within the Black community.
A revelatory and riveting work of history, “Courage to Dissent” is driven by a cast of complex, real-life characters. Among the Civil Rights Movement’s many lesser- known yet no less extraordinary legal and social activists, Brown-Nagin spotlights: Austin Thomas “A.T.” Walden, the son of illiterate former slaves, who graduated with honors from the University of Michigan Law School, established a law practice in 1912 (when Thurgood Marshall was still in high school), and fought for Black advancement through activism in civic, social, church, and political organizations, as well as through his work at the bar, and Lonnie King, the heroic sit-in activist who led the student movement’s assault on segregation in Atlanta in the 1960s and, 10 years later, led a surprising assault on the LDF’s interpretation of the landmark Supreme Court ruling against “separate but equal” public schools for Black children. An outspoken critic of massive student busing, he proposed a better way to achieve equality of education for Atlanta’s Black students: hire Black principals and teachers.
Also, Ethel Mae Mathews, a maid with a sixth-grade education who found her political voice when politics threatened her children. As president of the Atlanta chapter of the National Welfare Rights Organization, she coordinated a push for school desegregation among public housing residents in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Speaking out as a mother, she opposed Lonnie King’s plan, which had gained support among prominent Blacks such as Dr. Benjamin Mays, the first Black chairman of the Atlanta Board of Education and a mentor of Dr. Martin Luther King and trailblazing lawyers such as Leon Holt, Donald Hollowell and Constance Baker Motley.
In the book’s conclusion, Brown-Nagin considers what current activists can learn from the long history of the civil rights movement in Atlanta.
Praised by former NAACP chairman Julian Bond as “an excellent work,” “Courage to Dissent” has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and the ongoing, contentious struggles for social change, racial equality and justice.
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