Black Power in Dixie: A Political History of African Americans in Atlanta

Foreword

Foreword The history of black people in America’s cities stretches back into the seventeenth century. As early as the 1640s, for example, people of African descent —many of them slaves—had a major presence in New Amsterdam. They contributed to that Dutch colonial city’s cosmopolitan culture and continued to do so after the city fell under English control and became New York. During the American War for Independence, revolutionary ideology and economic change encouraged the abolition of slavery in the Northeast and a great increase in private acts of manumission in the Chesapeake. Almost immediately, important free black communities arose in several other American cities, including Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, Washington, Norfolk, and Richmond. In the Deep South, where few slaves gained freedom prior to the Civil War, black communities in New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, and Atlanta were smaller and less autonomous than they were farther north. African Americans in these Deep South cities established churches, schools, and other institutions, but they retained closer ties to their former masters than did their counterparts in the Chesapeake and Northeast. Often physically related to the white master class and enjoying its patronage, the Deep South’s urban black elite calculated that its interest lay in a strategy of accommodation toward powerful white leaders. As Alton Hornsby Jr.demonstrates in his textured history of black politics in Atlanta,this spirit of racial compromise and conciliation did not disappear among black leaders in that city after the abolition of slavery in 1865. Instead, it continued during the long struggle for black rights that began during the postwar years and has not yet ended in the early twenty-first century. Even as the city’s black elite adjusted to a rigid system of segregation within a racially charged environment, its members allied with powerful white interests to protect themselves and other African Americans. Black dissent in Atlanta from 1876 to 1990 was, therefore, determined but cautious. Again and again Hornsby refers to the “Atlanta Style”—a type of black politics that aimed to achieve its goals without economic disruption or physical conflict. That xii Foreword style also mediated black power in the city when a growing African American population exercised increasing amounts of it during the twentieth century. Black politics in Atlanta is by definition a dissenting politics. It is also, in Hornsby’s measured analysis, an increasingly successful politics. But it is a form of dissent conditioned by a circumspect and careful leadership drawn from the city’s black business, educational, religious, and political elite. As Hornsby emphasizes, this form of politics has not achieved racial parity. It has by no means accomplished the goals associated with the “black power” slogan of the 1960s. Instead it has, since the brutal race riot of 1906, gradually implemented (in conjunction with a growing black population and without major outbreaks of violence) an effective black power in a “city too busy to hate.” Throughout his history, which stretches from the end of Reconstruction through AndrewYoung’s administration as mayor during the 1980s,Hornsby depicts cooperation and friction between the city’s black elite and its black masses. He also stresses the ever-present negative influence of white racism. His recurring theme is that lasting success is elusive. Whether the issue is education, public transportation, voter organization, interracial political coalition , protest, residential segregation, or police brutality, black leaders in the city could not and cannot rest easy. Atlanta was once portrayed as the preeminent city of an economically progressive but racially segregated and white-supremacist “New South.” During the civil rights era, observers regarded the city as the epitome of peaceful southern change. For Hornsby, the city’s history since Reconstruction is a story of how a cautious dissenting politics can achieve a great deal, but also fall short of its greatest hopes and frustrate those who practice it. He tells the story well. Black Power in Dixie is a welcome addition to the Southern Dissent series. Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller Series Editors ...