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

Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960-1977. By Winston A. Grady-Willis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. xxii plus 288 pp. $22.95).

Winston/A. Grady-Willis has made an important contribution to the historiography of the black freedom movement. He offers a fresh perspective by examining Atlanta, an important southern protest city. Drawing on archival research and oral interviews, Grady-Willis's work challenges traditional interpretations that view the 1960s and 1970s as a struggle for civil rights; instead he frames black activism in terms of human rights. The former approach is problematic because, according to the author, "activists spoke in broader and more transcendent terms, embracing less confining descriptors such as freedom struggle and rights struggle" (xvii).

In addition, Grady-Willis places the human rights struggle within the broader context of international movements for self-determination. His second interpretive frame employs the term apartheid to describe "the scope of institutionalized white supremacy" in the Deep South. He argues that like South Africa's period of "institutionalized separate development" from 1910 until the early 1990s, the Deep South witnessed a similar white supremacist structure after Reconstruction until the mid-1960s (xvii). Gender and class are pivotal modes of analysis to Challenging US. Apartheid. Women played a central role at every turn of the human rights struggle. African American women activists worked from various ideological perspectives as frontline grassroots organizers, Black Nationalists, and activist intellectuals. Throughout this period

they sought to redefine gender roles and challenged middle-class ideas of civility.

Grady-Willis's hook focuses on "an eclectic group of Black activists from the city, region, nation, and larger global African World" in the struggle for human rights (xxii). The first chapter discusses the student non-violent movement. Students from the affiliated schools of the Atlanta University Center (AUC) challenged established black leaders' gradualist approach for desegregation of public accommodations, and equal housing, health care, education, and employment. The student direct action movement garnered support across intraracial class lines, broadening Atlanta's activist base. The second chapter shows the ways in which students confronted white resistance and the Ku Klux Klan. Using direct-action tactics, black students and their white allies defeated petty apartheid in Atlanta.

Ending petty apartheid did not come without great consequences. Many blacks lost their lives or were jailed in the process. The intensity and violence of working on the frontlines inside and outside Atlanta had a profound impact on student activists. In chapter three, Grady-Willis shows how Black Nationalist Malcolm X greatly influenced many men and women, who began to see the struggle for human rights as a quest for self-determination. Malcolm linked the struggles of frontline activists in the American South with African freedom fighters. Consequently, by the mid-1960s black activists in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began to come to terms with the meaning of self-determination for blacks locally, nationally, and globally (78). In his fourth chapter, the author examines SNCC's Atlanta Project, established to address the poor living conditions for African Americans in the city. Atlanta Project activists focused on grassroots urban organizing instead of traditional voter registration work. Significantly, the Atlanta Project initiated a black consciousness movement within SNCC. Radicals within the student organization argued that to achieve self-determination, African Americans would need complete control of SNCC. These debates provided a framework for the Black Power movement. In addition, these SNCC activists developed a sharp critique of the Vietnam War, linking their suffering at home to the colonization of colored people abroad.

In chapter five Grady-Willis asserts that the early phase of the Black Power movement was defined by urban protest and neighborhood activism. Although black activists had all but destroyed petty apartheid in Atlanta, living conditions for African Americans continued to deteriorate, especially in the neighborhoods of Vine City, Summerhill, and Peoplestown. In 1966, residents of Summerhill and Peoplestown began to fight back against poverty and police brutality. These demonstrations turned violent as police used force to maintain order. Grady-Willis deftly engages the debates for appropriate protest strategies among older activists, younger activists, and community members. In this context, he is able to lift up the various perspectives that shaped the black freedom movement. He successfully shows that Atlanta's urban protests were as significant in shaping the Black Power movement as were the more well known northern conflicts in Harlem and Detroit.

The book's last two chapters do not support his framework as well as earlier chapters. In his chapter on black intellectual development the author contends that the emerging Black Studies programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s grew out of the grassroots activism in poor and working-class neighborhoods. Unfortunately, he focuses more on the activism of scholars with little connection to the "eclectic group of Black activists" that framed his study. This approach makes it difficult to appreciate the relationship between grassroots urban activism and black intellectual activists. In his final chapter Grady-Willis maintains that the activism of the 1970s operated on "four distinct, yet connected fronts" (xxii). But, in his discussion of grassroots neighborhood activism, black elected officials, women-centered activism, and "progressive Black political activism," he fails to make clear how these fronts were linked in the human rights struggle.

Despite these criticisms, Challenging U.S. Apartheid is an important read for anyone interested in Black Power, Atlanta history, and the internationalization of the African American human rights struggle.

John Matthew Smith

Purdue University