Schooling Jim Crow

Driskell’s argument is clearly articulated, and the findings represent a substantial contribution to our understanding of Atlanta’s history as well as to larger scholarly debates. The book is particularly successful in analyzing intricate cultural and political struggles among African Americans over the meanings of racial justice and the best strategies for advancing civil rights. Driskell’s skill as a writer makes this book among the clearest and most engaging that I have ever encountered."

"Driskell’s Schooling Jim Crow is a wonderful addition to the scholarship on African American politics during the early Jim Crow period, new studies on citizenship and urban life, and the literature about the operation of gender, class, and the politics of respectability in struggles for civil and human rights.... What is unique and fresh about Driskell’s work is that he shows how African Americans both used the politics of respectability to negotiate racial solidarity and adapted to the ever-shifting ground beneath their feet by their willingness to jettison this politics when it no longer seemed useful. It was, after all, a politics of respectability and not a rigid ideology."

"This meticulously argued and informative study provides a foundation for comparative work on urban black politics during the Progressive era."

"A fine addition that covers an impressive array of topics: the politics of respectability, interracial politics, gender and Jim Crow, early Jim Crow formal politics, the NAACP, Progressivism, and the South more generally."

"It is difficult in a brief review to do justice to the subtlety and complexity of the story that Driskell tells. The author has integrated insights from a wide range of scholarly perspectives to provide us with an analysis of black politics in early twentieth-century Atlanta that is both significant and compelling. He has shown us, above all, that mass black protest politics in places like Atlanta was a product not of 'arid intellectual debate over the best way for the race to advance' but emerged rather through concrete political struggles in the specific material circumstances of the New South city"

"Schooling Jim Crow is a well-written and well-argued text in which the author displays an eye for nuance and subtlety in his analysis.... An excellent book that demonstrates the complex interactions between issues of black identity, social class, and gender in ways that shed light upon contemporary society."

"This detailed and persuasively written book contributes to the growing literature of local activism that makes civil rights history such a rich field and one of continual surprises."

"Driskell successfully demonstrates the long process to change black politics that resulted in a major educational victory.... Schooling Jim Crow is an important text for graduate students and scholars interested in African American education, politics, and protest in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban South."

"A very impressive piece of work—conceptually sophisticated yet grounded in a practical understanding of how grassroots politics and community organizing actually works, in practice."

"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. This meticulously argued and informative study provides a foundation for comparative work on urban black politics during the Progressive Era."

"Driskell offers an impressively broad analysis of the evolution of Atlanta’s racial, class, and gender politics.... One of the most impressive aspects of Driskell’s study is his gender analysis of the politics of white supremacy, using a range of local newspapers, speeches, and letters.