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.