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  • Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960-1977
  • John Matthew Smith
Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960–1977. By Winston A. Grady-Willis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. xxii plus 288 pp. $22.95).

Winston A. Grady-Willis has made an important contribution to the historiography of the black freedom movement. He offers a fresh perspective by examining Atlanta, an important southern protest city. Drawing on archival research and oral interviews, Grady-Willis's work challenges traditional interpretations that view the 1960s and 1970s as a struggle for civil rights; instead he frames black activism in terms of human rights. The former approach is problematic because, according to the author, "activists spoke in broader and more transcendent terms, embracing less confining descriptors such as freedom struggle and rights struggle" (xvii).

In addition, Grady-Willis places the human rights struggle within the broader context of international movements for self-determination. His second interpretive frame employs the term apartheid to describe "the scope of institutionalized [End Page 499] white supremacy" in the Deep South. He argues that like South Africa's period of "institutionalized separate development" from 1910 until the early 1990s, the Deep South witnessed a similar white supremacist structure after Reconstruction until the mid-1960s (xvii). Gender and class are pivotal modes of analysis to Challenging U.S. Apartheid. Women played a central role at every turn of the human rights struggle. African American women activists worked from various ideological perspectives as frontline grassroots organizers, Black Nationalists, and activist intellectuals. Throughout this period they sought to redefine gender roles and challenged middle-class ideas of civility.

Grady-Willis's book focuses on "an eclectic group of Black activists from the city, region, nation, and larger global AfricanWorld" in the struggle for human rights (xxii). The first chapter discusses the student non-violent movement. Students from the affiliated schools of the Atlanta University Center (AUC) challenged established black leaders' gradualist approach for desegregation of public accommodations, and equal housing, health care, education, and employment. The student direct action movement garnered support across intraracial class lines, broadening Atlanta's activist base. The second chapter shows the ways in which students confronted white resistance and the Ku Klux Klan. Using direct-action tactics, black students and their white allies defeated petty apartheid in Atlanta.

Ending petty apartheid did not come without great consequences. Many blacks lost their lives or were jailed in the process. The intensity and violence of working on the frontlines inside and outside Atlanta had a profound impact on student activists. In chapter three, Grady-Willis shows how Black Nationalist Malcolm X greatly influenced many men and women, who began to see the struggle for human rights as a quest for self-determination. Malcolm linked the struggles of frontline activists in the American South with African freedom fighters. Consequently, by the mid-1960s black activists in the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began to come to terms with the meaning of self-determination for blacks locally, nationally, and globally (78). In his fourth chapter, the author examines SNCC's Atlanta Project, established to address the poor living conditions for African Americans in the city. Atlanta Project activists focused on grassroots urban organizing instead of traditional voter registration work. Significantly, the Atlanta Project initiated a black consciousness movement within SNCC. Radicals within the student organization argued that to achieve self-determination, African Americans would need complete control of SNCC. These debates provided a framework for the Black Power movement. In addition, these SNCC activists developed a sharp critique of the VietnamWar, linking their suffering at home to the colonization of colored people abroad.

In chapter five Grady-Willis asserts that the early phase of the Black Power movement was defined by urban protest and neighborhood activism. Although black activists had all but destroyed petty apartheid in Atlanta, living conditions for African Americans continued to deteriorate, especially in the neighborhoods of Vine City, Summerhill, and Peoplestown. In 1966, residents of Summerhill and Peoplestown began to fight back against poverty and police brutality. These demonstrations turned violent as police used force to maintain order. Grady Willis deftly engages the...

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