Dorsey, Allison

English

Works

Swarthmore College Works History Faculty Works History Winter 2005 Review Of "The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, And Violence In A New South City" By G. Mixon Allison Dorsey Swarthmore College, adorsey1@swarthmore.edu This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history  Part of the History Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Allison Dorsey. (2005). "Review Of "The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, And Violence In A New South City" By G. Mixon". Georgia Historical Quarterly. Volume 89, Issue 4. 566-567. https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/53 Georgia Historical SocietyThe Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City by Gregory MixonReview by: Allison DorseyThe Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 4 (WINTER 2005), pp. 566-567Published by: Georgia Historical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40584877 .Accessed: 05/09/2014 14:57Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .Georgia Historical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The GeorgiaHistorical Quarterly.http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 5 Sep 2014 14:57:37 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions566 Georgia Historical Quarterly The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City. By Greg- ory Mixon. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. xv, 197. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95. ISBN 0-8130-2787-X.) A surprisingly slim volume, Greg Mixon's The Atlanta Riot offers the definitive treatment of the 1906 Atlanta race riot. Culled from his highly regarded and much cited dissertation, supplemented by material gath- ered from the personal papers of many of the key political players in the city, and a close read of newspapers and civic committee records, the work is a concise, cogent analysis of the firestorm of violence that fore- stalled the black quest for political inclusion and equality in the Phoenix city. A corrective to much of the previous cholarship on Atlanta, Mixon's work lays to rest myths about the destruction of Alonzo Herndon 's fa- mous Peachtree Street barbershop and details the role of the municipal leadership in reducing by two thirds (!) the count of the number of peo- ple killed in the riot. Mixon reveals the link between whites who "flocked to Atlanta by streetcar" to attack black citizens and members of the local law enforcement like Sheriff Nelms, who colluded with the mob by deputizing as many as three hundred "prominent and conservative" white citizens who help herd black Brownsville r sidents to the Atlanta stockade for detention. The aggressive assault on black lives, property, and civil rights was part of a strategy developed by white "commercial-civic" reformers who wished to craft a "progressive" city marked by "stability and controlled growth" of industry as well as "racial segregation, black disfranchise- ment" and regulation of social aspects of black life. These elites joined forces with disillusioned and anxious members of the white working class who blamed their declining social status not on the expansion and evo- lution of ever-more-powerful capital and industry but on the "illegiti- mate" notion of black political and social equality. Confronted by autonomous black laborers who competed for jobs, housing, and the bal- lot and who chose to engage in raucous street life, whites moved to rees- tablish the economic, political, and social control of the South rooted in the slave past. Playing upon sexual fears and anxieties, the elites high- lighted the threat o white womanhood posed by the black males to es- tablish a toxic link of white supremacy with their working-class brethren. Despite the "racial improvement campaign" mounted by the city's highly educated black elite, black leaders were unsuccessful in their efforts to forge a viable link of class solidarity across racial lines with their white peers. The triumph of white supremacy and riot "installed disfranchisement . . . and institutional segregation as the dominant form of race relations" in Atlanta for the next forty ears. Mixon's trim text provides a succinct analysis of the causes, action, and resolution of the riot that immobilized the "city too busy to hate" in the fall of 1906. Readers may suspect there is more to know about the life This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 5 Sep 2014 14:57:37 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBook Reviews 567 and role of men such as Henry A. Rucker (who graces the cover) and other black leaders in the city, yet this is not a weakness o much as the mark of a talented narrator who leaves his audience wanting more. Allison Dorsey Swarthmore College Ms. Dorsey is the author of To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906 (University of Georgia Press, 2004). The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South. By Shelley Sallee. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 207. Notes, bibliogra- phy, index. $49.95, library cloth, $19.95, paper. ISBN 0-8203-2448-5 cloth. ISBN 0-8203-2570-8 paper.) Although progressive-era efforts o prohibit child labor centered on the industrializing South, the movement has often been presented only in a national context. Hence, Shelley Sallee's study of child labor reform in Alabama is a welcome and long overdue contribution tothe literature. Sallee's study, while narrowly focused on one state, does more than sim- ply recount the legislative history of reform. Drawing on the growing field of "whiteness tudies," Sallee offers an important interpretation of southern progressivism and how it became allied with national move- ments. When reformers chose to center the campaign on racial uplift for white mill children, they necessarily diminished more radical implica- tions regarding class and economic power. "Whiteness" made child labor reform safe and helped forge interregional lliances, but it left African- American children and their plight outside the scope of reform. The book opens with an exploration of the antagonists of reform, mill owners and southern working people themselves. Early on in south- ern industrialization, Sallee points out, mill men could comfortably por- tray the employment of "cracker" children as moral uplift and imagine mill villages as evidence of a booming New South. Mill families them- selves, especially fathers seeking control over family labor, welcomed the opportunity for factory labor. Here, Sallee's account is more or less con- ventional, and it might have been helped by a somewhat more sophisti- cated investigation of southern working families, especially what they wanted for their younger members. Sallee is more interested in the language of reform, and the book's central section, which explores that language intimately, is its most valu- able. Here, she details how casting child labor in the discourse of white- ness challenged the paternalist language of industrialists. Ironically, the labor movement did much to turn child labor reform away from its so- cialist implications, Sallee argues. Samuel Gompers's choice of English- born reformer Irene Ashby-Macfadyen to spearhead the AFL's efforts guaranteed that reform would become part of middle-class progressivism This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 5 Sep 2014 14:57:37 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review Of  The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, And Violence In A New South City  By G. Mixon

https://works.swarthmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&amp;context=fac-history

Review Of The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, And Violence In A New South City By G. Mixon

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Works

Works