Dr. Allie Lopez

Bio

Dr. Allie R. Lopez is an Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Gwinnett College. She recently completed a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship at Baylor, where she taught US History in Global Perspective and the United States in the 1960s. Her research focuses on the Black freedom struggle in the rural South and has received support from the Organization of American Historians, the Alabama Historical Association, and the Summersell Center for the Study of the South. She has published articles in Agricultural History, the Alabama Review, and TIME, Made by History. 

Dissertation

The Injustice that Permeates: Survival and Resistance in Rural Alabama
during the Civil Rights Era

Abstract

“The Injustice that Permeates” examines the experiences of Black Americans in the rural South who chose not to join in activist efforts as well as the anticipated and realized consequences for those who did. The first chapter outlines the geography of south-central Alabama, white dependence on Black agricultural laborers, and continuities and change in race relations from the early to midtwentieth century. ... Another chapter considers the impact of tenant farming in the region and the relationships between Black tenants and white landowners as well as changes in agriculture, including shifts from cotton to cattle farming and the early impacts of mechanization. ... [other] chapter[s] examine the role of the Negro Extension Service and ... the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperative Association in the region. ... This dissertation signals a shift in studies of the civil rights era. While the period was certainly shaped by resistance and backlash, there remained a significant number of Black Americans who chose not to participate in activist efforts. “The Injustice that Permeates” seeks to tell their stories.

What Faculty Say

In the end, Allie’s dissertation describes in rich detail the significant, often insurmountable, challenges that prevented black men and women in rural Alabama from participating in the civil rights movement at the local level. Following historian Pete Daniel’s admonition that most histories of the civil rights movement have “leveled mountains of conflict and ignored valleys of despair,” Allie’s work centers those valleys of despair, telling the stories of the men and women who exist on the periphery of most other histories of the movement. This work often involved Allie reading her sources against the grain. One example of Allie’s approach is her reinterpretation of the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperative Association (SWAFCA). Where previous historians have privileged characterizations of the cooperative by its leadership and other activists who emphasized its significant political aims, Allie closely read organizational records to show a significant gap between leadership and rank and file members, who often wanted the economic benefits of the cooperative without the significant dangers associated with activism in a part of the state firmly under white control. ... Allie’s work provides a potent corrective in a field where an emphasis on resistance and activism has led to a triumphant focus on a relatively small group of brave, important, but in the end atypical men and women. However, she also avoids some of the pitfalls associated with this approach. One of the unfortunate responses to Johnson in the field of slavery studies has been an overemphasis on the helplessness of enslaved individuals facing crushing, impersonal forces that coopted even resistance. In this context, it is worth pointing out that while Allie deftly describes similar dynamics in mid-twentieth century Alabama, she does so without dehumanizing her subjects, emphasizing not only the fear and power structures that kept these everyday people from participating in activism and resistance, but also the deep-seated love of the places they lived that suffused their reasoning.  

- Dr. Robert Elder, Professor of History, Baylor University