To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in black Atlanta, 1875-1906 (review)

Dorsey's study analyzes the Atlanta black community's development and evolution during the post-Reconstruction era. She emphasizes the importance of the slave experience in the process, suggesting that the first post-slavery generation had a sense of racial solidarity and group decision-making that carried over into late nineteenth-century community building. In 1860, Atlanta had fewer than 10,000 people, one-fifth of them slaves and only a small number of free blacks. Mostly destroyed during the Civil War, the rebuilt postwar city attracted rural freedmen in considerable numbers. Clustered in several separate enclaves, Atlanta's black population reached about 35,000 by 1900.

In separate chapters, Dorsey explores the building of black community through the formation of churches, black colleges, social and fraternal organizations, and entrepreneurial activities. Collective action expressed through these institutions provided educational and economic opportunity and, despite limited resources, underwrote upward mobility. Blacks also organized politically to achieve community goals, especially adequate public schools for black children and the appointment of black policemen, as well as to protest white violence. Nevertheless, black voting power was contested and severely circumscribed by whites throughout this period. Over time, social stratification divided the black community; the division was based not so much on class as on status. A small black elite of professionals, such as preachers, editors, teachers, and businessmen, promoted a "politics of respectability" and a gospel of education, prohibition, and moral reform. Black professional women played a major role in this moral-uplift campaign. All of these efforts at community building, however, were hampered by persistent white efforts to regulate, control, threaten, and exploit Atlanta's blacks.

Dorsey's work suggests that white supremacy shaped the African-American community as much as black agency. Adhering to the concept of black inferiority, whites reacted negatively to black activism and resorted to such methods of social control as the convict lease system and segregation ordinances for streetcars. Curbing black voting rights became central to white supremacists by the turn of the century. As the black community grew in population, intensified competition for living space antagonized whites.

State politics played a role in worsening race relations as well, especially after southern populists Tom Watson and Hoke Smith turned away from an earlier coalition with black voters in Georgia. Rising tensions, stimulated by fear-mongering newspaper campaigns, led to the race riot of 1906, in which rampaging whites burned black businesses and killed a dozen or more black citizens. An interracial effort involving the black elite restored calm, but the riot, Dorsey writes, "had a transforming effect on the black community" (166). Black housing was pushed into more spatially separated areas, segregation practices were legalized, and blacks were disfranchised. Atlanta's black elite pulled back from political and social activism, focusing instead on internal development of the black community rather than openly challenging white supremacy. Oddly, the author devotes comparatively little attention to the Atlanta riot, the culminating event of thirty years of post-Reconstruction race relations.

This book is extremely well written. It is based on research in almost two dozen manuscript collections and a large number of published sources. The data are historical, but the conceptualization cuts across the social sciences. As a community study, the book contributes in important ways to our understanding of late nineteenth-century southern urban history and race relations.