The Pain and the Promise: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Tallahassee, Florida - Hardcover

Rabby, Glenda Alice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082032051X ISBN 13: 9780820320519

Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr, 1999

Synopsis

While Florida is rarely considered a traditional southern state, its history of race relations reveals otherwise. This study of the civil rights movement in Florida’s capital during the 1950s and ’60s shows that Tallahassee was a key player in the South in that era, hosting the region’s most successful bus boycott in 1956 and protest activities by the Congress for Racial Equality that were among that organization’s first in the Deep South. Drawing on eyewitness accounts and local newspaper coverage, Glenda Alice Rabby chronicles events from the murder of an NAACP official in 1951 to the final integration of public schools in 1970. She analyzes the shifting goals of the civil rights movement, the complex relations between civil rights organizations, and the activism of Florida A&M students. She also tells how the bus boycott provided national exposure for its spokesman Charles Kenzie Steele and documents for the first time the extraordinary leadership of women, notably Patricia and Priscilla Stephens. The Pain and the Promise describes an important chapter in civil rights history that establishes Florida’s rightful place in that story.

About this title

About the Author:

Glenda Alice Rabby is with the Florida Department of Education. She lives in Tallahassee.

Review:

"This will be a significant contribution to civil rights historiography and will bring Florida’s civil rights history into the literature in a way that has not fully happened."--David J. Garrow, author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

"A gripping narrative of the civil rights struggle in Florida's capital . . . The author's work mining the relevant archives and court records is impressive. . . . In exploring the roots, evolution, and outcomes of African American civil rights struggles in Tallahassee, Rabby illuminates 'the promise of protest' while remaining ever-mindful of 'the pain of what is yet undone."--North Carolina Historical Review

"Until Rabby, no one had chronicled the entire civil rights movement in Tallahassee and validated . . . what it was: a crucial part of American history.”--Tallahassee Democrat

"A highly readable book, rich in detail, conversational in tone, informative."--Florida Times Union

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 082032051X
• ISBN 13: 9780820320519
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 330