| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875–1906. By Allison Dorsey. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. xvi, 238 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8203-2618-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8203-2619-4.)

Allison Dorsey's To Build Our Lives Together details the emergence of Atlanta's African American community from the late antebellum era to World War I, although most of the book's coverage deals with the period from 1875 through the infamous Atlanta race riot of 1906. It was, as Dorsey contends, a "long, slow and painstaking process of interwoven personal and communal actions and interactions" (p. 1)—a four-decade process that involved forming residential spaces and establishing churches as "the spiritual and social heart of the multi-layered African American community" (ibid.) and that included developing a system of public education accessible to blacks, a network of social organizations, a business community to serve race needs, and a political infrastructure. Some institutions and practices were transferred from the slave experience, but Dorsey emphasizes that Atlanta's black community became increasingly stratified from 1875 to 1906 more by social status than by class, given that many among Atlanta's black leadership were drawn from a working class that prospered in support of the community.

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