New Georgia Encyclopedia : History and Archaeology Updates

Camilla Massacre, The

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:57:10 EDT

The Camilla Massacre, which took place on September 19, 1868, was one of the more violent episodes in Reconstruction Georgia. Two months earlier, Georgia had fulfilled the requirements of Congress's Radical Reconstruction plan and had been readmitted to the Union, yet in early September, the state legislature expelled twenty-eight newly elected members because they were at least one-eighth black. Among those removed was southwest Georgia representative Philip Joiner. On September 19, Joiner, along with northerners Francis F. Putney and William P. Pierce, led a twenty-five-mile march of several hundred blacks and a few whites from Albany to Camilla, the Mitchell County seat, to attend a Republican political rally....

Civil Rights Movement

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 15:23:20 EST

The civil rights movement in the American South was one of the most significant and successful social movements in the modern world. Black Georgians formed part of this southern movement for full civil rights and the wider national struggle for racial equality. From Atlanta to the most rural counties in Georgia's southwest Cotton Belt, black activists protested white supremacy in a myriad of ways?from legal challenges and mass demonstrations to strikes and self-defense. In many ways, the results were remarkable. As late as World War II (1941-45) black Georgians were effectively denied the vote, segregated in most areas of daily life, and subject to persistent discrimination and often violence. But by 1965, sweeping federal civil rights legislation prohibited segregation and discrimination, and this new phase of race relations was first officially welcomed into Georgia by Governor Jimmy Carter in 1971....

King Jr., Martin Luther (1929-1968)

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 15:29:10 EST

Martin Luther King Jr., Baptist minister and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), was the most prominent African American leader in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s....

Redemption

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 11:36:33 EST

In the context of southern politics the term Redemption refers to the overthrow or defeat of Radical Republicans (white and black) by white Democrats, marking the end of the Reconstruction era in the South. In addition to its biblical allusions, the term also underscores the widely held belief among white southerners of that era that the Republican state regimes that ruled during Reconstruction had been inefficient and corrupt, and that the "Redeemers" who reestablished white Democratic control of the state also restored effective and honest government. In recent years historians have come to avoid the term because of both the bias it suggests and the very different way in which modern scholars interpret the overthrow of Reconstruction....

Segregation

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 15:32:42 EST

Beginning in the 1890s, Georgia and other southern states passed a wide variety of Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation or separation in public facilities and effectively codified the region's tradition of white supremacy. The name "Jim Crow" refers to a minstrel character popular in the 1820s and 1830s, but it is unknown how the term came to describe the form of racial segregation and discrimination that prevailed in the American South during the first half of the twentieth century. ...