After the Civil War, as Black freedmen prepared to exercise their new voting rights in Georgia, white supremacist groups rose to restrict their ability. Georgians faced a new prospect for brokering a class-based electoral coalition of white yeomen and Black freedmen.

The failure of Reconstruction echoes today as Georgia remains a voting rights battleground. This book details this struggle for racial justice and democracy in postwar Georgia, with an eye on issues that have persisted more than 150 years later.