Melissa Fay Greene, the author, used to work for a legal services agency in Georgia, where she met her husband. This same legal services agency plays a role in the story in this book. Greene lives in Atlanta.

The story, which is supposedly true, takes place in McIntosh County, Georgia, during the 1970s. The main part of the narrative has to do with the efforts of black activists in this poor coastal county to challenge the political power of the local white establishment. With the help of legal services lawyers, the activists got the electoral system changed in a way favorable to the blacks, and one of the activists, Thurnell Alston, became a county commissioner.

This is a brief summary of the basic story, but this summary only scratches the surface of the intricate narrative which Greene tells. Greene uses the narrative style of a novelist (but hopefully not the same degree of creativity) to draw the reader in to the story and make her (the reader) empathize with the people involved. The focus of the narrative is on the civil rights angle, but other aspects of life in McIntosh County are also covered. Greene talked to many local people, black and white, in researching this book, and she consulted various documentary sources.

The white dude who ran McIntosh County was named Tom Poppel. He was the sheriff, and he had his allies in the county government and the municipal government of Darien, the county seat. Poppel was a boss in the George Washington Plunkett tradition (“I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em”). Folks from the gambling community, the prostitution community and the drug community shared their wealth with Poppel in exchange for the right to carry out their activities in McIntosh County free from the threat of prosecution. This upset the anal-retentive types at the FBI, the DEA, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, etc., but they never managed to catch Poppel, who died unindicted, as his supporters proudly avowed.

To maintain his political support, Poppel does not seem to have used thuggery against the voters (he reserved his thuggery for the racketeers, if they crossed him). Poppel earned the support of voters by doing what all politicians do, from the county courthouse all the way up to the White House: He took wealth out of the economy by force and redirected it to his voters. True, Poppel had a fairly unconventional way of doing this. Most politicians use taxes and regulations to transfer property and goods to the voters. Poppel eschewed any fig-leaf of legality and employed more rough-and-ready methods.

McIntosh County contained roads that were used by truckers carrying goods on the New York-Miami route. Woe betide the truck that had an accident while going through the county. Poppel would alert people in the vicinity of the accident and let them loot the truck of its contents. Since there were a lot of trucks going through the county, there were often accidents. Some of the accidents were the result of hitting other trucks, going off the road, etc. Other accidents were the result of mysterious tire-slashings that sometimes happened if the truck driver made the mistake of stopping in McIntosh County.

Even before the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks in McIntosh County could vote, so Poppel bought their votes just like he bought white votes-by giving blacks as well as whites the opportunity to rob trucks. This is where the title, *Praying for Sheetrock,* comes from. A black woman who needed Sheetrock for her home prayed to God and, sure enough, Sheriff Poppel let her steal some Sheetrock from a wrecked truck. The woman attributed this to God. Apparently God had waived the technicality of the Eighth Commandment for the woman’s benefit.

When it came to other sources of illicit enrichment, however, the blacks were cheated. Well-placed white allies of Poppel got a share of the graft from the drug dealers, the gamblers and the white-slavers, but if Greene’s account can be trusted, no black people-not even the handpicked blacks elected to local office under the auspices of the Poppel machine-had access to this lucrative source of income. Greene, who waxes eloquent about the lack of social services, etc., in the black community, seems insufficiently indignant about this egregious denial of equal opportunity. Vice was where the big money was, not wrecked trucks. So the blacks-or at least the black leaders-should have had the same chance as the whites to get money from the vice operators. It’s a matter of basic fairness, or so it seems to me.

What got the black people upset at Poppel was the persistence of various forms of discrimination and insensitivity. The black people of the county got active when a city cop in Darien shot a black guy (in a non-political dispute). The blacks marched on City Hall, got listened to, liked the feeling of power, and stayed active for a few more years. Greene indicates that one factor which led the government to listen was the fact that the black people were armed. If only liberals had been running the county, there could have been some gun control!

Black political activism peaked after the county and Darien governments, pressured by federal lawsuits and the threat thereof, agreed to accept a district-based election system, which gave black activists the opportunity to elect their own people instead of the political pawns (white and black) of Sheriff Poppel. Thanks to the new system Thurnell Alston, the political leader of the black community, got elected to the County Commission. Alston was a low-income worker who was genuinely aggrieved by the plight of his people.

After his election, Alston began to lose his idealism. As Greene tells it, the death of his son and the political apathy of his constituents left Alston depressed and bitter, and he began to imitate the late Sheriff Poppel’s habit of taking bribes from vice operators, particularly drug-dealers. Unlike Poppel, Alston didn’t get away with it. A federal agent posing as a drug dealer befriended the sad and lonely Alston and tricked him into saying incriminating things into hidden microphones. Alston got sent to prison.

Greene gives the reader a fascinating, well-crafted narrative. Although Greene is a liberal from Atlanta, she manages to speak in a sympathetic manner about fellow-Southerners from a rural county. Her focus is on the black people of McIntosh County, but she fits the white people into her story as well.

In describing the voting-rights litigation, Greene shows her bias. She makes some nods to the county government’s perspective-after all, black people managed to get elected to office in McIntosh County even before the litigation began, which undermines somewhat the thesis that the system was rigged against blacks. However, Greene makes clear that the system needed reforming because the only blacks who had gotten elected before the lawsuit were part of the Poppel machine. Only after the lawsuit-when the election system changed from an at-large system to a district system-was an anti-Poppel black candidate (Alston) elected.

The voting-rights lawsuit described in this book belongs to the so-called “second generation” of voting-rights lawsuits. The first generation of such suits was directed against direct disenfranchisement: Various Southern states and localities refusing to let blacks register to vote, or participate in primary elections. This hadn’t been a problem in McIntosh County, according to Greene, since World War II. The second generation of voting-rights cases had to do with allegations that blacks, though they had the vote, were facing attempted “dilution” of their vote through various devices such as at-large districts (so that whites could outvote blacks), runoff primaries (so that black candidates wouldn’t be able to get elected by a plurality if the white vote was split), and other things. One issue in vote-dilution cases was whether plaintiffs had to prove intentional discrimination in order to win their cases. The federal courts went various ways on this issue in the 1970s, and when the Voting Rights Act was renewed in 1982, vote-dilution was made illegal even if it was unintentional. These Voting Rights Act issues are still a matter of debate today, but you wouldn’t know it from Greene, who simplistically portrays the voting-rights lawsuit in McIntosh County as an attempt to bring the county into compliance with the Constitution, into the modern era, etc.

An excellent book. When a shipment from Barnes and Noble comes through your county, hijack the truck and steal as many copies of the book as you can. Just kidding.


Recommended: Yes