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Restructured Resistance

The Sibley Commission and the Politics of Desegregation in Georgia

Jeff Roche author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Georgia Press

Published:15th Sep '10

Should be back in stock very soon

Restructured Resistance cover

In the spring of 1960, unprecedented public hearings were held on segregation and the future of public education. These hearings, held by John Sibley and the Georgia General Assembly Committee on Schools, offered a rare glimpse into the reactions of southerners—black and white—to the changes wrought by the civil rights movement.

Restructured Resistance uses newly opened private papers, public records, newspaper reports, and oral history interviews to examine how the desegregation of public schools in Georgia reflected the evolution of southern society, economics, and politics. In the midst of crisis over segregation as a symbol of southern distinctiveness, the state legislature accepted the inevitable, adopted the Sibley Commission's proposals, and created a deliberate and more utilitarian form of defiance—a restructured resistance—rooted in contemporary practicality and corporate pragmatism.

This is a fine study of the Sibley Commission. Roche has placed it within the context of economic, political, and social developments that shaped southern history during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.

* author of Struggling to Shake Off Old Shackles: Twentieth-Century Georgia

ISBN: 9780820338859

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm

Weight: 454g

272 pages