Brown-Nagin - Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement

COURAGE TO DISSENT

Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement

TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN

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Copyright 2011 by Tomiko Brown-Nagin

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown-Nagin, Tomiko, 1970
Courage to dissent: Atlanta and the long history of the
civil rights movement / Tomiko Brown-Nagin.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-538659-2 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-19-538659-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. SegregationLaw and legislationGeorgiaAtlantaHistory. 2. Segregation
Law and legislationUnited StatesHistory. 3. SegregationGeorgia
AtlantaHistory. 4. Civil rights movementsGeorgia
AtlantaHistory20th century. I. Title.
KF4757.B76 2010
342.73085dc22 2010010825

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To my parents,
Willie J. and Lillie C. Brown

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Austin Thomas (A.T.) Walden, the son of illiterate former slaves, graduated with honors from the University of Michigan Law School in 1911. Walden established a law practice in Georgia in 1912, while Thurgood Marshall, who one day would be known nationwide as the man who slew Jim Crow, was still in high school. Waldenone of the Souths first African-American attorneyscharted Atlantas path toward racial equality in the years before and after Brown v. Board of Education. He fought for black advancement through activism in civic, social, church, and political organizations, as well as through his work at the bar.

Walden, the president of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP for many years, became Thurgood Marshalls man in Atlanta once Marshall took the helm of the NAACPs legal committee. In public, at annual conferences and at meetings of the legal committee, Walden dutifully pledged allegiance to Marshalls strategy. Waldens alliance with the NAACP and his activism on behalf of African Americans landed him on the hit list of the Ku Klux Klan. Walden was living on borrowed time, declared a Klansman who confronted him on the street one day during the 1940s. In the Klansmans view, Walden, an ally of the NAACP, unquestionably threatened the racial status quo.

In practice, the story was more complicated. Rather than obediently follow the NAACPs strategy, Walden and other leaders in Atlanta, the thriving metropolis of black education and culture, exercised considerable agency and independence. Reflecting the perspectives of the band of middle-class blacks that W. E. B. Du Bois had called the Talented Tenth, Walden added his own designs to Marshalls blueprint for achieving equality through law. He fashioned a brand of socially conscious lawyering that fit local circumstances, and deviated in crucial ways from the model of legal activism of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). Walden did not oppose elements of the NAACPs strategy because he and his clients lacked an affirmative vision of racial justice. Rather,