This Georgia Rising: Education, Civil Rights, and the Politics of Change in Georgia in The 1940s

This Georgia Rising is a study of Georgia's political changes in the decade of the Second World War and in the postwar years of the 1940s. Georgia's political establishment underwent challenges in the 1940s as Georgians defended the state's university system from attacks by Governor Eugene Talmadge and Georgia's larger cities and towns challenged the state's county unit system during the early postwar stirrings of the modern civil rights movement.

An array of progressive forces-including Georgia's veterans of the Second World War, college and university students, newspaper editors and reporters in the state's larger circulating newspapers and smaller town newspapers-fought for change in some of the state's political institutions, culminating in 1942's election of Governor Ellis Arnall and 1945's changes to the state constitution.

This Georgia Rising is a detailed study of the gubernatorial races of the 1940s as they are interwoven with the larger political and social changes of wartime and then postwar Georgia. This book draws not only from Georgia's larger circulation newspapers but also focuses on its smaller circulation newspapers and especially its African-American newspapers, including The Atlanta Daily World and The Savannah Tribune.

This Georgia Rising is rich narrative of a decade of far-reaching change in twentieth-century Georgia.