Arthur Raper, 1899-1979: A Life Looking ‘for the Heart of the Thing’

Interview by Cliff Kuhn

Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987, pp. 4-10

Introduction

No Southerner had a deeper commitment to regional reform than sociologist Arthur Raper. Born on a farm in Davidson County, North Carolina, in 1899 and schooled at the University of North Carolina, where he studied with Frank Porter Graham and Howard Odum, Raper mirrored the South’s problems and promise. His books on sharecropping-Preface to Peasantry, Sharecroppers All and Tenants of the Almighty-powerfully described the causes and devastating human and environmental consequences of plantation agriculture. His work The Tragedy of Lynching remains the classic work on the subject. Through his work with Gunnar Myrdal on An American Dilemma and as research director for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, forerunner of the Southern Regional Council, Raper played a leading role in interracial activities that informed and anticipated the transformations of the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1979, Arthur Raper gave what proved to be his final interview for community radio station WRFG’s “Living Atlanta” series, depicting life in Atlanta between the World Wars. The interview ranged broadly and represented a looking backward by one of the South’s seminal figures shortly before his death. Following are excerpts.

Parts of the interview can be heard on two radio documentaries produced by non-commercial station WRFG. In addition to the fifty-part “Living Atlanta” series, in 1986 WRFG produced a three-part series, “A Southern Profile: The Life and Times of Arthur Raper,” addressing such issues as Raper’s place among the regional sociologists and intellectuals, the etiquette of race relations in the South, and the transformation of Southern agriculture through a look at Greene County, Georgia. For more information, contact Cliff Kuhn c/o WRFG, P.O. Box 5332, Atlanta, GA 30307.

Radio Free Georgia Broadcasting Foundation, Inc.

BEFORE I CAME to Atlanta I was at Chapel Hill with the Institute for Research in Social Science, Odum’s operation, and there I worked with Guy Johnson and Rupert Vance and the other fellows. I was very much interested in what Vance, particularly, was doing in his work.

The way I got to Atlanta was that I was in my little cubbyhole one day and I heard Odum and Alexander-Will Alexander-coming down the hall. I’d met Will Alexander at Fisk or when I had been at Vanderbilt, one or the other, in ’24 or ’25, getting my master’s. They were coming down the hall at Chapel Hill, and I heard Odum say to Alexander, “Now, let’s stop in here. You might like to talk with this fellow a little.” So they came in and Alexander-I recognized him of course, and I think he remembered me a little bit. And he said, “Why don’t you come down to Atlanta where the people are? You have brick buildings and things here. Why don’t you come down there and work with us?

He said about two more sentences and I said, “When do you want me to come?”

And so he named some time which wasn’t very distant away. Maybe that was in the spring and I went down there in the fall.

My original position in Atlanta was secretary of the Georgia Interracial Committee. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation had state committees, and my original job was to be secretary of that state committee. They had urban or county committees, mostly urban committees in the leading urban communities in Georgia. Practically every place it was the elite whites and the elite blacks in their separate worlds that were on these committees. I don’t think that’s wrong. I think that’s the kind of committee you need. If you’re going to do something in a Southern community as of at that time in the field of race relations, that’s exactly what you needed. Now, what could come later in a way was built on that, because that had to happen first, I think. I think those people had to be so they could be in touch with each other and be known and be appreciated and respected across the line. I think much of what happens grounds back on that.

And they would talk about what the situation was. Maybe some trouble is threatened over here because there’s so many people unemployed, or there’s people over here–

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likely to be some trouble because it’s said that a black man, a Negro, insulted some creditor when he challenged his debt, or something like that. These people would sense when something was coming up that was going to get hot, and they tried to take care of it before it got to that stage. It was not a committee to solve problems. It was a committee to anticipate where problems might arise. And in that extent, it’s a very, very basic concept, and you can’t have-you can’t have a good interracial committee without that kind of insight and that kind of commitment. They were committed to this community and to this relationship.

There was the assumption that if you didn’t have more equitable educational facilities, if you didn’t have more opportunities for people to participate in the political process, if you didn’t have more opportunities for people to have access to health facilities, equitable health facilities, why, you were building up problems for yourself. Well, this one I remember was used in the field of health, and this was told with great relish at one of the annual meetings, about the Negro maid who was in the home of her employer, and she says, “Why, that child there is coming down with diphtheria just like my children have had for a couple weeks.” Okay. You can see that. You can respond to it. You can get a public health facility understood and financed. You can illustrate the whole way through the same type of things. You don’t ignore and demean a part of your common life of a community without paying the price for it.

And I began going to those communities and talking with these interracial committees, and I soon found that I wasn’t too excited by that. It wasn’t too challenging. But something that was tremendously interesting to me was that when I got to Atlanta I realized, of course, that Floyd Corry who I had been very closely associated with at Vanderbilt, lived down in Greene County. He was there, was running his own store, and his uncle was one of the leading lights left in the county.

And when I got there, Father Corry, Floyd’s father, just latched onto me. He had lost his property. He was sort of a scion of a rundown part of the family. But he still had the name and he had the kinship contacts. He was buying cows and selling them. This was in the Depression there. And he would tell me about, well, now, this old house up here on the hill with these pines all around it and everything gone to pot here, but this was where somebody lived, and he told me his name and who his connections were and what had happened to him and the whole business. And so part of what comes out in Preface to Peasantry and later comes out in Tenants of the Almighty was because I had this entree to this family that had roots there way back, and had status. Because I was accepted so utterly by this family who was so genuinely a part of the picture there.

The plantation was already crumbling. It was already propped up with very high-priced gear and fertilizer, and propped up with a lot of borrowing and propped up with a lot of tenants that couldn’t pay back their credit-priced stuff that they had consumed while they were producing a crop, and then that threw the landlord into a hard place to handle. Well, all of that was going on, and then came the boll weevil, and it just knocked it down. And that was well before the ’30s. It was ten years before the ’30s, in 1918,’19 and ’20 in that particular area. Plantations closed down. In Greene County, more than half the people left some parts of the county. The cotton crop fell from 20,000 bales one year to-I don’t remember the exact figures, but this is the order of it-from 20,000 bales to, say, 6,000 bales to 1,500 bales to 323 bales, I remember, from 20,000 just two or three years before that. And, actually, the fertilizer that they had spent on the cotton crop-not this last year when it was 323, but the crop before that-the cotton hadn’t even paid for the fertilizer bill, to say nothing of all the rest of the expenses you have in growing cotton. It just simply went broke.

And when I’d get back to Atlanta I would go over to the city welfare office there in Atlanta where Ada Woolfolk was director, and she wanted me to help her think about, now, what can we do with these people that are coming in here, and they’re stranded and they don’t have anything and they’re not well and they have no skills and no education, very little, most of them, and what can we do with them? And I began to develop maps to see where they came from

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in Georgia, and a lot of them had come from Greene County and surrounding counties where the situation was practically the same as it was in Greene. And it was then in 1926 end ’27 that I got the lead into this refugees to the city that later became tremendously significant and an evident fact. But I saw it very, very early.

Then they set up this study of Lynching and they asked me to be secretary of that, which I did. They had 20 more Lynchings in ’30, and they said, “What the heck happened here? Let’s find out.” You’ve got to prevent Lynchings with facts about why people Lynch. Well, who got Lynched? What was he accused of?

See, the irrationality quotient in the Lynching phenomenon was tremendous. There was just an assumption in some areas that you had to have a Lynching every now and then to preserve equitable race relations. The phobia was black men abusing a white woman. And part of that is reflected in this tremendous emphasis that your Southern politicians in the filibusters and what not had always been talking about, Southern white womanhood.

Before we’d gone very far we had these statistics about how many of them had been-the South, how many of them had been black, how many had been for this crime and the other, and what the relationship was between the number of lynchings and the price of cotton, and all this and that and the other. Most of it was not for sex or sex-related crimes, as reported by the white newspapers. It was mostly economic and etiquette matters. Even the statistics that we had where about one-sixth of them were accused of sex-related crimes-it wasn’t that much. It wasn’t as much as a sixth, because there was an element-and everybody knew it-there was an element of fabrication built into that to protect the status quo.

When we had got that research together and got the thing said, and it was getting into the newspapers getting accepted, because the kind of people we had on the Lynching commission in the South, you don’t say-when those men-and, incidentally, there wasn’t a single woman on that Lynching commission-but when those men came out and said, “This is our report. These are our findings,” they were accepted, and they’ve been accepted ever since. Well, when you find out what you’ve been Lynching for, and when you get it from a source that you can’t challenge-and it wasn’t challenged-well, then you are on a different basis to call the sheriff or say, “Well, let’s just don’t let this thing happen.” And of course the women did come in and played a tremendous role there.

WOMEN HAD been sort of shut out of the church: they couldn’t become preachers. They were shut out of the courts: they couldn’t be judges. They were shut out of the sheriff’s office. They wanted to do something. They were hurting to do something. So here, now, was this Lynching thing, and we’d done the statistical work on it. Jesse Daniel Ames just grabbed onto it like a puppy that’s hungry for a bone-or like a big dog that’s hungry for a bone. “This we will do.” And she got them organized very quickly. They were women that had ability and they wanted to do something. And she had this emphasis on working with women and knowing how to work with-and she did know how. So she got the women organized here pretty quick, and she’d call them in there to a meeting, you know, and they would come. And what these women have done-they have signed that they are going to prevent Lynchings in any way they can, and that they are going to call on the sheriffs and they are going to call on the police and they are going to call on the judges and they are going to be active in this thing. And, my gracious, they were. And they were going to tell the politicians, “Lynchings don’t protect our virtue. We don’t need anybody to protect our virtue. And if you get up in the Congress of the United States and say that you are Lynching to preserve our virtue, we’re going to call you down. Now, don’t you do it.” And all of this filibustering, that’s full of that stuff, up till 1930 and ’31, it dropped out.

It gave them something to do, something that was important, something that was vital. And they had a very good organization there for nearly a decade, and I think it did have something to do with the decline of Lynchings. I think the overall situation was moving in that direction anyway, but that was one of the things that was in the overall situation was these alerted women throughout the South to be on their toes about this thing.

When the federal anti-lynch legislation came up, she was very much opposed to that. I don’t think she ever concurred in it as a desirable thing. I didn’t think it would be easy at all. I’d never been in a community where I’d really gotten acquainted with the people where I didn’t find some people willing to testify against the Lynchers, if they could do it without their barns getting burned down or without their church being split wide open or people stop buying at their drugstore. They wanted to. They wanted–it seemed

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to me, they wanted to be put in a position where they would take an oath and say, “Well, yes. I didn’t want to bring this into the open, but I had sworn on the Bible to tell the truth. They asked me this question and I answered it.” They sort of wanted to do that, I thought, and I thought we’d be way ahead if they did and had the opportunity, had a protected situation within which they could give their testimony, because when you’ve got a Ku Klux Klan judge and a prosecutor who sympathizes with him, and then jurymen that they select by their own processes with Negroes not on it and women not on it, at that time. a very closed operation.

Why, you could do anything in the courts. And they did. And this, I thought, would open that thing up some and would be real boon for the region.

I was with Myrdal, because I thought, well, what Myrdal was doing here was important. I didn’t run away from Alexander. I just, with Alexander’s not too enthusiastic permission, went to work with Myrdal.

Myrdal comes down to Atlanta and says he wants to talk with two people. Well, who are the two people? The head of the Ku Klux Klan and Mrs. J. E. Andrews, the head of the Association of Women for the Preservation of the White Race. So he gets out with Mrs. Andrews and is talking with her, and she was saying that what I was doing at Agnes Scott was that I was over there pretending to teach but what Raper is really doing is making white women available for nigger men. And Myrdal knew me somewhat, and he said-it just got too much beyond him, and he said, “Well, wait now, Mrs. Andrews, have you ever had sexual relations with a Negro man?” And she didn’t know what to say and couldn’t say anything hardly. And they went on with their conversation and he left.

AND MYRDAL CAME back to our office. He was somewhat agitated and what not. And we went on out to the house with Ralph Bunche and we ate a meal out there at our house, which was verboten, of course, but we did it anyhow. And then we went on down to Greene County. And by the time we got to Greene County we learned that Mrs. Andrews had sworn out a warrant for Myrdal, that Myrdal had insulted her. She got to thinking about it later and she decided she had been insulter!. So she could get a warrant all right, because she had connections in the political set-up with the Klan. So she got her warrant, and called up Martha to know where I was. She wanted this warrant served. I was with Myrdal. So Martha kept her on the phone for-how long? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Then she got in touch with me as soon as she could.

Incidentally, we’d had dinner that night with the chain gang in Greene County. Because somebody raised the question some little pipsqueak said, “What do we do with Dr. Bunche?” And once the question was raised, everybody had to protect his flanks, you see. But if the question hadn’t been raised, why, they’d have done the same things that we did with Ralph Bunche when I took him to my house and we had dinner. We’d have just eaten and then gone.

Oh the piece de resistance on this one is the people, when they decided that they wouldn’t let Bunche come in and eat with the whites, they had sent him a plate of filet mignon, just like all the rest of us, out into the black camp.

I said to Myrdal, “Now, look, they’ve got this warrant sworn out for you.”

He said,”What do we do?”

I said, “Whatever you decide to do.”

He said, “Well, hmmm. What do we do?”

Oh, he’d been asking me to run for governor of Georgia. I should run for governor of Georgia. “What else can you do here if you won’t take political responsibility and stand up to these bozos and he]p educate them? Let them count the votes. Go out there and do it. You’re scared, Raper.”

I said, “No, I’m not scared. I live here.”

He said, “What we going to do?”

I said, “Well, the best lawyer in town was with us down at that convict camp dinner tonight-Colonel Fawlkes. You can go talk with him and he can tell you.”

The sheriff was there, too. So we went down to Colonel Fawlkes house, and Colonel Fawlkes called the sheriff. The sheriff said, “Well, I will not be in my office for official business until 9 o’clock tomorrow morning.” This was about 10 o’clock at night. So I said to Myrdal, “You just decide what

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we’re going to do. I live here all the time, and this stuff is going on always, as you heard Mrs. Andrews this afternoon.”

He says to Colonel Fawlkes, “Well, look. What would they do?”

“They’d have a trial.”

“Have a jury?”

“Yeah, they’d have a jury.”

“Who would select the jury?”

“Well, they’d be selected by the outfit in Atlanta.”

“This would get in the papers, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would get in the papers.”

“Well, I’m an international figure.”

And although he wanted me to run for Governor of Georgia and stand up for my principles, I noticed that he wasn’t taking the warrant and standing for his. He said, “This would make it an international incident, and I’m here for the Carnegie Corporation. They put a lot of faith in me. I’m a well-known social engineer.” So we decided that he’d better leave before that warrant got there at 9 o’clock the next morning.

So we rode all that night and we went across the rickety bridge-it was then-down between Fort Benning and Phenix City, Alabama, 2 o’clock that morning, and got over to Tuskegee, and we took our rooms and they had a little bath connection between us, you know. We went to sleep, and the next morning about 8 o’clock he came stomping in there. “Raper, what in the hell happened at Runnymeade? Now, you tell me. What happened at Runnymeade?”

I said, “What happened at Runnymeade was that the people made King John sign some papers.”

“Yeah. And what? What happened?”

I said, “Well, one of the papers was that you can’t arrest anybody unless you’ve got a warrant. But Mrs. Andrews has a warrant for you.”

Well, there we were. I haven’t ever been inspired maybe but once or twice in my life. But that was one of the times. And, incidentally, he never did ask me any further about running for Georgia.

Then I went back to the study of rural Georgia. I went with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Argicultural Economics, to Greene County in the fall of 1940. And I was busy as six bees, keeping myself propped up on every leaning side down there so I didn’t get thrown out.

In the meantime I was running all over the South, checking on things, and going to committees and conferences, and accepting invitations here, yonder, and there, to help write a report and the like. I had an advantage. I had a travel account. And all these organizations that are looking for a speaker-well, they’re frequently looking for somebody that don’t cost them anything. So, from that point of view, I was very attractive, just from the logistical point of view. But they also was willing and even eager, seemingly, to have somebody get up there and talk about the plantation system, and have somebody get up there and talk about the unevenness of education between whites and blacks, between the educational expenses in Atlanta and in the rural counties, of the soil washing away and filling up the rivers and rendering people very, very poor.

I was amazed and frankly very pleased at the invitations that I had to speak. I remember to the Kiwanis, I guess, in Atlanta, the name of my speech was “It Could Happen Only Once.” And I took the forests and the soil then the installment buying and this and that and the other. I had the thing worked out on about ten points. And I look back at it every now and then and I think it was quite insightful. But they took it. They listened to it. I saw those folks later and they would talk. I’d meet them in other meetings, you know.

Then came the New Deal, and it did have an NWA program, and it did have a WPA program, and it did have something for the schoolteachers, and it did have some notions about some clinics and the like. And Gay Shepperson presided over a sort of resurrection of hopes and spirits of the people of Georgia. I had ready access to her office on any kind of public information that she had, and I worked out for every county in Georgia how much money was going for CWA, Civil Works Administration, for the whites, and how much for the blacks, and how much per capita, if it was on a basis of people employed; if not, on a basis of the population. And we had that whole thing for all of those, all of those agencies. And we had, with the Rosenwald Fund, worked up some figures on what the disparity of costs were for education for whites and blacks in Georgia by counties, then when this New Deal program came in for education and they were going to give something to the teachers, how much of it went to these that were getting so little and how much went to these others, how much went to Atlanta to the whites and how much went to Atlanta to the blacks.

Wherever the general standard of education was the highest, the differential between the whites and the blacks was the least, and where the general education expenditures were the lowest the differentials were the greatest. And that was something that we’d documented to the hilt. So we were interested to see where these New Deal funds went. And they were usually on the side of the angels. If they didn’t get the whole way to heaven, why, they at least were sort of in that direction.

WELL, MR. TALMADGE thought this was all pretty bad. And in his Statesman, you know, the weekly paper that he had, he railed about this, these programs every week. But they just went right on. He was railing, and a lot of people were asking him to snap his red galluses. But a lot of other people were glad to have some money coming down to the county. And somehow or other they had said “We like Talmadge. We like old Gene. But we also want the WPA money to come down here. We want the money to come. Whatever money is to come down here, we want it to come.” And I think they wanted that to happen more than they wanted to praise Talmadge.

I don’t know how much of the renaissance in the South came out of the New Deal, but I think–I expect if you analyze this back–and this would be a good thing for a historian to do–analyze that back, you will find more coming out of the New Deal than almost any one thing that’s happened in the South in the last 100 years. I would be pretty sure of that. Especially changing attitudes of people toward themselves is the greatest change it made. The NYA helped some kids get an education. The CCC helped some kids plant some trees and get their stomachs full of good

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food and get their faces clean and their feet clean. But the main thing it did is it gave these people maybe a first chance they had had to believe they could ever be anything except a sharecropper’s son or a sharecropper’s daughter. More poor kids got to school under the NYA than anything else that’s happened in the South-the National Youth Administration. This is what they went out there to do, and this is what they did. And they-they just saw a different world from what they had up until then been able to even envision.

See, when I was working in Greene County, working on this Tenants of the Almighty that we published, MacMillan, 1943-I had working in my office five NYA youngsters, and those kids-no one of them would have ever been associated with a project like interviewing farmers and asking them what they would have expected to get from the Unified Farm Program, and what difference has it made when they had canned fruit, or what difference had it made when they had a fenced garden, or what difference had it made when they were able to get a production loan at a low rate of interest, what difference did it make when they had a clinic, and this and that and the other. Well, those kids just simply saw a new world when they were working with that material. And then the pictures that Jack Delano made there in Greene County-and we had them up on the wall, and we were talking about–“This is what they’re doing for the land erosion back over here, and here’s what they’re doing in this area to get a forestry going. And fire towers–be sure if the fires break out that they get them put out before they burn the whole business up.” And the whole way through, those five kids there were just an illustration of the process that was going on.

And another thing that happened here was this tenant purchase contract that they had with the Farm Security Administration. I can tell you a story about that. Alexander had been saying, and he wrote in Preface to Peasantry, that what we had to do was get the ownership of the land into the hands of these producers, that that was the only way we could have an adequate civilization here. He had worked on that. We had talked about it. He had promoted it in every way he could. And so he called me into his office one day– this was before he left Atlanta–says, “I think we got it. I think we got it. I think we got it.”

I said, “What?”

He said, “I think we got this tenant purchase thing. I think we got it. John Bankhead thinks he thought it up.”

Well, Alexander was the kind of guy who had very practical sense, and if he saw that it was the way to get John Bankhead to promote that legislation, why, he would devise every scheme in the world he could to help get John Bankhead reconfirmed every morning that he had thought that up.

Well, these tenant purchase contract folks-there was, back here, this dream of 40 acres and a mule, and that had been dashed. Then here comes along an agency that says, “You can have this land. It’s yours. You can pay off your indebtedness with a low rate of interest.” And there was practically no hanky-panky in that program. It was done by local committees, and the elite, again, made up most of the local committees. But the elite didn’t get the farms. The rung down, not the bottom of the tenant but the top of the tenant group got those farms. And out from those farms went children who have done anything that has been done in America.

We know one family in Greene County. They lived right next door to us. And we said to the Hopkinses, “Now, look. Why don’t you apply for one of these tenant purchase contracts?” They were right beside of us and were working on the land there on that old plantation we were living on when we were in Greene County.

And they said, “No, we won’t do it.”

Why? Well, I talked with the man about it, Mr. Hopkins, Frank Hopkins, and Martha talked with Mary Hopkins, his wife, that, well, this would be a good idea to do.

“No, there’s a joker in it. We’ll get squeezed again.” He said, “My father tried twice to move from sharecropper into ownership, and each time bad years came. he had to give up everything he had and go back into sharecropping. I’m just going to sharecrop.”

Well, we kept saying, “No, you don’t need to do that now.” I think they saw we were sincere, and then they saw some of these other people moving onto these farms. And

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they did move onto their own farm. They paid for it in five years. Well, there it is. I’m glad that it happened. I’m glad that I was associated with something that is that vital.

Of course, I didn’t anticipate, then, frankly, agribusiness and what that has done in terms of this tremendous emphasis on bigger units to finance and pay for bigger machines and to pay bigger fertilizer bills and pay for bigger insecticide bills. I didn’t anticipate that then.

There was, when I left, in, say, the middle of ’39-there was still the assumption on the part of most, I think, of the Interracial Commission members that segregation-we would make it as best we could. We wouldn’t openly challenge it. I had openly challenged it, but I just did it personally. And I think I didn’t earn any points with Odom and Alexander when I did it. I went to the Southern Conference on Human Welfare in ’38 [the first SCHW meeting was held in Birmingham in 1938] and took a very active part and was a sponsor to the one they had in ’40. Alexander and Odum both had the feeling that this Southern Conference on Human Welfare was sort of a flash in the pan, as indeed it was. But the people that I knew in the South were nearly all there, and I wanted to be there with them, and I was.

And in some ways they were right. But in other ways I think the South in race relations is very much farther along by having had the southern Conference on Human Welfare, even if it did later on peter out, and for good and sufficient reasons. But it did something. The people got together and they talked and they looked at each other. It was a plus, I think, and I’d do it again. If I had been ten years older, I think, I don’t know whether I would have done it or not. I was still under forty. But if I had been fifty, I don’t know whether I would or not. Maybe I would have been with Alexander and Odum. The Interracial Commission had its backgrounds and it had its committees and it had its-never did write down what it believed in. Alexander said, “We won’t do that. We’ll decide as we go along.” He was right in doing it, because couldn’t anybody pick it up and say, “This is what the Interracial Commission believes in.” The whites and blacks at the Interracial Commission had always chosen their place of meeting. It had always-it had never been secret, but neither had it been advertised in public. It was purposely kept sort of quiet because it didn’t want to be annihilated. “We can grow,” we thought, “if we don’t kill ourselves.”

Well, then, the police and some of the folks in Birmingham looked around a little bit: “Hmmmm, we better go over and check on this thing.” So they came over and decided they had to segregate us, and when they did it made us mad. We were here and we had this meeting set up, and this was the way we were going to go, and now you won’t let us go. “We’ll have a meeting only after this where we can have it unsegregated.” That came out of that meeting in 1938. “We will not have another Southwide meeting where we have to be segregated.” That came out of that meeting. That was a part of the findings of the meeting. It was put in the newspaper.

Okay. So that-and, as I say, I didn’t gain any points by having been identified with something that was pushing up on the mores, as that was. And that was exactly what it was doing.

Every member of the Interracial Commission was an ultimate integrationist. He had nowhere to go except towards integration or else deny his affiliation with the whole effort. Now that’s the dynamism of that earlier work that was done with the Interracial Commission when it was being careful, when Alexander wouldn’t put down, “This we verily believe.”

I think what happened was that the people who were in this process knew in themselves that, insofar as this better thing to be done, why, everybody was going to feel better. You feel better when you have been considerate of this other fellow who is treated inconsiderately by so many people. You feel better. You see he feels better, or she feels better. You sleep better. The doors on your house don’t have to be locked quite so securely. The laws don’t have to be quite so demanding in terms of restrictures here and here and here in life.

I think the people who were the farthest along with it were happy that they saw other people every now and then coming towards their side. They thought they were with the future. This is the future, therefore I can abide it somewhat. It hurts, but let’s keep going.

I don’t think your ultimate integrationist ever thought integration was going to solve the whole thing. I think some of the other people who had been against it and then flipflopped over to it made demands on it that some of us who had worked through the process never expected. We didn’t think it was going to make a tremendous, immediate difference. But it was a process which had to be entered into and carried on through. And the sooner and saner you can get started, why, the better off you are.

When you look at the Southern situation, the racial situation, so far as the mechanics of the thing is concerned, it has made more advances than many of us in 1940 could have expected. But these advances that have been made haven’t gotten the heart of the thing. The heart of the thing lies deep in the culture of the white man and in the culture of the black man.

So that’s where the real problem is-the integration, we had to come through that phase. But we ain’t there yet. We ain’t there yet, and we’re not anywhere close to that. But we’ve gotten up the mountain far enough that we car be over it and see what some of the other peaks are and how high they are. The latter and more troublesome half of the journey is still there.

Historian Cliff Kuhn was a co-producer of the “Living Atlanta” series and the producer of the “A Southern Profile” series.

From Protest to Process: Ann Braden’s Inside View of the Rainbow Campaign

Interview By Cliff Kuhn

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 10, 12-15

Sidebar: I. Winning and Losing at the 1988 Democratic Convention

As a supporter of the Rainbow Coalition and the Jackson campaign I felt pretty good about the convention. Now, some people didn’t so that’s going to be a topic of discussion for some time. It depends on where you start from. I felt that Jesse Jackson and our movement–generally the peace and justice forces in this country–set the tone of the convention. Although we didn’t have the power, we had the moral authority. Hardly a speaker got up to that podium that wasn’t plagiarizing Jesse Jackson. I felt that you could see many of our ideas in that convention. We didn’t come there with enough votes to get what we really wanted which was the nomination for Jesse. We’ve just got to face facts, we didn’t. I think partly that the Democratic machinery was rigged against us, and some of that is going to change in 1992 with the new rules that we got adopted. But we came with an awful lot of votes and we represent a lot in this country. Jesse Jackson and other people who spoke at the convention who are a part of our movement–Ron Dellums, Richard Hatcher, and others–really lifted up a new vision for a new direction for this country.

There was some discussion about where we go from here. Obviously people are asking, what did we get out of this? Certainly you will hear some people say that we didn’t get anything. Some of us haven’t done much for the last year except work in the Jackson campaign. We’ve let other things go and maybe important things we should have done. I was especially concerned about increasing our white vote, which I was not satisfied with in 1984; I wasn’t satisfied with it this year either although we did a lot better and there was a more conscious effort to do that.

I know there were some people who were disillusioned. Not with Jesse, not with our campaign, but with the whole system and whether it was worth it, and how can you crack the Democratic Party, and everything’s rigged against us and is it really worth it? And did we win anything? I think we won a lot.

You would not know it to read the establishment media, because they tried to do everything from the very beginning of Jesse’s campaign to destroy it in one way or another. First they belittled it, and when he obviously was getting a lot of votes then they began to figure out different ways to attack him. They looked for some scandal in his background. That didn’t work. The whole line, ‘he can’t win,’ came from the press. We were not really successful in overcoming that psychology.

If everybody who thought Jesse was the best candidate had voted for him, I really think he’d be the nominee today. Our main failure was that we couldn’t overcome the ‘can’t win’ thing, which was nothing but giving in to racism. He could have won. On the floor the night after Jesse spoke I ran into Merle Hanson, the farmer advocate, who was with the Iowa delegation. He said what is just so heartbreaking is when you listened to Jesse’s speech last night and saw the reaction to it from people both there and in other places watching it on TV you know he could have won. He’s able to overcome all those barriers once people can actually hear him.

But we didn’t win the nomination. I want to talk about what we did win. Jesse’s whole performance was practically a miracle. Everybody knows the figures. He got seven million votes. He won ninety-two congressional districts. He carried state after state and came in second in the others. He got more convention votes than any runner-up has ever gotten-1218.5 at the end.

The mass media played it up as the Jackson forces have been defeated. In fact, the day after the vote on the platform they played that we were defeated on those two planks therefore the Jackson forces had been defeated and Dukakis was firmly in control.

I don’t think Dukakis was in control of that convention. Jesse was in control morally. He was setting the tone. It has been played up as a defeat, when it wasn’t. We came there a tremendous bloc of voters who cannot be ignored in this country.

At this convention more than any other in history there was a real rainbow in the racial sense and more delegates of non-European descent-not just black, but Asian and Latino and Native American. You felt a real sense of pride on the part of everybody that we represented this quilt. Jesse presented it as a thing to be proud of. The rainbow means a lot more to us than the racial quilt, but that’s one element of it.

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It doesn’t make headlines that before we ever got to this convention because of the force of the Jackson movement we had basic changes in the rules of the Democratic Party. We won everything the Jackson forces went into the rules committee asking for. Well, not entirely; we’d like to cut out the superdelegates entirely, but in 1992 they’ll be cut down by a third. The winner-take-all system that really did us in in some states will be eliminated. The bonus delegate thing which worked against us will be eliminated. There are some other technical changes which add up to be important. Somebody calculated that if the rules now in effect had been in effect this year Jesse would have come to Atlanta with 400 more delegates and Dukakis with 400 fewer. We would have had a different scenario. We won that.

We’ve changed the equation within the Democratic Party. In terms of the way the Democratic leadership looks at this movement, it’s been legitimatized; it’s gotten respect. The visible expression of that fact is that they’ve added these members to the Democratic National Committee who are Jesse’s nominees. How much power that represents, I don’t know, but they recognize that this is at least a wing of the party that is a significant movement in this country.

Sidebar: II. A Platform Worth a Fight

To some people the platform doesn’t matter. A platform is usually ignored by candidates and forgotten once they get in office. But a good platform gives you something to fight about. We got a fairly good platform though people didn’t realize it because they read that we got defeated on the two planks that went to the floor. One was for a no first-strike policy–I don’t know how anybody can be against that–and the other one was tax-the-rich. The Jackson forces were basically saying that we will not increase taxes, in fact we will try to reduce taxes on low-income and middle-income people, but that we will go back at least to 1977 in terms of the taxes that the corporations and very rich people are paying. Most of us, since most of us aren’t rich, should be for that. It’s a policy trying to reverse the unfair trend of the tax structure, not just since Reagan came in but since World War II, because the tax burden in this country has shifted dramatically since World War II. Sixty-something percent of the tax revenue came from corporations and very high income people. But now that’s completely reversed and the largest share, maybe up in the 70 percent range, comes from poor and middle income people. All the Jackson forces were asking was that you undo what Reagan has done, which has been robbing from the poor to give to the rich. As Jesse said in his convention speech, they’ve had this party, let them pay for it. The people who argued against that plank were really dishonest. I don’t mind somebody being against me if they’ll be honest. They were presenting that platform proposal like it was going to be taxing poor people. “We can’t do that or we won’t get elected like Mondale.” It wasn’t that and they knew it.

Those were two planks we lost and it was heartbreaking. But of the thirteen points of dispute on the platform, we won in negotiation on nine of them. They are not worded as strongly as if we’d had the votes to elect Jackson but they are pretty good planks. On Central America, on nuclear testing, on health care, on headstart and programs for children, on budget priorities. We got in our concepts of what the priorities should be for human needs.

The one plank that did not go to a vote but that we think was a victory in that we were able to have our speaker on the floor was on the question of self-determination for the Palestinian people. A lot of people who were watching TV that night had an opportunity to hear a viewpoint they just haven’t heard. That was a victory in itself.

The other thing that people don’t realize is that the whole thrust of that platform was what Jesse has been pushing since 1984 basically economic justice at home and peace abroad. It really is there and of course we have to bring it to life. I was wandering around the floor that night after we lost those votes, wandering around like everybody else; nobody listened to the speakers. Suddenly I heard Richard Hatcher at the podium speaking on one of the platform planks. Ron Dellums was speaking on the South Africa plank. This platform calls for declaring South Africa a terrorist state. I thought, “Gee, I’d better sit down and listen to what’s going on. Because this is our platform.” It really is.

In 1984 in San Francisco one of the disputed planks that we lost was affirmative action. This time that’s in there. People ought to look at it. We know it can be a scrap of paper that doesn’t mean anything. But it also gives us something that we can hold those two candidates accountable for. We can use it as a litmus test for other candidates who want our support. I think the very fact that Jesse could set the direction of that platform shows again that we have taken a major step toward our real objective–to change the

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direction of this country.

We came out of this election season the winner in the sense that the movement for peace and justice in this country is stronger than ever. It has legitimacy. It has a power base within the Democratic Party. It gives us certain advantages. There are disadvantages. I think more advantages than disadvantages at this point in history. It gives us a platform from which we are going to reach millions of more people before 1992.

When we came to Atlanta we knew Jesse wasn’t going to be the presidential nominee. We really didn’t think he was going to be the vice-presidential nominee and a lot of people didn’t want him to be. I don’t know whether he wanted to be. Jesse talked for a couple of hours with his delegates on Friday morning in Atlanta. One of the things he said was, “You people are saying they didn’t get nothing. That’s like if you go to the grocery store and your family is really hungry and your people need something to eat and they haven’t got any steak. You come home with an empty sack. And money in your pocket. Yet there was hamburger and sausage and pork chops and you didn’t get them. Is that what you are going to do?”

We didn’t get the steak but there was a bit of sausage and hamburger and we’ll get the steak next time.

A lot of people keep saying, “Let’s get out of this mess” of the Democratic Party. But Jesse has said since ’84, “No, the conservatives hope we’ll leave. They are scared we’ll stay and take over the party.” He thinks it’s possible to use this machinery to further a peace and justice agenda.

So far he has been right.

I think we are in a new stage of history. Jesse said the other day this is not a short sprint. It’s a long-distance run. I think we passed a major milestone this year.

Sidebar: III. Beyond Protest

My first political action was forty years ago in 1948 in the Progressive Party, which was an alternative program not too different from what we’re working for now. Henry Wallace–a lot of younger people don’t even know who he was now–was the standard bearer. He was talking about the same thing–justice at home, peace abroad–and it was just when the cold war was starting and the segregationists and racists were gaining strength in the South. That was a powerful movement. It was destroyed. That was a special period, the cold war and everything.

Henry Wallace, who had been in the Roosevelt administration and then started this third party movement because the Democratic party was going on a different direction, was a good guy. To lead the kind of movement we need, frankly, he was the wrong color. He was white. I’m white and you’re white and there’s nothing wrong with white folks. We’ve got a role to play. But because of the whole history of a racist society, I think it’s inevitable that the only way this inclusive coalition that we need can really come together is with the leadership of people of color.

Forty years ago black people, especially in the South, were just being able to struggle and emerge out of the seventy-five or almost a hundred years of terror. But they were organizing and lining up to vote at the courthouses all over the South. I was a young newspaper reporter then watching them line up in Birmingham where one of them got registered. Veterans coming back from World War II and all that sort of thing. That was going on.

That movement for black freedom had to emerge and develop to bring to the fore leadership that could pull together the coalition that would include everybody. That has happened now. At the founding convention of the Rainbow in 1986 I really got to thinking about it. That was the first time I heard Jesse talk about the quilt–how one patch isn’t big enough but you put all the patches together and you’ve got a quilt. He said that to poor white people in the mountains of Kentucky during this campaign–a big rally up there. He says, “Your patch isn’t big enough, but you put it together with all the farmers in the Midwest and the paper workers in Mobile and we’ll get together.” When we come together this way we are the new majority. We are not minorities anymore.

Most people want a government that reflects humane policies. But all these people who want a new direction are coming from different directions. You go to meetings and talk about forming a coalition. We sit in a meeting and plan it but it doesn’t happen. Until now.

That is the new element that makes it possible to talk about this new majority running the country. That is not rhetoric. I think we are going to do it. But it is such a shift of gears for people like me who spent the last forty years–all my adult life–protesting. Your psychology gets to the point that you think that’s what the social justice movement is-protesting. We are real good at picketing and we know how to descend on city hall and raise hell and get some things done. You can beat city hall. We do it a lot.

But it almost never occurs to us that we could be running city hall. I remember in the ’50s and I can remember a different group in the ’60s, revolutionaries, that would sit around and talk about seizing power. I don’t think they believed it. About two years ago I started thinking and it was like I had to change the gears of my thinking. We don’t always have to be a protest movement on the outside. Our movement can take power and run this government and change the policies. That is like a new thought.

* * *

A lot of us think we need a real two-party system in the

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country. The traditional Democrats and the Republicans are so much alike that you can’t tell them apart. The current Democratic leadership is having to acknowledge Jesse Jackson now but of course we know they came out of the ’84 election with this strange analysis that some way they could win all these voters if they sounded more like Republicans than Republicans. That never made any sense. If somebody wanted to vote for that they’d go vote Republican.

Jesse has given them a different way to win, to offer an alternative program to the country. In practicality, the advantage to building this movement through the Democratic Party is that without it I’m not sure we as a movement would have reached millions of people this year with our message. A lot of people have heard the truth from Jesse Jackson and those who have worked with him this year. I am not sure that would have happened if we had not been in the Democratic structure. Somebody told me a hundred million people were watching Jesse on TV. It was information they needed.

We are talking about power. We are tired of being a protest movement. The objective of this movement is to take governmental power. That scares some people. We have seen power corrupts and all that. Some of us think that the policies of our government are so bad that we’ve got to be about taking power and changing them.

For example, if Dukakis wins it is possible that within six months we will get official government action declaring South Africa a terrorist state. That is not just semantics. That sets up certain things sanctions, stopping trade, stopping trade with countries that are giving South Africa arms. If you are outside that structure you do not have access to that governmental power. It is a debatable question. This is the course that Jesse Jackson has set and I think it is working in the interests of the people right now.

Sidebar: IV. Of Men and Movements

Martin Luther King wasn’t the movement although people are not learning that now, unfortunately, the way King is being presented. On the other hand this movement wouldn’t be at the stage it is without Jesse Jackson.

I do not like to compare Jesse with Dr. King because it gets you into all kinds of crazy things. They are two very different people, very different personalities. I think you can make some leadership comparisons. I had the deepest respect for Martin’s character, and I do for Jesse’s, too. I saw Martin take some very courageous stands. He would do what he thought was right whether he was going to get glory for it or not. But I’ve always felt that the real genius of Martin Luther King was that he was able to articulate and bring to the attention of the country the message that many people were feeling in their inner beings. Therefore he became a catalyst that did not create the movement at all; he didn’t even create the Montgomery movement as we know, but that role as catalyst did raise it to a different level. In the process I think the movement made Martin. I think he changed and grew under the impact of that movement. He responded to it and to the challenge of history and what was expected of him.

In a sense you can make a parallel with Jesse. His great genius is that he is able to articulate what everybody’s longing for, in terms of a new direction, a new vision. It is something that is welling up from the people and he is able to give a voice to that. He has risen to do that at this time. He has become the catalyst. The movement as I see it, with a capital ‘M,’ has never stopped. We got repressed in the late sixties. Some people got co-opted in the seventies. People went on strike. They went on to doing different things. Jesse has pulled it back into a national focus. It is growing because of that and much faster than it would have otherwise. In the process it is creating Jesse. He is changing and growing under the impact of that movement. I think that is the way it should be.

He isn’t perfect. Martin wasn’t. None of us are. We are all a bundle of contradiction But Jesse gets more blame for it. The problem is that if you are in leadership the mix of good and evil gets exaggerated. People can tell you all the bad things about Jesse. Before Martin got put on a pedestal they could tell you all the bad things about Martin.

I think that Jesse has developed into a great leader under the impact of this movement. Obviously he had the potential to do that.

Sidebar: V. In the Embrace of the Party

I think Jesse has enough sense not to become co-opted, though that is the strategy of the traditional Democratic Party at this point. They would like to have ignored this movement until it went away. It hasn’t gone away. So the next thing is to try to co-opt it. If they are not able to do that they may start trying to crush it. That has been the history–if they can’t co-opt you they repress you. We are not to that stage yet.

The convention was orchestrated to try to make it look like the traditional Democrats had taken Jesse and his movement in to their fold and they are in control. Our people weren’t thinking that way. The most vital meeting that happened outside of the convention hall was the Friday morning meeting with Jesse with his delegates. They all came–Dukakis and Bentsen and [DNC Chairman Paul] Kirk and Kitty Dukakis. They all trooped on the stage with Jesse. I think they were impressed. There were these hundreds of delegates up at eight o’clock in the morning. I bet they couldn’t get their’s up at eight o’clock in the morning.

Someone said, “What do you mean by co-optation?” I had to think about it. Somebody asks you what you mean by

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something when you’ve been using the word for years. I think what I mean by co-optation is that there’s a dominant force that tries to co-opt a movement by pulling in our people one by one, using our energy and our commitment for their agenda so that our agenda gets lost. They might co-opt some individuals. I don’t think they’ll co-opt Jesse. I don’t think this movement as a whole is co-optable. I think it’s too strong.

Jesse has sort of laid out a practical agenda–not an issue agenda; we know what the issues are–of things that people need to be about now. He is saying that people need to really work in the November election. Some people are going to have a hard time doing that. Some people may not do it. There are arguments for doing it. The most essential thing right now is to remove from Washington those people who have been running the government for the last eight years.

Dukakis has pledged he is not going to support contra aid. He is not going to support UNITA in Angola. He has said that. You have got a platform that says we will declare South Africa a terrorist state. You can’t say there is no difference because there is even though it is not our program, our candidate. Jesse is saying that the first thing we have got to do is get those folks out of Washington. The only way to do that is to work for the Democratic ticket and see that they get elected.

That is not all. He told people to go home and do at the state, city, county and congressional district level what we are doing at the national level–create a new equation in the Democratic Party. Make sure that our forces are represented. That hasn’t been done in a lot of states. He uses Mississippi sometimes as a model because after ’84 they went home and organized and now the Rainbow forces or the Jackson forces have taken over the leadership of the Democratic Party. He is also saying, “Run for everything.” Run for the Senate, run for the Congress, run for mayor, run for city council, run for dogcatcher. Get your Rainbow candidates to run. That started in ’84.

He keeps stressing the census process in 1990 because if that isn’t done right it can screw up a lot of things on the numbers that give you your representation. Then be organized to deal with the legislatures in 1991 on reapportionment. By then we are into another presidential race. There is plenty to do.

In tangible expressions of respect for the Jackson movement, the Democratic leadership has committed itself to support some really important legislation. The Dellums bill on complete sanctions against South Africa will probably pass now. Another is the D.C. statehood bill which affects all of us, because with the present power relationships in Washington it means two more progressive Senators and another progressive governor. There has also been a commitment to comprehensive child care. They have also promised to implement the economic set-asides for minorities. That is millions of dollars in goods and services that would amount to a community investment program in minority communities.

There is commitment to the Conyers bill for on-site, same-day registration so that people can go on voting day and register to vote. Jesse Jackson and all the forces around him feel that that this measure is critically important for expanding the electorate; it already exists in some states. It would make a a difference. I was working at Jackson headquarters on Super Tuesday. People were coming in droves wanting to know where they could vote for Jesse Jackson. We said, “Where’s your precinct?” They didn’t know anything about a precinct. “Are you registered?” They weren’t registered. It just occurred to them that day they wanted to go vote. That is what this bill says they would be able to do. All the election officials are going to scream and holler. The bill includes money for the states to set the machinery for this, the necessary computers to make it possible. There’s plenty to do.

Sidebar: VI. Politics, Power and Possibility

I think a lot of people who have been in protest movements almost shy away from actually taking over. Do we really want power? We have seen what power does and power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Maybe we’d rather be out here real pure, picketing all our lives. I’ve thought about that, too. It seems to me that we really think that the policies of the government are so destructive and are destroying people here and all over the world. Threatening the existence of this plane-then we’ve got to think about taking power and changing those policies. Now it is really possible. It is going to happen. I think it is going to happen soon. I think it could have happened this year. The problem is that even if we had been able to nominate and elect Jesse as President this year–if that miracle had happened–we might not have been ready for it because we didn’t have Congress. We can have Congress. We won ninety-two congressional districts. One thing he’s telling people is to go home and see whether your representative in Congress is representing what that vote stood for. If he isn’t then he or she needs to be replaced. All that can happen pretty quick. I started saying a year and a half ago that we’d have a Rainbow government in Washington by the year 2000. This year I thought maybe 1988, maybe 1992. I think it will happen soon. I hope it happens in my lifetime. I would like to live to see a government in Washington that really cared about the people of this country. That was committing our resources to meeting the needs of the people of this country and working with the people struggling for a better life all over the world instead of trying to crush them in my name and using my tax money.

I grew up during the New Deal which I think did have those commitments–or the movement forced it to have them. Ever since World War II we just haven’t had that. We’ve had to be ashamed of our government. Now wouldn’t it be nice to be real proud of our government for a change.

I think we are going to live to see that.

Contours of the Color Line

Reviewed by Cliff Kuhn

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 pp. 26-27

Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta by Gary M. Pomerantz. (Scribner’s, 1996, 550 pages).

Race and the Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta by Ronald H. Bayor. (University of North Carolina Press, 1996, 350 pages).

Despite Atlanta’s emergence as a major American city, until very recently the books treating its past in any sort of depth and complexity have been few and far between. There are various interrelated reasons for this historical neglect, most of them related to the city’s specific development. Ever since its rapid re-construction after the Civil War, Atlanta’s movers and shakers have stressed the city’s modernity, its newness, its departure from the outdated, traditional, old South. Closely associated with this striving has been a remarkable boosterism. Since Henry Grady, Atlanta has had a slew of highly capable city promoters and sloganeers, always mindful of the city’s image. In the 1920s, Atlanta became the first city in the United States to literally advertise itself in popular and business magazines. In more recent years, it has been promoted as “the city too busy to hate” and “the next international city,” slogans which often bore only a casual relationship to reality, to put it mildly. Such an overarching concern with image has served to blunt and limit any critical historical perspective. In addition, the near-mythic status of Gone with the Wind and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the tremendous influx in recent years of newcomers with little appreciation of the city’s traditions have contributed to the local historical amnesia.

Fortunately the situation is beginning to change. Ironically, the Olympics, Atlanta’s latest self-promotional striving, have helped launch a veritable cottage industry of new books on local history which promise to significantly enhance and challenge the received historical wisdom about the city’s past. Among the most important of these recent works are Gary Pomerantz’s Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn and Ronald Bayor’s Race and the Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta.

At first glance, these two books could hardly be more different. Atlanta Constitution reporter Pomerantz has crafted a beautifully written saga depicting five generations of the families of former mayors Ivan Allen and Maynard Jackson. Their personal stories are what propel the book, stories which inevitably intersect with the emergence of modern Atlanta. In contrast, personalities are decidedly in the background in Georgia Tech history professor Bayor’s study of race as a crucial and enduring component of all aspects of the city’s development.

Yet there are important similarities between the two works, too. Both authors came to their projects out of an awareness of the centrality of race in Atlanta to this day. Pomerantz refers to “the profound resonance of race” throughout Atlanta’s history (p. 623), while Bayor points to racially-based policy decisions which have had “long-range and often debilitating effects” on the city (p. 256). Both books are exhaustively researched, covering topics not heretofore addressed in the city’s historiography and often providing fresh insights into subjects previously treated by other historians. Unlike other, more chronologically confined works, they examine Atlanta history over the last hundred years, a long range perspective that fosters appreciation of both the continuities and discontinuities in the city’s past. Taken in tandem, the two books provide impressive insights into the contours of the color line in twentieth century Atlanta, and the relationship between the city’s rhetoric and its reality.

Race and the Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta attempts to determine the impact of race on the city’s institutional structure and physical development. After briefly describing the racial setting of turn-of-the-century Atlanta and providing an overview of race and electoral politics, Bayor applies his racial lens to a variety of public policy issues both before and after the emergence of black political power. In turn, he examines housing, jobs, recreation, health, the police and fire departments, mass

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transit, and the schools.

This topical approach has considerable strengths and a few related weaknesses. It enables Bayor to treat each subject in considerable depth. For instance, the section on residential segregation covers racial zoning, the placement of Atlanta’s roads and highways, urban renewal, public housing, and annexation. On the other hand, each issue is to a large degree compartmentalized, without little sense of how it interrelates with other developments. As an example, some of the leaders in the 1946 voter registration drive (a signal moment in the making of modern Atlanta, incidentally) had cut their organizational teeth trying to get black workers hired at the Bell Bomber plant during World War II.

The cumulative effect of the book is sobering and depressing. Time after time, Bayor demonstrates how racially-based policy decisions made during the era of segregation have left a corrosive legacy in Atlanta, despite shifting power relations. While legal segregation has been toppled and African Americans have made political gains, deep racial divides, increasingly intertwined with class, continue to mark the city. The portrait he paints is a far cry from the one that local image makers have presented to the world.

Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn is a more triumphant book. The triumphs, large and small, are not only those of mayors Jackson and Allen and their kin, but of the city of Atlanta itself. After all, Pomerantz reminds us, Atlanta experienced a comparatively peaceful transition out of the Jim Crow era, did not burn like other cities in the 1960s, and, of course, is hosting the Olympics today.

This by no means implies that Pomerantz is a starry-eyed city booster. On the contrary, he takes great pains to depict the separate but unequal “gulf of geography and culture” that historically divided black and white Atlanta (p. 18). He does this via a chronological approach, alternating chapters on the Allens and Dobbses (Jackson’s family). Each of these families was prominent on their respective side of the color line for generations, yet tellingly they never actually met until 1962. This device works extremely well, not only portraying Atlanta’s racial divide, but linking members of the two families to larger historical currents, and presenting them in their complexity.

Of course, two of the principal characters are mayors Allen and Jackson. Allen is portrayed as a fundamentally decent man, whose pragmatic approach and flexibility served Atlanta extremely well during the 1960s. Pomerantz points to two defining moments in Allen’s career, and by extension in the history of Atlanta: Allen’s triumph over arch segregationist Lester Maddox in the 1961 mayoral election; and his 1963 testimony on behalf of the public accommodationsaccomodations [sic] section in President John F. Kennedy’s proposed civil rights bill. The defining moment for Maynard Jackson, elected in 1973 as the South’s first black mayor, was when he held firm on the issue of affirmative action in city jobs, despite experiencing tremendous pressure from the local business community.

The third dominant figure in the book is Jackson’s grandfather, John Wesley Dobbs. Alternately a railroad mail clerk, the head of the black Masons in Georgia, a pioneer in black voter registration, a devoted father of six talented daughters, and the unofficial “mayor” of Auburn Avenue, black Atlanta’s foremost thoroughfare, Dobbs emerges in the book as a larger than life character. For instance, when he spotted Duke Ellington in an Auburn Avenue restaurant, Dobbs successfully invited the famed musician to play the piano in the Dobbs family living room. Pomerantz has performed a great service by resurrecting this colorful figure, who, while still well-known among black Atlantans over fifty, is all but forgotten by the vast majority of metropolitan Atlanta residents.

Neither Pomerantz nor Bayor speculate about what post-Olympics Atlanta might look like. There’s no doubt, however, that clues to this future development can be found in these two fine books, both of which belong on the still short but growing “must read” list on Atlanta history.

Cliff Kuhn is assistant professor of history at Georgia State University. Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914-1948, based on radio interviews which he co-edited with Harlan Joye and Bernard West, provides an-other chronicle of the city.