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 (review)

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 the politics of respectability as acceptance of limits on the franchise, efforts to reconfigure Jim Crow along class and gender lines, and cooperation with whites to “civilize” the lower classes of both races. Atlanta’s black male leaders advanced an ideal manhood based on morality, responsibility, and security for wives and daughters. The black elite shared white Atlantans’ anxiety that an undisciplined black working class threatened the social order. Yet white supremacy hamstrung the politics of respectability. In 1899 Booker T. Washington argued that a bill to disenfranchise blacks was unnecessary because the existing poll tax incentivized black men to be thrifty and industrious. The bill failed, but the Georgia Equal Rights Convention (GERC) was unable to halt subsequent disenfranchisement despite similar arguments. The belief of many whites that without “the discipline of slavery” African Americans were devolving into “barbarism” was too entrenched to be dislodged by rhetoric, as demonstrated by white mob attacks on black Atlantans of all classes during the 1906 riot (p. 55). Furthermore, the harsh economic realities of the black working class made it impossible to create the GERC’s “idealized patriarchal household” (p. 53). Without the inclusion of the working class, the politics of respectability would fail.

Black middle-class women met this challenge. Lugenia Burns Hope worked tirelessly to bring urban services to black residents. In 1908 she founded the Neighborhood Union (NU), which built cross-class solidarity by focusing on self-funded development rather than disenfranchisement. The NU “created a sort of volunteer welfare state nested within the racially exclusive whites-only Progressive Era state” (p. 121). In 1913 the NU publicized the woeful deficiencies of the city’s black schools and demanded improvements as the due right of black citizens and taxpayers, presaging the so-called New Negro militancy of World War I.

The NAACP, which chartered a branch in Atlanta in 1916, built on the NU’s efforts, blocking a bid to eliminate the seventh grade from black schools in order to fund a new white school. Still able to vote on city referenda, black residents were mobilized by the NAACP and the NU to oppose bonds to upgrade Atlanta’s schools until the city’s white Progressive leaders finally committed to building four new grammar schools and a high school for black students as part of those improvements.

The chief strength of Schooling Jim Crow The Fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics is its granular attention to the evolving black response to Jim Crow in one city. The book will be most useful to scholars interested in learning how Atlanta’s black elite struggled to adapt the politics of respectability, while in the process building “a new framework for black politics in the South as well as the foundation for the NAACP’s political strategy for much of the...