Show Thyself a Man: Georgia State Troops, Colored, 1865–1905 by Gregory Mixon (review)

Gregory Mixon's Show Thyself a Man: Georgia State Troops, Colored, 1865–1905 expands our understanding of African American agency during Georgia's post–Civil War era by focusing on the role of black soldiers in state-sponsored and independent militia units. Mixon argues that for four decades, black militias protected the community's social, political, and economic rights in a hostile postemancipation world dominated by a conservative and embittered white community. But, unlike other former Confederate states with large black populations, such as South Carolina and Tennessee, where Radical Republicans confronted emerging white Conservatives and where militias became political weapons dominating state politics, Georgia largely avoided these battles. Instead, Georgia's leaders managed race relations through the equally funded but segregated state-sponsored militias, thereby circumventing federal scrutiny and intervention. This policy allowed black militias to champion the "values of freedom, independent labor, and masculinity" as African Americans worked to create economic and political organizations that assisted the community, at least until the end of the nineteenth century (p. 42).

Mixon observes that immediately following the Civil War, Georgia enacted black codes that attempted to reestablish a form of slavery, but Radical Reconstruction introduced the black community to political activity instead. Contrasting the standard historical interpretation that white people supplanted slavery with a "'culture of segregation'" and black subjugation, effectively ending Reconstruction, Mixon maintains that black Georgians used the militia to create "political and economic autonomy" (p. 125).

Mixon discusses two types of black militias in Georgia: independent companies that did not receive state funding but were involved in political initiatives that included the protection of black labor and property rights, and state-sponsored units that were urban-based and operated within state regulations. Independent militia companies operated from the late 1860s to the mid-1870s. But unlike the official tether that limited the power and activities of the state-sponsored militias, the independent black militias engaged with white groups in contests for power that were linked with the electoral politics of self-defense.

The end of Reconstruction, according to Mixon, "marked the climax of the independent militia" in Georgia's eastern and central counties, in what was known as the Johnson County Insurrection (p. 41). This occurred during the transition from Republican to Conservative Democratic rule. Following the Johnson County Insurrection, independent militias were supplanted by state-sponsored, urban black militias. Eventually these groups were undermined by anti-black violence and political suppression such that by the end of the nineteenth century, their role was primarily ceremonial, participating in Emancipation and Freedom Day programs.

While Mixon's study posits some interesting ideas about the role of both independent and state-sponsored black militias, the book could have benefited from intense editing and review. Too often, ideas are repeated, and some of his most groundbreaking arguments are unsupported (such as the uniqueness of Georgia's militia policy and the use of black militias as a safeguard for rural community political power).

Despite these shortcomings, Mixon breaks new ground by underscoring the important interplay between race and civilian military power during Reconstruction, revealing how Reconstruction Georgia's rural African American populations mobilized their communities through the independent militias to protect and preserve their labor, their civil rights, and their assets. Expanding on many of the themes in Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), Mixon argues that the organizing strategies of Georgia's African American militias in the post–Civil War era used timeworn but effective leadership networks, kinship ties, labor unions, and religious associations to mobilize the community to resist oppression in an effort to redefine concepts of "freedom, citizenship, and belonging" (p. 337).