What is the main idea of Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Greene?

Melissa Greene’s Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction chronicles the Civil Rights Movement as it progresses through the small town of McIntosh, Georgia.  In the beginning of the novel, McIntosh is a town governed by the white hegemony of the Old South and racial inequality was accepted as the status quo despite the civil rights advancements occurring in neighboring cities and states.  The endurance of this racialized order is primarily attributed to the town’s law enforcement, which was entirely made up of white officials with zero intention of dismantling the segregation and discrimination and instead focused entirely on promoting and protecting their own gains, such as drug trafficking, prostitution rings, and gambling.   The town is portrayed as an entirely different world, as Greene states, “From the late 1940s through the late 1970s, McIntosh County was a mini-Las Vegas... where white men came looking for, and found, women, gambling, liquor, drugs, guns, sanctuary from the law, and boats available for smuggling" (Greene 14).  It is not until an uneducated black man named Thurnell Alston moves to McIntosh that the black community begins to take action against the persistent discrimination, for up until then, the black community put all their trust in God delivering them from the oppression.  Through a series of events, Thurnell is elected to the county commission, and he initiated several public works projects and improved the social relations between the black and white communities of McIntosh.  Thurnell helped to dismantle the repressive order, but after a decade of service to his community, Thurnell is arrested for allegations of drug trafficking—an act that speaks volumes to the present mass incarcerations rates of the African American community.

Thus, the main idea of Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction is to chronicle the trajectory of a racial and social movement through an intimate narrative to show how the Old South was dismantled and how the U.S. Constitution challenged and abolished deeply-entrenched customs in a small, close-knit community in the backwoods of Georgia.  This is a significant piece of writing because it captures the emotions, moralities, and perspectives of both the black and white community in a place struggling to embrace the changes occurring all across the country.  Further, through the incarceration of Thurnell, the novel shows a movement from race reform to race retrenchment, where all the social movements fall into a cyclical pattern of reversion in which a new system places the black community back into a system of social control.