Thinking through the Concept of Social Justice: Preliminary Observations for Auburn Avenue

Auburn Avenue, once home to the wealthiest African American community in the United States (Grant 1993; Pomerantz 1996), today sits in various states of disrepair and what some call "shameful neglect" (Editorial Staff, Atlanta-Journal Constitution 2004, A14). Buildings that once served as the headquarters for the United States Civil Rights struggle are now occupied by the down trodden and homeless. "Ma Sutton's," a restaurant that fed many significant black leaders in the South, is an abandoned building, overgrown and overrun with trash. The peeling plywood covering the windows of the "Herndon Building," painted with the names of some of the wealthiest African Americans in the South who once operated offices there, barely conceals a collapsed roof and an abandoned community. However, Auburn Avenue is also home to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Park and other memorials dedicated to Civil Rights. Currently Auburn Avenue is undergoing significant change with major efforts to renew and revitalize the neighborhood. The National Park Service controls a substantial portion of the neighborhood and other large portions of the community are owned by local churches and community development organizations. These community and commercial developers strive to stimulate redevelopment in the Auburn Avenue area, exemplified by a $45 million residential and shopping complex being constructed by Big Bethel AME Church, the oldest African American Church in Atlanta (Saporta 2004, E1).

The redevelopment efforts raise important questions about the identity and meaning of Auburn Avenue as a racialized place. In addition, they bring into focus critical questions about the meaning of social justice in the American South, particularly as it relates to African American, urban communities. On Auburn Avenue we encounter a complex political situation in which various groups compete for, and articulate, vastly different visions for Auburn Avenue and its redevelopment. Undergirding these arguments are various understandings of the role of the state, community institutions, and individuals in the process of urban development, which also reflect profoundly different meanings of "social justice." For example, "Disillusioned Liberalism" (Dawson 2001; Harris-Lacewell 2003), most poignantly conveyed in Dr. King's speeches and writings after 1966 (e.g., King 1967) and displayed by residents and community leaders on the Avenue, contrasts and competes with "Black Conservatism" (Dawson 2001) and a belief in the emancipatory aspects of free markets, articulated by various business and development interests on Auburn Avenue. These groups view the concept of social justice through profoundly diverse lenses. This implies that in order to understand the concept of social justice we need to broaden mainstream conceptions of social justice to include a wide array of groups, goals and outcomes. Importantly, we should concentrate on how competing meanings and understandings of social justice stem from contrasting political ideologies.

My dissertation research on Auburn Avenue suggests that a number of different discourses provide context to Auburn Avenue and competing meanings of social justice as deployed on the street. In turn this affects the ways in which the street's memorialized spaces are understood, the direction urban redevelopment takes on the street, and the place and role of Dr. King's legacy within the broader United States. This has implications for a variety of geographic concepts, not least of which is the social construction of identity and our understandings of racism.

By expanding the story field of social justice to include a wide variety of groups and interests we can begin to see the ways different groups use discourses about social justice to advance profoundly different visions for society. One only need look to the 2004 presidential election where social conservatives branded "social justice" as a means of reaching out to particular communities, such as Latinos and African Americans. In the Auburn Avenue community the meaning of social justice is often a point of conflict in which diverse groups, with dissimilar goals use a social justice discourse to legitimize different community redevelopment visions. Community organizations like ACORN, which advocates for affordable housing, and the INTEGRAL Group, a collection of wealthy African American developers, employ contrasting interpretations of social justice to plan and debate Auburn Avenue's redevelopment. Overlaying debates about...