Restructured Resistance - by Jeff Roche (Paperback)

About the Book

Restructured Resistance uses newly opened private papers, public records, newspaper reports, and oral history interviews to examine how the desegregation of public schools in Georgia reflected the evolution of southern society, economics, and politics.

Book Synopsis

In the spring of 1960, unprecedented public hearings were held on segregation and the future of public education. These hearings, held by John Sibley and the Georgia General Assembly Committee on Schools, offered a rare glimpse into the reactions of southerners--black and white--to the changes wrought by the civil rights movement.

Restructured Resistance uses newly opened private papers, public records, newspaper reports, and oral history interviews to examine how the desegregation of public schools in Georgia reflected the evolution of southern society, economics, and politics. In the midst of crisis over segregation as a symbol of southern distinctiveness, the state legislature accepted the inevitable, adopted the Sibley Commission's proposals, and created a deliberate and more utilitarian form of defiance--a restructured resistance--rooted in contemporary practicality and corporate pragmatism.

Review Quotes

This is a fine study of the Sibley Commission. Roche has placed it within the context of economic, political, and social developments that shaped southern history during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.

--Will Holmes "author of Struggling to Shake Off Old Shackles: Twentieth-Century Georgia"

About the Author

Jeff Roche is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.