Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta - (The John Hope Franklin African American History and Culture) by Karen Ferguson (Paperback)

About the Book

Ferguson looks at how black reformers in Atlanta used New Deal federal programs to advance their struggle for citizenship--and how they used their authority as agents of the state to impose a bourgeois "politics of respectability" that effectively stratified the black community.

Book Synopsis

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, Atlanta had the South's largest population of college-educated African Americans. The dictates of Jim Crow meant that these men and women were almost entirely excluded from public life, but as Karen Ferguson demonstrates, Roosevelt's New Deal opened unprecedented opportunities for black Atlantans struggling to achieve full citizenship.

Black reformers, often working within federal agencies as social workers and administrators, saw the inclusion of African Americans in New Deal social welfare programs as a chance to prepare black Atlantans to take their rightful place in the political and social mainstream. They also worked to build a constituency they could mobilize for civil rights, in the process facilitating a shift from elite reform to the mass mobilization that marked the postwar black freedom struggle.

Although these reformers' efforts were an essential prelude to civil rights activism, Ferguson argues that they also had lasting negative repercussions, embedded as they were in the politics of respectability. By attempting to impose bourgeois behavioral standards on the black community, elite reformers stratified it into those they determined deserving to participate in federal social welfare programs and those they consigned to remain at the margins of civic life.

Review Quotes

"A significant work . . . Powerful, even provocative. . . . [This book] immediately goes on the short shelf of outstanding works on Atlanta's history; it also forces us to reconsider what we thought we knew about mid-twentieth-century African-American and American history." -- Georgia Historical Quarterly

"Ferguson offers important insights into the ambiguous effects of government intervention in the lives of black Americans during the New Deal era." -- American Historical Review

About the Author

Karen Ferguson is associate professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.