University Press of Florida Show Thyself a Man: Georgia State Troops, Colored, 1865-1905 (Southern Dissent)

Product Description In Show Thyself a Man, Gregory Mixon explores the ways African Americans in postbellum Georgia used the militia as a vehicle to secure full citizenship, respect, and a more stable place in society. As citizen-soldiers, black men were empowered to get involved in politics, secure their own financial independence, and publicly commemorate black freedom with celebrations such as Emancipation Day.White Georgians, however, used the militia as a different symbol of freedom—to ensure the postwar white right to rule. This book is a forty-year history of black militia service in Georgia and the determined disbandment process that whites undertook to destroy it, connecting this chapter of the post-emancipation South to the larger history of militia participation by African-descendant people through the Western hemisphere and Latin America. About the Author Gregory Mixon, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, USA, is the author of The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City