Project, an organizing arm of SNCC. When national debates on the politics of Black Power are brought home in the re-examination of SNCC’s own structure, the Atlanta Project led the fight within SNCC to exclude whites.

Challenging U.S. Apartheid also describes the birth of the Black studies movement that spread across college campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A generation of Black liberation scholars such as Walter Rodney, Joyce Ladner, and C.L.R. James found a home in Atlanta and grappled with debates on organizing, structural inequality and African nation-building.

For Grady-Willis, these radical intellectuals continued the tradition inspired by the United Nations’ birth in the 1940s to locate Black oppression in a “broader human rights framework” and efforts for the UN to condemn U.S. racism as genocide.

It is in these discussions, and those of the new campaigns of Black elected officials, that problems of the author’s “multi-front” approach emerges. The mayoral election of Maynard Jackson, the rise of Black elected officials, and “progressive Black electoral activism” is seen uncritically as another front in the same struggle rather than a strategy that helped derail it. A section of activists hitched their wagon to the Democratic Party, with a campaign, for example, led by Georgia Black political officials to elect President Jimmy Carter. Grady-Willis turns to today’s battles to make an important case for the sharpened class divide and continued poverty of the urban majority. But he fails to draw out a clear conclusion that electoral politics is inextricable from the rise of a new Black middle class and the very problems he calls out.

Despite this weakness, Challenging U.S. Apartheid is a fascinating read not only of the frontline struggles that brought down Jim Crow, but for its account of how political consciousness took shape and broadened over the course of a generation. The era’s internationalism and understanding of the ties between war, racism, and poverty are immensely useful lessons for our era’s new struggles.

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