Provides an understanding of the intersection of race and region while addressing contemporary issues such as the future of elementary and higher education, the nature of health-care disparities, and voting and representation. The research presented here reveals that race and class-based problems remain, and geography often is a contributing factor to those differences.

The lush landscape and subtropical climate of the Georgia coast only enhance the air of mystery enveloping some of its inhabitants—people who owe, in some ways, as much to Africa as to America. As the ten previously unpublished essays in this volume examine various aspects of Georgia lowcountry life, they often engage a central dilemma: the region's physical and cultural remoteness helps to preserve the venerable ways of its black inhabitants, but it can also marginalize the vital place of lowcountry blacks in the Atlantic World. The essays, which range in coverage from the founding of the Georgia colony in the early 1700s through the present era, explore a range of topics, all within the larger context of the Atlantic world. Included are essays on the double-edged freedom that the American Revolution made possible to black women, the lowcountry as site of the largest gathering of African Muslims in early North America, and the coexisting worlds of Christianity and conjuring in coastal Georgia and the links (with variations) to African practices. A number of fascinating, memorable characters emerge, among them the defiant Mustapha Shaw, who felt entitled to land on Ossabaw Island and resisted its seizure by whites only to become embroiled in struggles with other blacks; Betty, the slave woman who, in the spirit of the American Revolution, presented a “list of grievances” to her master; and S'Quash, the Arabic-speaking Muslim who arrived on one of the last legal transatlantic slavers and became a head man on a North Carolina plantation. Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council.

"[A] vital investigation of Forsyth’s history, and of the process by which racial injustice is perpetuated in America." —U.S. Congressman John Lewis Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century, was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten. National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth “all white” well into the 1990s. In precise, vivid prose, Blood at the Root delivers a "vital investigation of Forsyth’s history, and of the process by which racial injustice is perpetuated in America" (Congressman John Lewis).

Published in 1951, this study looks at the social, economic, political, and historical aspects of the development of higher education for African Americans in Georgia.

In Statesboro, Georgia, two schools coexisted: one white and the other black. Yet, these schools were intertwined by their geographical location and the traditions of the segregated South. There are many glaring similarities between the white students of Georgia Southern University's forerunner, the First District A&M School, and the black students of the Statesboro Industrial and High School. Yet as happened all too often in the South as implementation of the federal court's desegregation orders took shape, "Negro" schools were downgraded or outright closed. Statesboro was no different. While, First District A&M became a regional university, Statesboro Industrial and High School was downgraded to a junior high school. In 1961, integration on the higher-education level at Georgia's flagship university captured national attention. Few works if any have examined desegregation in the context of non-flagship universities. Likewise, there is a misguided mythology that desegregation occurred quietly at Georgia Southern University: it's clear that while there was not the violence and rioting seen elsewhere in Southern universities, blacks were marginalized and did not feel welcome at the college. A passive group after the initial integration, blacks adopted tactics of protest and confrontation to empower themselves. Taking a page from the Civil Rights Movement, black students and faculty established organizations to confront discrimination and gain access to campus leadership positions. This is a story about the defeats, victories, struggles, and developments of blacks at Georgia Southern University.

From the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, Georgia's racial order shifted from the somewhat fluid conception of race prevalent in the colonial era to the harsher understanding of racial difference prevalent in the antebellum era. In Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750--1860, Watson W. Jennison explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, arguing that long-term structural and demographic changes account for this transformation. Jennison traces the rise of rice cultivation and the plantation complex in low country Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century and charts the spread of slavery into the up country in the decades that followed. Cultivating Race examines the "cultivation" of race on two levels: race as a concept and reality that was created, and race as a distinct social order that emerged because of the specifics of crop cultivation. Using a variety of primary documents including newspapers, diaries, correspondence, and plantation records, Jennison offers an in-depth examination of the evolution of racism and racial ideology in the lower South.

In Show Thyself a Man, Gregory Mixon explores the ways African Americans in postbellum Georgia used the militia as a vehicle to secure full citizenship, respect, and a more stable place in society. As citizen-soldiers, black men were empowered to get involved in politics, secure their own financial independence, and publicly commemorate black freedom with celebrations such as Emancipation Day. White Georgians, however, used the militia as a different symbol of freedom--to ensure the postwar white right to rule. This book is a forty-year history of black militia service in Georgia and the determined disbandment process that whites undertook to destroy it, connecting this chapter of the post-emancipation South to the larger history of militia participation by African-descendant people through the Western hemisphere and Latin America.

Decades before Georgia became the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement, generations of its African Americans waged a historic struggle to abolish the institution of slavery. Now Michael Thurmond presents this unique, fascinating story of black Georgia from the early eighteenth century until the end of the Civil War.

"A project of the New Georgia Encyclopedia"

Reflecting a new commitment by American anthropologists to engage in what has been called the anthropology of racism, this book examines racism, class stratification and sexism as they bear on the African-American struggle for social justice, equality and cultural identity in the South.