"This is the best treatment scholars   have of black life in a southern state at the beginning of the twentieth century."   --  Howard N. Rabinowitz, Journal of American History "The author shows clearly and forcefully   the ways in which this [white] system abused and controlled the black lower   caste in Georgia." -- Lester C. Lamon, American Historical Review.     "Dittmer has a faculty for lucid exposition of complicated subjects. This is   especially true of the sections on segregation, racial politics, disfranchisement,   woman's suffrage and prohitibion, the neo-slavery in agriculture, and the racial   violence whose threat and reality hung like a pall over all of Georgia throughout   the period." -- Donald L. Grant, Georgia Historical Quarterly.