"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.