Robert Norrell traces the course of the civil rights movement in Tuskegee, Alabama, capturing both the unique aspects of this key Southern town's experience and the elements that it shared with other communities during this period.

Home to Booker T. Washington's famed Tuskegee Institute, the town of Tuskegee boasted an unusually large professional class of African Americans, whose economic security and level of education provided a base for challenging the authority of white conservative officials.

Offering sensitive portrayals of both black and white figures, Norrell takes the reader from the founding of the Institute in 1881 and early attempts to create a harmonious society based on the separation of the races to the successes and disappointments delivered by the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

First published in 1985, Reaping the Whirlwind has been updated for this edition. In a new final chapter, Norrell brings the story up to the present, examining the long-term performance of black officials, the evolution of voting rights policies, the changing economy, and the continuing struggle for school integration in Tuskegee in the 1980s and 1990s.