Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool

Frances Freeborn Pauley, born in Ohio in 1905, moved south with her family at the age of three and proudly identified herself as a “northerner” for the rest of her long life in De catur and Atlanta, Georgia. Pauley's family rejected traditional southern racism and carefully schooled her in democratic values. Pauley went on to work unstintingly for social justice in her adopted home for more than sixty years. She comes wonderfully alive in this carefully prepared, sensitively edited autobiography. Kathryn L. Nasstrom interviewed and taped Pauley in depth and used earlier oral history interviews to enrich her firstperson narrative. She reveals Pauley as an indefatigable, clearheaded, nononsense workhorse who jumped into the political fray in the 1930s by starting a free clinic to relieve the suffering of poor women lacking adequate medical care. Pauley subsequently became involved in the League of Women Voters, serving as state president in the critical desegregation years. In 1952, she won a campaign to defeat Georgia's county unit system, which gave rural counties unbalanced power over urban areas and regularly resulted in electing southern demagogues such as Eugene and Herman Talmadge. She next fought an amendment to the state constitution that provided for private (mostly white) education in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Losing this battle, she only deepened her resolve to combat seg reg ation, deciding , among other thing s, to give up her membership in a segregated club. She personally instigated many firsttime social gatherings of blacks and whites

Ancient history · Battle · Biography · Constitution · Democracy · Desegregation · Economic Justice · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Racism · Sociology · State (computer science · White (mutation · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society