Dissertation Information for Winston A. Grady-WillisNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: A changing tide: Black politics and activism in Atlanta, Georgia, 1960-1977 Abstract: This dissertation seeks to provide an intraracial narrative history of African American politics and activism in Atlanta, Georgia from the student-initiated direct action movement to end segregation begun in early 1960 to the emergence of women-centered activism that coincided with the culmination of Maynard Jackson's historic first term as mayor of the city in late 1977. Grounded in primary sources, including extended interviews with several activists and scholars from the period, this study fills a key vacuum in the historiography on the late twentieth century African American freedom movement by charting the various manifestations of Black political activism in Atlanta during the transition from Civil Rights to Black Power. Atlanta has represented for several decades a key point of convergence for overlapping and sometimes contested lines of Black political thought and action. Indeed, the process of student and community radicalization which took place in 1960s Black Atlanta was part and parcel of a larger tradition in Black activism. The key organizational embodiment of this Black radical tradition was the Atlanta Project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Atlanta Project radicals worked to link condemnation of the Vietnam War with local neighborhood struggles for increased community control and an end to police harassment and brutality. The volatile Summerhill-Peoplestown and Dixie Hills neighborhood protests of the late 1960s gave rise to a core group of dedicated and uncompromising grass-roots neighborhood activists, including Ethel Mathews, president of the local chapter of the National Welfare Rights Organization. At the same time, however, such protests helped to propel the Black Studies movement at the Atlanta University Center and at Emory University, as well as the establishment of the Institute of the Black World, an activist think tank and resource center. Events in Atlanta confirm that the Black Power era spawned three distinct--and in some ways, disparate--trends in twentieth century African American politics: the establishment of Black Studies programs and independent cultural institutions; the ascendancy of liberal Black electoral politics; and the reemergence of a women-centered critique of patriarchy and sexism in the African American freedom struggle. |
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