"In this social and political history, Gregory Mixon explores the ways African Americans in postbellum Georgia used the militia as a vehicle to secure full citizenship, respectability, and a more stable place in society. In telling the forty-year history of the black militia in Georgia and the determined disbandment process that whites undertook to destroy it, Mixon not only shows the key role that militia participation played in African Americans' search for citizenship after the Civil War, but he also connects this chapter to the larger history of militia participation by African descendant people throughout the Western hemisphere and Latin America"--Provided by publisher.