Product Description

Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award and a New York Times Notable book, Praying for Sheetrock is the story of McIntosh County, a small, isolated, and lovely place on the flowery coast of Georgia--and a county where, in the 1970s, the white sheriff still wielded all the power, controlling everything and everybody. Somehow the sweeping changes of the civil rights movement managed to bypass McIntosh entirely. It took one uneducated, unemployed black man, Thurnell Alston, to challenge the sheriff and his courthouse gang--and to change the way of life in this community forever.

"An inspiring and absorbing account of the struggle for human dignity and racial equality" (Coretta Scott King)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #285930 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.com Review
Despite what it said in the New York Times or the Congressional Record, not everybody in America got the word right away about the civil rights movement. Thus it was that well into the 1970s, 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. This is, writes Greene, a story of "large and important things happening in a very little place."

From Publishers Weekly
As the first black commissioner of McIntosh County, Ga., retired boilermaker Thurnell Alston brought the civil rights struggle to a coastal backwater in the 1970s. He initiated voting rights lawsuits, fought drugs and introduced medical clinics, plumbing and running water to "a forgotten county needy in every way." A threat to corrupt Sheriff Tom Popell, who ruled the county as his fiefdom, Alston challeged the "good old boy" patronage system. But the irascible commissioner became increasingly distanced from his constituency and, after his youngest son's tragic death in 1983, he neglected his wife and children in escapist pursuits. The target of a government sting operation, he was convicted of drug conspiracy charges in 1988 and sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison camp, where he remains. By turns inspiring and sad, his story is told with dramatic skill by Atlanta journalist Greene. 75,000 first printing; $75,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
It's hard to believe that this powerful story of the political awakening of the black community in McIntosh County, Georgia took place in the 1970s. Untouched by the civil rights movement, this isolated rural county was long dominated by a renegade sheriff until a series of events resulted in the election of Thurnell Alston as the first black county commissioner since Reconstruction. Greene's use of the actual words of county residents adds an air of truth that cannot be denied. This book needs to be read by everyone who does not know the deep South and by those who think all of our racial problems were corrected in the 1960s. Young adults of all races would find this more enlightening than many history books. For most collections. --John W. King, Univ. of Mary land Libs. , College Park
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

If you want to understand the South, read this.
As a native Southerner, I can say that Melissa Faye Greene is spot-on in creating her characters. Her descriptions of people, places, scenes, sounds, and smells bring everything to life. I find myself saying again and again, "I've experienced that; I know that person." I gave this book to my teen-ager so she would understand why racial politics are what they are in the South; she's now re-reading it -- on her own -- for the third time. Parts of this story will make you laugh out loud; others will make you angry; throughout, there is the human struggle for dignity. If you want to understand the South of the current generation and the one before it, I recommend this book highly.

The More Things Stay The Same
My mother was born and raised in McIntosh County Georgia. She confirms the truck crash incident along with the Sheriff's drug cartel and other corruptions. She admitted that many blacks in the County looked up to Sheriff Tom Poppel and considered him a good man. I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Upon recommendation by a doctor my mother moved home to McIntosh County. I became a citizen of McIntosh County in 1983 and experienced an extreme culture-shock. The housing was inadequate, education was minimum, employment was scarce, race relations were very much segregated and people still spake Gullah. As a matter of fact in 1983 there was a separate prom for white and black students. It is fatally ironic that Thurnell Alston was caught in a drug sting. The truth of the matter is he became a victim of his own circumstance. I visited him in the hospital before he succumbed to cancer. His sons and I were close friends and I never really understood the significance of who he was until I read the book (Praying for Sheetrock) and consider it to be a well-written book for all to read especially citizens of McIntosh County. However because the lack of education exists many in McIntosh County will not read the book. Unfortunately the more things change the more they remain the same.

A wonderful history of a little battle for civil rights.
What a wonderful work! Melissa Faye Greene has brought together a passion for scholarship and a mellifluous writing style. Darien, Georgia is hardly the place to begin when one studies the civil rights movement in America -- but Melissa Faye Greene shows us the impact of this revolution in rural America, a story too often neglected in favor of stories of urban desegregation. Beautifully written, Ms. Greene elucidates the struggles of blacks and whites to come to terms with a changing social reality, and cast off decades of de facto dictatorial rule by a white aristocracy. In the process, both white and black come to see that what unites them is greater than what divides them, even though what unites them is not always to their liking