Urban Planning and White Supremacy: Development and Segregation in a New South City

Just over a century ago, Atlanta, Georgia, was the site of a historic surrender in the African-American campaign for full equality in the United States. Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Compromise address urged blacks to cast down their buckets where they were, assured whites that blacks renounced politics and all aspirations to social equality, and thus stamped an imprimatur on the system of Jim Crow. Although this “Age of Accommodation” lasted only another two decades or so (marked conveniently by Washington’s demise in 1915), we have ever since lived with its consequences in the severely inferior housing, education, employment, political power, and life chances for African Americans. The Atlanta Compromise brought this New South capital some national attention. But as Ronald Bayor’s Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta shows, the city was hardly more successful than the rest of the nation in solving the “race problem.” For much of this century, enforcing white supremacy was the city officials’ guiding principle in the casting and implementation of Atlanta’s public policy.

For a city “too busy to hate,” Atlanta’s political and business elites were obsessed with race. This century opened locally with the 1906 riot—a pogrom, really—in the midst of a race-baiting gubernatorial campaign and a movement to disfranchise African Americans. At the end of four days of violence, which was promoted by the city’s leading newspapers, black bodies and property were charred. A municipal reconciliation committee, on which African Americans had a muffled voice, was completely ineffectual; one might even say it was hypocritical, as whites seemed intent either on purging the memory of the violence or attributing it solely to drunken mobs while paternalistic whites tried to save black lives.

The business and political leadership of Atlanta sought to contain and constrain African Americans; the city’s geography and infrastructure fully reflect this salient fact. A most important feature of Bayor’s work is his comprehensive description of the use of official power to enforce segregation. Atlanta passed its first residential segregation law in 1913; a second followed three years later. Despite the Supreme Court’s 1917 decision outlawing such ordinances, the city enacted legislation designed to limit black mobility three more times, in 1922, 1929, and 1931. Legal measures were supplemented by a road construction policy designed to restrict the black population to certain parts of town. In a typical instance, as a black west side neighborhood’s population expanded toward the officially designated boundary in the late 1940s, the city decided that it would allow black developers to build new housing no closer than 100 yards from the dividing line and enforced this decision by refusing to pave new streets that fell within the new “demilitarized zone.” In the 1950s, city planners dead-ended several arterial roads in an attempt to corral the black population, and in 1962 the city erected a barricade across Peyton Road to preserve a white neighborhood. In 1960, interstate highway routes were explicitly planned to divide black and white neighborhoods; race was still a significant consideration in planning new roads into the 1980s.

Ultimately these physical impediments could not prevent the geographic expansion of black neighborhoods, and the city devised other methods to achieve this end. In transitional areas in the 1950s, the Metropolitan Planning Commission helped the real estate industry to determine which blocks would remain white, which black, and which would switch. Urban renewal and slum clearance further eroded blacks’ position, as African-American neighborhoods were destroyed while grossly inadequate provisions were made for their relocation. This policy continued almost unabated into the 1980s under Mayor Andrew Young, whose administration was intimately tied to the city’s business community.

The employment outlook was similarly bleak, as both private industry and the municipal and state governments conspired to subordinate African Americans. Despite black Atlanta’s success stories—Alonzo Herndon...