Despite what it said in the New York Times or the Congressional Record, not everybody in America got the word right away about the civil rights movement. Thus it was that well into the 1970s, McIntosh County in backwoods Georgia remained a place where the black majority still had never elected one of their own to any county office, where black kids were bused away from the white school, and where the white county sheriff had his hand in every racket there was. Praying for Sheetrock is the saga of how, thanks to the leadership of a black shop-steward-turned-county-commissioner named Thurnell Alston, together with the aid of a cadre of idealistic Legal Services lawyers (Melissa Greene was one of their paralegals) this situation began to change. The story, written as grippingly as a novel, is charged with twists that only nonfiction can deliver; for example, Alston, for all the brave good he did, ultimately got caught in a federal sting and went to jail while the corrupt sheriff walked. This is, writes Greene, a story of "large and important things happening in a very little place."

Customer Rating:
Summary: Remembering Sheriff Poppell
Comment: I met Sheriff Poppell one night in 1969 when he stopped me for exceeding the speed limit in Darien, which, as I recall, dropped to 25 or so from 60, for about a quarter mile.

He took me to his headquarters where, after showing me his cellblock that looked like something out of Cool Hand Luke, told me in some detail what he had done earlier that day to a black man (the Sheriff used another descriptive noun) from New York who he had caught speedingwith a .45 caliber pistol in his car.

My fine turned out to be equal to the exact sum of money I had in my pocket -- $65. He gave me a receipt -- from a generic "receipt book" and sent me on my way. Quite an experience; informative, and, I don't mind saying, frightening. I haven't read "Sheetrock" but believe there likely wasn't much the man wasn't capable of.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Praying for Sheetrpcl
Comment: An interesting review of the southern black population, and how their self esteem was, and possibly still is, somewhat depressed because of the discrimination toward them, by people who were victims of their upbringing, not intentionally putting them down.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent and Accurate Portrayal
Comment: Having been born and raised in a small community in south Georgia, I have seen first-hand much of what was described in this book. I found this work to be incredibly interesting and moving. Have attitudes evolved and changed for the better in this area? Yes, fortunately. Are there still traces of this? Yes, unfortunately. But with excellent works such as this, we can only hope that the sad attitudes and discrimination that is so accurately described in Ms. Greene's work will become a part of our distant past.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A story of race in the south of the 1970's
Comment: My first thought on this book was 'did you really think that a few laws and a few court cases was going to make really serious differences in the way people thought. Yes, you can force some things, like the attendance of a token few blacks at an all white high school, but back in the remote hinterlands life is going to go on much as before.

This is a story of race in a backwater southern community where an old-time sheriff continued to rule his domain much as before. The result was, eventually, for white legal aid attorneys to overthrow the system.

This is a story of race, but it's also a story of the lack of political power for a selected community. Much the same tale could have been told of Chicago in the Daley days, of jews during the holocaust and unfortunately of many other peoples over many other times. It is a fascinating story that ultimately offers some hope for the future.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An evocative oral history and a provocative work of journalism
Comment: There are a number of astonishing things about this provocative and evocative history of a remote coastal region of Georgia. Greene's chronicle is not simply an account of the institutional and covert racism that plagued one Southern county. Nor is it merely a biography of an unlikely black leader who led a momentous, peaceful rebellion against the white hierarchy before succumbing (at best) to his own credulity or (at worst) to the very corruption he criticized. Instead, "Praying for Sheetrock" is a composite oral history of a complex, deceptively quiet community during the 1970s and 1980s, where the social norms seemed old-fashioned, even quaint, and where even justifiably disgruntled citizens, both white and black, are restrained equally by an ill-defined sense of fear and by a desire to get along with their neighbors.

At the time of the writing, McIntosh County had been dominated by a corrupt yet efficient, nepotistic yet clever "Old Boy" network, but it was also populated by an impoverished black community that, on the surface, seemed to have been on good terms with the local white authorities all through the chaos of the civil rights struggle. For many years, state and federal authorities suspected that county officials, led by Sheriff Tom Poppell, had been deeply implicated in jury tampering, tax evasion, bribery, illegal gambling, drug-running, prostitution, and even murder. Folks joked that Poppell "was the only sheriff in America who owned four houses, one with an airfield, and all on twelve thousand dollars a year." Yet every attempt by higher authorities (who regularly indicated on their reports that Poppell was to be considered "armed and dangerous") failed to nab the suspects. The victims of their never-indicted yet well-documented activities included tourists on the way through the county to family vacations in Florida as well as the local poor.

The story of how this county eventually entered the late 20th century makes fascinating reading, and Greene's prose is an odd yet refreshing blend of journalism and lyricism. (It was included among the top 100 works of 20th-century American journalism by the New York University School of Journalism.) The reader is repeatedly stunned by her ability to persuade such a wide spectrum of local citizens--rich and poor, white and black, conservative and liberal--to talk at such length and with such honesty. Only at the very end of the book, in the acknowledgments, does it become clear that the author was far from a Janie-come-lately to the scene: she worked at Georgia Legal Services (which provided advice on civil liberties matters for the black community), was a witness to most of the events, and married one of the lawyers featured in the book. Rather than prejudicing her account, her experiences give the events an insider's perspective and make her relative objectivity all the more admirable. In fact, it's safe to say that only Greene could have written this book. And, much like "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" (itself set only a few miles to the north), her book manages to look underneath the scandal and the poverty and to reveal much to admire in the gentle camaraderie of these easygoing neighbors.

Above all, "Praying for Sheetrock" reminds us of the courageous heroes who look "upon law, upon the Constitution, as a series of fundamental truths about basic human rights." Those heroes include black community members, young and old, willing to risk everything for those rights; the lawyers who represented and advised them for next to nothing; and the small yet powerful number of local whites who believed that enough was enough. It's an inspiring tale that reminds us that the civil rights struggle is far from over.

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