Afterword

Atlanta, Georgia, witnessed both the greatest successes and greatest failures with regard to blacks in the United States. A Deep South city, Atlanta was marked by the sordid racial history of the American South with its riots and rebellions, yet was transformed into the South’s newest world-class international city by the late twentieth century....

The Sorrow of a City

Chapter Three focuses on the tumultuous episode where Atlanta’s most vulnerable citizens, primarily poor black children, were being hunted and murdered. To clarify this, chapter three explores the experience of the victims’ families through oral interviews, the FBI papers, and archival research to show how the popular political sentiment of Atlanta’s black working classes and poor towards Atlanta’s black City Hall was one of distrust that thwarts the black Mecca image. Crucial to understanding the Atlanta Child Murders again notes that the prism of race was not the only lens to better understanding this convoluted community, but that class stratification within black Atlanta(s) are lucid. The Atlanta Child Murders provide a unique counter-narrative on class to Atlanta’s black Mecca status, as victims who were poor black youth were labeled and dismissed as “hustlers and runaways” in effect suggesting that they deserved what happened to them. Chapter three accounts for the experiences of the Committee to Stop Children’s Murder (STOP Committee) and the Techwood Bat Patrol, organizations formed by some of Atlanta’s black working class and poor as they deemed it necessary to organize against the murderers because to them, Jackson was too busy bolstering the black Mecca image while sacrificing Atlanta’s poor to play politics. This chapter grapples with the idea that at this time, Atlanta’s black political leadership was already working with Atlanta’s white business elite to host the 1988 Democratic National Convention and the 1996 Olympic Games. As a result, it was widely believed by a large segment of the public that Atlanta’s black City Administration downplayed the murders to show that social and economic progress had been made in the South and thus promoting a “city too busy to hate.” Just as important, many in black Atlanta felt that Williams was not the killer and that another killer remained on the loose.

Introduction

On September 18, 1990, the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta, Georgia, as the host city for the XXVI Centennial Olympiad (1996). A product of the visionary leadership of black mayors Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr. and Andrew Jackson Young, this achievement signaled a Kairos moment for the southern city. Only twenty-five years before, Atlanta had reeled from urban rebellions as poor black citizens took to the streets to air their grievances over police brutality and poor living conditions. Just a few years later, Maynard Jackson had ascended to the mayor’s office, drawing from an unprecedented coalition of black Atlantans and the city’s white progressive voters. If a cross-racial grassroots coalition had been responsible for electing Jackson in 1973, the Olympic victory came thanks to a coalition of elites—cooperation between the black city government and the white business elite, especially Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, was instrumental to securing the Games. The city’s boosters, the Atlanta Convention Bureau, and different trade and tourist administrations could now claim that Atlanta had outgrown its status as regional capital of the South, transcending the region and history. After decades of reinvention, it was “Hotlanta,” the Deep South’s newest and most modern world-class and international city. Yet the fruits of this success were not, and have never been, shared equitably. As much as Atlanta had changed, the same poor blacks who had taken to the streets in the urban uprisings of the 1960s had benefited little during the decades that followed....

Speaking to the Spirit of the Games

Chapter Five focuses on the calculated and concerted steps taken by Atlanta’s white business elite and black city government to bid for the Centennial Olympic Games. A diverse cohort of private interests generated the necessary funds to give Atlanta a competitive bid for the Games was formed. This cohort included officers of Atlanta’s fortune 500 companies comprising of the Coca-Cola Company and Delta Airlines, Atlanta businessman Billy Payne, and politicians Mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young. Once awarded the Centennial Games, two movements of paramount importance commenced, representing what the author calls the “olympification” of Atlanta. “Olympification” connotes the policies where urban renewal and gentrification were implemented to get Atlanta ready for the Games. The first of these movements, a joint effort between the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) and the Atlanta Organizing Committee (AOC) worked to prepare the city for the Games is of extreme importance. The second movement, the Atlanta Project, gave way to social change in Atlanta waging war against poverty within the city. Started by the former U.S. president, humanitarian and Georgia native Jimmy Carter, this project had good intentions. But in the end, it did very little for Atlanta’s poor, thus further excluding them from the popular image of Atlanta as black Mecca.

The Bravado of the Black Mecca and Blackness Abroad

Chapter Four focuses on Atlanta’s rise as a global black city and the idea of black global citizenship through foreign and domestic policies as seen through U.S. Presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Jimmy Carter. When Andrew Young was elected as the city’s second black mayor during the 1980s, he inherited numerous social ills and a pernicious financial crisis. When President Ronald Reagan cut federal funding to American cities, Young found it necessary to fund and expand the city through foreign investments and neo-liberal forms of urban renewal and gentrification. Most of Atlanta’s black community saw a business-minded and globetrotting mayor promoting purported progress and the black Mecca image. Yet, Young had no plan to deal with issues pertinent to the poor as mayor and his “citizen of the world” persona was not a good look for Atlanta’s working class and poor black communities, as it seemed that he did not embody their interests. Young used his savior-faire and political influence to refashion a city worthy of hosting the 1988 Democratic National Convention and the Centennial Olympiad. The Democratic National Convention served as the dress rehearsal for the Centennial Olympiad and from this event it was clear that Atlanta was indeed a new city with the black Mecca image at its center, worthy of hosting events on the world’s stage. However, Atlanta’s overwhelmingly poor and black citizens did not share this vision of their city nor were they at the center of the commercial branding of the America South. The significance of this is that once again, the issue of class within the black community presents itself as more divisive than cohesive.

The Sound of the Fury

Chapter six focuses on Mayor Maynard Jackson’s creation of the City of Atlanta’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs, the first institution within city government dedicated to the support of artists, their creative expressions and arts organizations. The goal of the Bureau was to make all forms of art—established and experimental—more accessible to Atlanta’s citizens. The Bureau empowered a multitude of artists and arts organizations through city funded grants and broke new ground in stabling a niche for black musical genres such as jazz and classical music as well as alternative films. This set the stage for Atlanta to boom in terms of black popular culture, as Jackson’s black political power yielded an expressive arm, a black arts movement unique to Atlanta, making it ripe for popular culture to be spewed and accessed critically. “Dirty South” rap music evolved out of this black arts movement, and opened black Atlanta to social commentary from a new generation of artists that lived in the underbelly trampled over by Atlanta’s pursuit of a global commercial center. This counter-narrative and demonstration, gave a southern perspective of popular culture spewed and assessed critically in the city. It was grounded in Hip-hop and centered on this particular sector of youth culture, the meanings and significance of a recently self-defined southern–style of rap and Hip-hop culture and was established and promoted by Organized Noize’s OutKast and Goodie Mob, rap groups hailing from Atlanta’s Southwest side. Their music imbibed an aesthetic that was particular to the South in general and Atlanta in particular but was consumed by markets nationwide. In this music, artists call out Atlanta’s black politicians and their governing practices. Using popular culture from Atlanta provides a useful scope through which to view the lingering tensions and trends that were particular to Atlanta as a result of the “Olympification” of the city.

The Brawn of the Black Mecca and the Black New South

Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of a feisty black lawyer named Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr., who became Atlanta’s first black Vice-Mayor and subsequently Atlanta’s first black mayor. Jackson’s mayoral tenure marked the first of its kind in terms of black big city leadership and bolstered the black Mecca image. Jackson’s emergence was the fruition of caste and class within black Atlanta. He was a fifth generation Georgian, born into two of Atlanta’s prominent black families. As the grandson of prominent black Atlantans Andrew Jackson and John Wesley Dobbs, Jackson graduated Morehouse College at age 18 and went on to receive legal training in Durham, North Carolina. Jackson cut his teeth as a champion for the people and made headlines as the people’s politician with his quixotic 1968 run for the U.S. Senate against Senator Herman Talmadge. Jackson’s first term as mayor of Atlanta was full of political success. However, during his second term as mayor, many of his working class and poor black constituency felt as if he sacrificed them to play politics.

Building Black Atlanta and the Dialectics of the Black Mecca

This chapter starts with a brief and concise history of Atlanta after the Civil War and the events that influenced the development of post-1965 black Atlanta. A focus on black education is necessary to better understand black life in Atlanta and how the black Mecca image came to be. Through education we see how black political kingmakers emerging out of Atlanta’s black upper class began to take shape. Chapter one concludes by examining the Kerner Report, a report commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson and overseen by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner that concluded that America was segregated into two societies: one black; one white; moving in opposite directions. However, this chapter challenges that by observing Atlanta and noting that there were numerous black American communities within Atlanta’s black society: those that bolstered the image of a Mecca; and those that did not.