Dean Kopitsky

Dr. Barksdale/Mr. Mathis

Atlanta in Black and White

January 2018

Hidden Under the Embers: Race and Class in Atlanta

Atlanta has regarded the Latin word, resurgens, as its maxim since the flames of

Sherman’s total war consumed the city. Eager to forget the indignity of destruction, Atlanta

developed a short-term memory and willingness to attract the industrial future in order to elevate

the city to its modern international business status. In doing so, Atlanta succeeded beyond

measure, forming a jewel from the ashes. Since the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, Atlanta has

maintained its reputation as a business friendly, progressive city leading it to become the home

of Delta, Coca Cola, the 1996 Olympic Games, and the frontrunner to host Amazon’s eastern

headquarters. In addition to its remarkable business pedigree, Atlanta boasts a fertile ground for

art and culture. Towards the end of the 20th century, Atlanta became ground zero for hip-hop’s

southern wave, a movement that led to the city’s coronation as “Motown of the South.” But

underlying all this progressive fodder, Atlanta is as retrograde as the rest of the rust belt south.

Following the same impulse to forget its antebellum history, they city sacrificed its underserved

population to make way for the business elite. Atlanta is historically divided along boundaries of

color, driving blacks and whites to occupy opposing ends of the city. But since the civil rights

movement dismantled racial segregation in the 1960’s, the mark of race and social class blurred,

leaving Atlanta a city still demarcated by segregation.

In Greek mythology, the Phoenix is born from the ashes of death, giving it immortal,

regenerative power. For this reason Atlanta has adopted the Phoenix as its mascot, and a phoenix
rising from the ashes is emblazon on every streetlight, sidewalk, manhole, and city government

building in Atlanta. No man championed the effort to phoenix-iffy the city more than writer and

orator Henry Grady. Speaking to the New England Club in 1889, he made this claim on the state

of restructuring south: “The old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious

that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth. The new South presents a perfect

democracy… she stands equal among the people of the earth… her emancipation came

because…her brave armies were beaten.” Like the phoenix, Grady’s “New South” grows from

the fertile earth of its predecessor’s fiery end. Yet, because the Phoenix holds within it properties

of each phoenix that came before, the new phoenix inherits certain learned behaviors. In the case

of Atlanta and the South, it was total agency over black society. Reinforced by federal

complacence, the south instituted “Jim Crow” laws that ensured black society would be destitute

and hopeless. Blacks remained relegated to overcrowded streetcars, left with at best inadequate

educations that did not extend past middle school (or no schooling at all in many cases), and

black communities were tethered to areas bordered by railroad tracks, cemeteries, and dumps. In

Atlanta’s case, they often contained the trash of segregated white neighborhoods, and access to

electricity and water was particularly rare. The desecration of African Americans extended

anatomically too. In 1876, the Georgia legislature passed legislation allowing prisons to use

blacks as slave-like labor on “chain gangs” to work for private businesses. Often times, the

foundations of Atlanta’s “New South” businesses were built on the flogged backs of free black

labor. Henry Grady was no exception to the learned behavior. Two years before his speech to the

New England Club, he asserted that the societal foundations of the south still rested upon, “clear

and unmistakable domination by the white race.” Even in the New South, white power was

defined by the pastorilization of black folk.

 The mark of segregation paints the South in ways that reach deep into the fertile soil.

Segregation was facilitated by local government from the end of Reconstruction until the late

19th century when the infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson case sanctioned it on a national level. In

Atlanta, where blacks and whites had lived in close proximity, whites fled the residential area

just south of downtown for what became Atlanta’s first suburbs, Inman and Grant Park. Blacks

thus moved into the more upscale homes abandon by whites. For the first time, they could rely

on heating, running water, and electricity. As the 20th century dawned, some black communities

thrived in segregation. In a uniquely Atlantan moment, Alonzo Herndon became Georgia’s first

black millionaire as the founder of his Atlanta Life insurance company. Auburn Avenue, an

upper middle and upper class neighborhood east of downtown, became the cultural, economic,

and societal capitol of the Black South. Auburn Avenue flourished under segregation because

elite black business owners were legally bound to sell nowhere else. Atlanta’s black community

thrived but its growth was restricted to within the invisible borders of segregation. As the city’s

white population grew, first east and then north, blacks filled the forgotten neighborhoods.

Finally, two events in the 1960’s changed the face of race in Atlanta. First came the Civil Rights

act of 1964. This ended federal sanctioned segregation in the south and for the fist time blacks

could take their business outside their formally segregated communities. It seems ironic that

Atlanta’s expediency to accept the progressive movement as, “the city to busy to hate,”

ultimately led to the diffusion of black affluence and the destruction of Mecca on Auburn

Avenue. The interstates came next. I-75 and I-85 pierced the heart of Atlanta’s black community

as it divided Auburn Avenue in half. Negligence by city government led the area to go

unsupported during construction of the highways, and by the time cars passed over the historic

district, it had already bled its prominence.

 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought an end to the original conception of the Civil

Rights movement. Atlanta, after a feverish spell of White Flight, was now a majority black city

and in 1973 became the first large, southern city to elect a black mayor. Atlanta was poised to

reclaim its seat as the moral compass of the south. But as the formal boundaries of race faded, it

became clear that the city was dispositioned to maintain some form of societal demarcation. A

wealth gap emerged between the historic districts of Eastlake and Inman Park as affluence settled

in new, sprawling suburbs of Sandy Springs and Brookhaven. In the mid-1980’s, after a decade-

and-a-half of black mayors, 45% of blacks sill lived under the poverty line in Atlanta. Income

inequality between the white, affluent north and the black, poor south was the same ratio it had

been in the early 1960’s. To make the paradox more apparent, the percentage of blacks living in

affluence in the 1980’s was only 3%. Cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston, all infamous

for their incendiary race relations, had a lower percentage of blacks living in poverty than

Atlanta. Thus Atlanta as a modern symbol of black affluence was as mythical as the phoenix

rising from ashes.

But what is indisputable is Atlanta’s contribution to black culture. R&B groups from the

70s and 80’s flocked to Atlanta. Eventually, Atlanta became home to a conglomerate of

production companies working with a variety of acts of national prominence. By the mid 1990’s,

Hip-Hop had diffused across the country from its lower class adolescence to the suburbs. As the,

“city to busy to hate,” Atlanta was the perfect city to embrace its homegrown rap groups Goodie

Mob and OutKast as they rose to national fame. Yet as these groups came of age, they focused

on the institutional irony of black power failing its lower class constituents. As the city prepared

for the 1996 Olympic Games and the Super Bowls of the 90’s, the reality of its cosmetic attitude

to progress was revealed. City government was indifferent, at best, in terms of urgency to
remove the Georgia flag, which proudly flew the battle flag of the Confederacy, from the

Georgia Dome. The black politicians, while they recognized what the flag represented to the city

and the world, did not do enough to bring it down in the eyes of the young people of Atlanta.

When the Rodney King verdict was handed down in April of 1992, students of Atlanta’s

HBCU’s rioted. However, unlike the rest of the country which was protesting the oppression of

blacks by white police officers, Atlanta’s students protested the city’s black politicians whom

they felt had become complacent to their needs, transferring their loyalty to the business elite of

Atlanta. The students felt that the learned behavior of racial oppression, with its roots in the 19th

century, had manifested itself in the African American politicians of the city, this time taking the

form of class oppression.

If Atlanta is the “city to busy to hate,” it must also realize it is the city to complacent to

change. Physical oppression first divided the city along lines of color as Jim Crow laws from the

late 19th to the mid 20th century, and then returned as class negligence in the latter part of the 20th

century and remains the same today. Yet now, as the Atlanta Beltline reintroduces affluent

whiteness to downtown Atlanta, the city is in a position to change its legacy. Will it ensure the

protection and continuity of its historically disenfranchised communities in the face of raising

property taxes, or, will it continue to embrace its cosmetic approach, neglect to learn from its

history, and leave the city’s future to those that have always controlled it?