African American Civil Rights Movement

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had led the community in mass demonstrations the previous year. Indeed, almost every historian who has dealt with the southwest Georgia movement has made a similar assertion. However, such a notion could not be farther from the truth. The organizing tradition amongst oppressed African-Americans involved a sustained working-class struggle over several decades that was both tenacious and politically heterogeneous. In order to more fully understand the agendas and motivations for this political activity in southwest Georgia, one must first have some clue as to the nature and scope of their economic options. In 1935, noted statistician Charles E. Hall, under the supervision of Z.R. Pettet of the United States Bureau of the Census, published an exhaustive study of the social and economic characteristics of African-America entitled Negroes in the United States. Based upon information gathered by the Census Bureau, the work provides invaluable insight into the lives and movements of black Americans in the early part of the century. One crucial inference that may be drawn from Hall’s compilation is the overwhelmingly rural composition of the African-American population in southwest Georgia counties as late as 1930. For the purposes of the study, Hall employed the terms “urban” and “rural” in accordance with the meanings assigned