Practically all of this research has been on black Protestant churches. Scholars have recently examined the role of black churches in initiating civil rights and social justice activities, community development and rehabilitation projects, and family support and community health outreach programs. Copyright © 2011 by University Press of Mississippi. His personal account of this transformation underscores its meaning for him today and reminds the reader that no generation can ignore the past or rest comfortably on its progress toward tolerance, equality, and justice. In retrospect, McAtee's involvement in these events during this intense period became a turning point in repudiating his past acquiescence to the injustices of the racist society of his birth. Focusing on the quiet leadership of Mayor McLean and fellow ministers, McAtee shows how these religious and political leaders enacted changes that began opening access to public institutions and facilities for all citizens, black and white. "Buddy" McLean, in building community bridges and navigating the roiling social and political waters. A fourth-generation Mississippian and son of a Presbyterian minister, he joined a group of local ministers-two white and four black-to assist the mayor of Columbia, Earl D. deeply troubled by the resistance of so many of his fellow white southerners to any change in the racial status quo, McAtee understood that he could no longer be a passive bystander. Many other activists from across the country poured into the state to try to bring an end to segregation and to register black citizens to vote. ![]() Soon after his arrival, three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. In May 1964, Bill McAtee became the new minister at Columbia Presbyterian Church, deep in the Piney Woods of south Mississippi. Washington's life, concludes Norrell, was an object lesson of progress and hope that black people could rise to something better: at many levels, this prophecy was correct, and Washington's historical reputation should be revised to reflect that. In this article, the author discusses Washington's accepted biography, contending that Washington was not the conniving compromiser historians would have people think, but rather a pragmatic leader in a difficult time who pursued both protest and evolutionary change. They have done so out of protest against racial injustice-an understandable motive, but one that casts the Tuskegeean as a foil to African-American protest leaders of the 1960s. But from the 1960s onward, his reputation suffered: As one historian put it, "the tar brush of Uncle Tomism has stuck." In the author's view, leading American historians have committed the anachronistic fallacy of removing Washington from the context of his life. ![]() Washington rose to national fame with a speech at the Cotton States Exposition, in Atlanta, in which he told Southerners, black and white, that "in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Most black people and many influential white people looked to him from then on as the leader of his race. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the recognized leader of American black people from 1895 until his death in 1915, has been viewed as an accommodationist to segregation, an African-American leader who traded black equality and voting rights for his own influence among white bigots.
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