Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960–1977

Challenging U.S. Apartheid is an innovative, richly detailed history of Black struggles for human dignity, equality, and opportunity in Atlanta from the early 1960s through the end of the initial term of Maynard Jackson, the city’s first Black mayor, in 1977. Winston A. Grady-Willis provides a seamless narrative stretching from the student nonviolent direct action movement and the first experiments in urban field organizing through efforts to define and realize the meaning of Black Power to the reemergence of Black women-centered activism. The work of African Americans in Atlanta, Grady-Willis argues, was crucial to the broader development of late-twentieth-century Black freedom struggles. Grady-Willis describes Black activism within a framework of human rights rather than in terms of civil rights. As he demonstrates, civil rights were only one part of a larger struggle for self-determination, a fight to dismantle a system of inequalities that he conceptualizes as “apartheid structures.” Drawing on archival research and interviews with activists of the 1960s and 1970s, he illuminates a wide range of activities, organizations, and achievements, including the neighborhood-based efforts of Atlanta’s Black working poor, clandestine associations such as the African American women’s group Sojourner South, and the establishment of autonomous Black intellectual institutions such as the Institute of the Black World. Grady-Willis’s chronicle of the politics within the Black freedom movement in Atlanta brings to light overlapping ideologies, gender and class tensions, and conflicts over divergent policies, strategies, and tactics. It also highlights the work of grassroots activists, who take center stage alongside well-known figures in Challenging U.S. Apartheid. Women, who played central roles in the human rights struggle in Atlanta, are at the foreground of this history.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements ix Prologue xiii Abbreviations xxiii PART I: NONVIOLENT DIRECT ACTION 1. The Committee on Appeal for Human Rights and Phase One of the Direct Action Campaign 3 2. Phase Two of the Direct Action Campaign and the Fall of Petty Apartheid in Atlanta 33 PART II: DEMANDING BLACK POWER 3. Bridges 59 4. The Atlanta Project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 79 5. Neighborhood Protest and the Voices of the Black Working Poor 114 PART III: THE QUEST FOR SELF-DETERMINATION 6. Black Studies and the Birth of the Institute of the Black World 143 7. The Multi-front Black Struggle for Human Rights 169 Epilogue 206 Notes 213 Bibliography 265 Indez 281

About the Author :
Winston A. Grady-Willis is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Syracuse University.

Review :
"Through an examination of black women engaged in both property and violent crime in the context of political, social, and economic disfranchisement, Kali N. Gross has produced a riveting narrative that reveals the ways in which criminal acts and courtroom and prison behavior were also expressive acts. She not only contributes profoundly to our understanding of black working-class and poor women in and around turn-of-the century Philadelphia, but she resists the tendency to romanticize these women as 'primitive rebels.' The work is truly pathbreaking." Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination " "Challenging U.S. Apartheid is a brilliant and provocative contribution to our understanding of the Black freedom movement in Atlanta in the 1960s and 1970s. While Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy has long dominated our understanding of the movement in Atlanta, Winston A. Grady-Willis forces us to look again with a wider lens and a new set of sensibilities. With insight and eloquence he demonstrates the pivotal role of women and Atlanta's Black working class in the fight for racial and economic justice and self-determination. He does not simply give a polite nod to issues of gender and class. Rather, these modes of analysis take center stage in his thinking and in his work. Grady-Willis has done for Atlanta what Charles Payne and John Dittmer did for Mississippi. This book is a must-read for anyone serious about understanding the landmark social justice struggles of the 1960s and 1970s."--Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision "By deploying the frames of apartheid and human rights to analyze social struggle in the Black U.S. urban context, Winston A. Grady-Willis's work asks scholars to rethink the way we characterize Black demands and, therefore, their relationship to a broader activist cadre and global politics."--Rhonda Y. Williams, author of The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality