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Epilogue From the Reconstruction era to the pre–civil rights era, black Atlanta’s participation in politics grew from being an occasional influence on general and special elections and having three persons elected to public office to holding a balance of power in local elections. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, African Americans substantially increased their political influence until they gained political control of the city. From 1949 to the election of Maynard Jackson Jr. as the city’s first black mayor in 1973, black Atlanta, while providing the necessary votes to help the white power elite achieve its pro-development/growth agenda, fell far short of achieving black power as measured by control of black institutions and radically changing the socioeconomic status of the entire African American community. While the large black middle class and a sizeable upper class displayed corporate and personal wealth and status that distinguished them from much of black America, none of their businesses or professional offices ever came close to being a Fortune 500 firm. And the several black millionaires who lived in the city were at the bottom rung of America’s wealthiest. Thus, their economic fortunes were, for the most part, distinctive only when compared to other African Americans and the white middle class. And the city’s black masses remained consistently unemployed or underemployed and ill-fed and ill-housed. Although astute white politicians like Mayor William B. Hartsfield, sensing the growing size and importance of the black electorate, had opened“liaison ” with black influentials by 1947, black voting prowess did not translate into black power. Indeed, as Floyd Hunter so skillfully demonstrated in Community Power Structure, black leaders deemed powerful by African Americans were seen as powerless by much of the white leadership and were, he concluded, indeed powerless. And as Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., himself a principal beneficiary of the black bloc vote, later admitted, blacks got less out of the unique biracial coalition—the “urban regime,” as Clarence Stone called it—that held electoral and political power in Atlanta than they put into it. Even on one of the major issues on the black agenda—putting an end to Black Power in Dixie 240 police brutality—black Atlanta failed to achieve major success in these years. And when a few civil rights leaders, like the Reverend Joe Boone and Hosea Williams, and SNCC militants tried to radicalize disadvantaged black communities , often under the banner of Black Power, they invariably failed. Nevertheless, in the period from 1920 to the end of the Second World War,blacks demonstrated a significant electoral impact on some school board elections of that era.Blacks also began to play a balance-of-power role in elections between competing white candidates and in special elections, such as the Key recall election of 1936 and the election of Helen Mankin to Congress in 1946. The influence of blacks stemmed from a growing African American population and increasing numbers of black voter registrants, and, when blacks joined with upper- and middle-income whites, such breakthroughs that resulted in the election of Rufus E. Clement to the Atlanta school board in 1953, twelve years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, gave Atlanta a reputation of being more progressive than the rest of the Deep South. During this era, the black and white influentials shared many of the same social and economic values.Both,for example,believed firmly in the concepts of American democracy and corporate capitalism. Thus, it was not difficult to persuade the black elite to help promote the white power elite’s pro-development /growth policies. Under Atlanta’s“urban regime,” the white power structure was able to formulate pro-development/growth policies, and have them implemented by a subservient city government that furthered its social and economic aspirations . Most often these actions and activities increased the wealth of individual and corporate members of the business elite.They did little to enhance the social and economic conditions of the white or black poor. And they did little, in themselves, to increase the social and economic status of the black elite in the segregated African American subcommunity. Their status was achieved and displayed in Atlanta particularly after several institutions of black higher education began to produce a sizeable business and professional class toward the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet the southern caste system that allowed even the poorest white person to claim full citizenship rights (at least after the abolition of property and poll tax...

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