Praying For Sheetrock By Ben Alston

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The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in This study guide refers to the edition of the book published in by the Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. The book opens in June with a collision between two trucks on Highway 17, which cuts through the town of Darien in McIntosh County, Georgia. Several black residents who live nearby come to pilfer brand-new shoes that have fallen from the trucks.

Poppell condones this form of highway theft. The civil rights movement and desegregation of the s has largely bypassed this isolated section of marshland and forest in rural Georgia. White and black individuals live in separate spheres of society.

Most of the residents in the main city, Darien, are white; white individuals largely own the businesses in Darien. Most of the black residents are impoverished and live in the countryside, performing manual labor jobs like woodworking and service work for the wealthier white residents.

Other works by Melissa Fay Greene

Sheriff Poppell perpetuates a system of systemic racism in which he accumulates wealth by keeping the black residents of McIntosh in poverty. Enter Thurnell Alston: a black man, who, despite his lack of formal higher education, speaks eloquently and passionately and cares about the advancement of his black brethren. Following the shooting of a black man by a white police officer and the firing of the Praying For Sheetrock By Ben Alston black representative from the Board of Education, Alston leads two separate protests at city hall to protest discrimination against the black community.

Alston receives some help from white lawyers from the Georgia Legal Services Project to file multiple lawsuits against the county and the city. This results in more black representation on the grand jury that selects the Board of Education and redistricting of voting districts so that black voters will have more of a say in the electoral process.

Praying for Sheetrock Summary and Study Guide

After enduring years of likely voter fraud that discriminated against black residents, Alston is finally elected as a county commissioner. Unlike his black predecessors on the county commission, Alston is outspoken and advocates fiercely to improve conditions for black people in McIntosh County—much to the chagrin of the white commissioners.

Sheriff Poppell dies, and his terrible reign over McIntosh County comes to an end. After suffering the loss of his son and realizing that the poor black community does not have the time or energy to care about civil rights in the same way he does, Alston grows corrupt in his position.

Melissa Fay Greene

Alston eventually gets arrested for a drug deal by https://modernalternativemama.com/wp-content/custom/essay-service/professional-essay-writers.php undercover police agent and goes to jail, showing how power can corrupt anyone in its reach. Unlock this Study Guide! Join SuperSummary to gain instant access to all 49 pages of this Study Guide and thousands of other learning resources.]

Praying For Sheetrock By Ben Alston - all

Thus it was that well into the s, 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. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.