In Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, Tomiko Brown-Nagin recovers a complex, fascinating world of black activists, lawyers, and community leaders in civil rights era Atlanta, providing a rich account of a “movement with many dimensions” (173). Although familiar figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Andrew Young appear, much of the book's emphasis rests on characters who have received scant, if any, treatment by historians of the period, including, for example, “feminist lawyers” such as Margie Pitt Hames, welfare activists such as Ethel Mae Mathews, and black “pragmatists” such Austin Thomas (A.T.) Walden, William H. Borders, Jessie Hill, Jr., and Rufus Clement. In Brown-Nagin's account, all of the above parties interacted in complex ways to advance black interests, frequently developing novel strategies and forging provisional, if tension-ridden, tactical alliances. For example, “movement” lawyer Len Holt emerges as a litigation innovator who developed the “omnibus suit” to transform the courtroom into a platform for mobilizing “public concern about injustice.” (193) Meanwhile, welfare rights activist Ethel Mae Mathews challenged a major anti-busing compromise endorsed by black “pragmatists,” clearly demonstrating the value of litigation to the grass roots (428–29).

Although all of the above characters exhibited the “courage to dissent,” some dissented in more complex ways than others. For example, Atlanta's black “pragmatists” dissented against white leaders and, occasionally, black activists, either by stalling plans for immediate integration post-Brown vs. the Board of Education (Part I); negotiating deals to calm direct action protest in the 1960s (Part II); or forging key compromises with white leaders on questions of integration and busing in the 1970s (Part III). Although some of these moves angered more radical contingents, Brown-Nagin demonstrates persuasively that reform frequently emerged out of a complex dialectic between activists and elites, as demonstrations pressured whites into accepting compromises forged by demonstration-wary pragmatists – ultimately effecting change. Additionally, Brown-Nagin demonstrates how pragmatists forged their own, independent reform agendas rooted in “self-help,” “economic advancement,” and the development of “black institutions.” (32–33) Here, figures such as A.T. Walden demonstrated intriguing continuities between earlier proponents of black advancement such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois (both of whom taught Walden and—as Brown-Nagin shows—converged in much of their thought), and later city leaders such as Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young (277).

Impressive for both its scope of coverage and depth of recovery, Courage to Dissent raises a variety of new questions about the civil rights movement and its aftermath. For example, Brown-Nagin's recovery of black infra-politics in Atlanta invites comparison to other local studies of Southern cities at the time, including Glenn Eskew's But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and J. Mills Thornton's Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma work on Birmingham. Interesting not only for its longtime rivalry with Atlanta, Birmingham also became a place where Atlanta natives such as Martin Luther King, Jr. won considerable publicity. According to Eskew, civil rights demonstrations gained intensity in Birmingham in part because of a rift in local black leadership between “the traditional Negro leadership class” who worked “through compromise, negotiation, and accommodation,” (much like Atlanta's pragmatists) and “new indigenous protest groups” such as the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights led by “charismatic leaders” such as Fred Shuttlesworth.

However, Brown-Nagin demonstrates similar schisms in Atlanta politics. Was the difference between the two cities located primarily in white politics, for example in schisms between white moderates and extremists? Or, were black pragmatists in Atlanta better able to control the tempo of protest? On this point, Brown-Nagin's study invites future work on Atlanta post-civil rights as well. To what extent, for example, did black pragmatism set the stage for future economic growth in the city, lifting white and black boats alike? As Kevin Kruse in White Flight and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) demonstrates, black mayor and former activist Andrew Young startled whites by turning “out to be the best friend a business community ever had” (241). Was this a continuation of the pragmatism forged by leaders such as A.T. Walden? If so, does this then mean that black pragmatism formed a little- understood counterpoint to the larger “modern conservatism” story focused on by Kruse, Lassiter, Crespino and others? Or, were black pragmatists engaged in something else: perhaps the creation of an alternate vision of democratic politics? On this particular point, parallels seem to emerge between leaders such as A.T. Walden and black intellectuals such as Ralph Ellison, who, as Nikhil Pal Singh argues in Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2004), fought for a redefinition of America that questioned the “modernizing assumption[s]” implicit in Brown's push for assimilation, countering with an attention to the “substantive collective identities of racialized subjects.” In Singh's account, “the black city was in many ways less intellectually isolated than the larger society—the site for the generation of cosmopolitan discourses that often surpassed conventional American views of the world” (153).

Whether black pragmatists in Atlanta forged their own definition of America or not, Courage to Dissent surpasses any study to date in its synthesis of social and legal history to describe the interaction between grassroots protest and legal reform. It sets the bar high for future studies of the intersection between legal history and civil rights.