Race And The Shaping Of Twentieth Century Atlanta

Atlanta is often cited as a prime example of a progressive New South metropolis in which blacks and whites have forged "a city too busy to hate." But Ronald Bayor argues that the city continues to bear the indelible mark of racial bias. Offering the first comprehensive history of Atlanta race relations, he discusses the impact of race on the physical and institutional development of the city from the end of the Civil War through the mayorship of Andrew Young in the 1980s. Bayor shows the extent of inequality, investigates the gap between rhetoric and reality, and presents a fresh analysis of the legacy of segregation and race relations for the American urban environment. Bayor explores frequently ignored public policy issues through the lens of race--including hospital care, highway placement and development, police and fire services, schools, and park use, as well as housing patterns and employment. He finds that racial concerns profoundly shaped Atlanta, as they did other American cities. Drawing on oral interviews and written records, Bayor traces how Atlanta's black leaders and their community have responded to the impact of race on local urban development. By bringing long-term urban development into a discussion of race, Bayor provides an element missing in usual analyses of cities and race relations.

A potent re-examination of America’s history of public disinvestment in mass transit. Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster, our transit networks are so bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way. Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, Bloom provides overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. He pinpoints three major factors that led to the decline of public transit in the United States: municipal austerity policies that denied most transit agencies the funding to sustain high-quality service; the encouragement of auto-centric planning; and white flight from dense city centers to far-flung suburbs. As Bloom makes clear, these local public policy decisions were not the product of a nefarious auto industry or any other grand conspiracy—all were widely supported by voters, who effectively shut out options for transit-friendly futures. With this book, Bloom seeks not only to dispel our accepted transit myths but hopefully to lay new tracks for today’s conversations about public transportation funding.

In 1906 Atlanta, after a summer of inflammatory headlines and accusations of black-on-white sexual assaults, armed white mobs attacked African Americans, resulting in at least twenty-five black fatalities. Atlanta's black residents fought back and repeatedly defended their neighborhoods from white raids. Placing this four-day riot in a broader narrative of twentieth-century race relations in Atlanta, in the South, and in the United States, David Fort Godshalk examines the riot's origins and how memories of this cataclysmic event shaped black and white social and political life for decades to come. Nationally, the riot radicalized many civil rights leaders, encouraging W. E. B. Du Bois's confrontationist stance and diminishing the accommodationist voice of Booker T. Washington. In Atlanta, fears of continued disorder prompted white civic leaders to seek dialogue with black elites, establishing a rare biracial tradition that convinced mainstream northern whites that racial reconciliation was possible in the South without national intervention. Paired with black fears of renewed violence, however, this interracial cooperation exacerbated black social divisions and repeatedly undermined black social justice movements, leaving the city among the most segregated and socially stratified in the nation. Analyzing the interwoven struggles of men and women, blacks and whites, social outcasts and national powerbrokers, Godshalk illuminates the possibilities and limits of racial understanding and social change in twentieth-century America.

In this book, Jason McDonald raises some new and challenging questions about the pattern of race relations experienced by Mexican Americans and African Americans in Austin, Texas, in the early twentieth century.--P. [4] of cover.

This book brings together key essays that seek to make visible and expand our understanding of the role of government (policies, programs, and investments) in shaping cities and metropolitan regions; the costs and consequences of uneven urban and regional growth patterns; suburban sprawl and public health, transportation, and economic development; and the enduring connection of place, space, and race in the era of increased globalization. Whether intended or unintended, many government policies (housing, transportation, land use, environmental, economic development, education, etc.) have aided and in some cases subsidized suburban sprawl, job flight, and spatial mismatch; concentrated urban poverty; and heightened racial and economic disparities. Written mostly by African American scholars, the book captures the dynamism of these meetings, describing the challenges facing cities, suburbs, and metropolitan regions as they seek to address continuing and emerging patterns of racial polarization in the twenty-first century. The book clearly shows that the United States entered the new millennium as one of the wealthiest and the most powerful nations on earth. Yet amid this prosperity, our nation is faced with some of the same challenges that confronted it at the beginning of the twentieth century, including rising inequality in income, wealth, and opportunity; economic restructuring; immigration pressures and ethnic tension; and a widening gap between 'haves' and 'have-nots.' Clearly, race matters. Place also matters. Where we live impacts the quality of our lives and chances for the 'good life.'

Debates about poverty and inequality in the United States frequently invoke the early twentieth century as a time when new social legislation helped moderate corporate power. But as historian Daniel Amsterdam shows, the relationship between business interests and the development of American government was hardly so simple. Roaring Metropolis reconstructs the ideas and activism of urban capitalists roughly a century ago. Far from antigovernment stalwarts, business leaders in cities across the country often advocated extensive government spending on an array of social programs. They championed public schooling, public health, the construction of libraries, museums, parks, and playgrounds, and decentralized cities filled with freestanding homes—a set of initiatives that they believed would foster political stability and economic growth during an era of explosive, often chaotic, urban expansion. The efforts of businessmen on this front had deep historical roots but bore the most fruit during the 1920s, an era often misconstrued as an antigovernment moment. As Daniel Amsterdam illustrates, public spending soared across urban America during the decade due in part to businessmen's political activism. With a focus on three different cities—Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—and a host of political groups—organized labor, machine politicians, African American and immigrant activists, middle-class women's groups, and the Ku Klux Klan—Roaring Metropolis traces businessmen's quest to build cities and nurture an urban citizenry friendly to capitalism and the will of urban capitalists.

Race and the Greening of Atlanta turns an environmental lens on Atlanta’s ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city’s variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of “the environment.” Arising out of Atlanta’s Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism’s undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South. Placing these two movements on the same historical page, Christopher C. Sellers spotlights those environmental inequities, ideals, and provocations that catalyzed their divergent political projects. He then follows the intermittent, sometimes vital alliances they struck as civil rights activists tackled poverty, as a new environmental state arose, and as Black politicians began winning elections. Into the 1980s, as a wealth-concentrating style of capitalism returned to the city and Atlanta became a national “poster child” for sprawl, the seedbeds spread both for a national environmental justice movement and for an influential new style of antistatism. Sellers contends that this new conservativism, sweeping the South with an antienvironmentalism and budding white nationalism that echoed the region’s Jim Crow past, once again challenged the democracy Atlantans had achieved.