The Disposable Olympics Meets the City of Hype

By Preston Quesenberry

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 pp. 3-14

Not since the height of the Civil Rights movement have the Southern states, and Atlanta in particular, received as much extended media coverage as they are due to receive in the next month. The 1996 Centennial Olympic Games will draw not only fifteen thousand members of the press covering the athletic events, but also an anticipated live to ten thousand additional national and international journalists looking to use the Olympics as a backdrop for human interest stories and feature articles on Atlanta, Georgia, and the South.

Anticipating this incoming media wave, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, along with other trade and tour-ism organizations, has established a press information center at the site of a former bus station in the middle of downtown Atlanta to assist international reporters re-searching, among other things, “Southern lifestyle and culture.” The world’s journalists are not likely to settle for a South viewed through the Chamber’s lens, but those who drop by the center will receive press kits presenting two central images. One is an “Old South” of “genteel Southern plantations,” “Southern hospitality,” “nostalgic, charming towns,” and “tastes of the region like sweet tea, cornbread, black-eyed peas, barbecue, and peach pie.” This evocation of a “region rich in tradition” is then juxtaposed with depictions of a forward looking, rapidly progressing, economically booming “New South.”

Of course, pre-packaged images of Southern traditions iron out all of the diversity between different regions of the section of the United States known as the South, while denying or harmonizing historical and existing tensions which exist among the different populations who live across this broad geography. Appalachia is not the Delta is not the Carolina Piedmont is not the Gulf Coast, and so on. Nor can Atlanta stand in for the diverse historical realities of any old or new Souths. And as for generalized depictions of an “economic boom,” such talk obviously ignores a great many people who have not shared in the supposedly ubiquitous prosperity.

Questioning the oversimplified portrayals of Atlanta and the South leads us to voices other than those of business and tourist promotion or of the Atlanta Commit-tee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) and its list of proud sponsors. Atlanta, rather than the South at large, is the subject of this essay which seeks to locate some realities underneath the city’s current image-making and asks what we can learn about this Olympic city from local activists, advocates for the homeless, and public scholars who have been dealing with and thinking about the coming of the Games for many months.

While the Chamber of Commerce may boast that Atlanta was voted number two in Fortune’s 1995 “Best Cities for Business” list, the city also ranks number two in the nation in income disparity between blacks and whites, number two in the percentage of the population living in public housing, number two in violent dimes per capita, number two in total crimes per capita, and number nine in the rate of poverty. While the voices for business say that the Atlanta metropolitan area leads the nation in in-migration because of its “unmatched quality of life,” the population living in the city itself (now generously estimated at 424,300) has been shrinking for more than twenty years. An estimated fifteen to twenty thousand people in this urban-core population can’t rind any place to live, much less a place “unmatched in quality,” and an additional fifty thousand live in public housing with seven thousand qualified applicants waiting to move in.

The world of journalists descending on Atlanta for the Olympics will find it particularly difficult to ignore this poverty because so much of it is concentrated in and around what is known as the Olympic Ring — a three-mile wide circular area in Atlanta’s downtown core which contains nine major venues holding sixteen of the thirty sporting events. According to data collected in 1990, ninety-two percent of the 52,000 people living in the Olympic Ring neighborhoods are African-American, and most of them are poor. The median household income in these neighborhoods is just $8,621, the median per-capita income is $5,702, and labor participation rates are no higher than seventy percent and as low as thirty-five percent. Does ACOG expect journalists not to address this obvious poverty in their descriptions of the city? As Reverend Austin Ford, who works in the neighborhood surrounding the new Olympic stadium, puts it, “The Olympic stadium is in a very depressed community, and

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I don’t know that the journalists will need for that to be pointed out to them. They might say, `Well, I can see!”‘

Not Again: Resistance to the Olympic Stadium

Father Ford heads Emmaus House, a community center located just south of the stadium. He says he first came to work in the area in 1967 because of problems created by the 1965-66 construction of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, home of the Atlanta Braves. While the Braves stadium was touted as an economic benefit to the area, the neighborhoods surrounding the stadium– Summerhill, Mechanicsville, and Peoplestown–declined dramatically after its construction. The initial erection of the structure required the destruction of thousands of households and the displacement of 5,500 residents. By 1990, Summerhill’s population had dwindled from 16,000 to 2,746 and Mechanicsville’s had plummeted from about 15,600 to 3,900. As of 1992, unemployment in Summerhill was sixty-six percent and the median household income was $7,670. In Mechanicsville and Peoplestown, the median household income as of 1990 was $5,598 and $11,563, respectively.

Given the adverse impact of the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, the proposed construction of a $209 million, 85,000-seat Olympic stadium on the old stadium’s south parking attracted immediate and vehement opposition from Father Ford and other community activists in the Summerhill, Peoplestown, and Mechanicsville neighbor-hoods. ACOG–the “non-profit,” exclusively private organization supposedly responsible for all aspects of financing and staging the $1.7 billion Olympic spectacle, including all venue construction–promised these activists that the new stadium would serve the best interests of surrounding residents and set up an Olympic Stadium Neighborhood Task Force to give local community leaders a role “in planning an Olympic stadium in your neighborhood.” Father Ford refused to join, telling the local newspaper, “I’m not planning on an Olympic stadium–I’m hoping against hope they don’t put it down here. I just think they’ve got to keep it straight: We can’t be co-opted.”

So far, Father Ford says that, despite ACOG’s promises, he has “really seen no positive impact on the people who live around here. Their lives haven’t been improved but actually quite the reverse because rents have gone up. One week we had seven evictions because the rents have gone up so. The owners are fixing up these old houses, you see, to rent them out to people who want to be around here during the Olympics. A lot of people have been moved. There’s also been a lot of demolition around here–mostly in Mechanicsville to make room for parking. They considered the structures they demolished to be bedraggled and run down, but people were living in those places.”

Summerhill residents currently have no legal recourse against these evictions because Atlanta, according to former Atlanta Tenants Rights Association President David Bass, has “one of the worst renters’ rights situations of any major city in America.” Landlords can raise rents to whatever amount they like and as often as they like, they can set the security deposits to whatever amount they want, and they can force tenants to sublease their apartments. Despite the attempts of Bass’s and other organizations to push for legislation to remedy this situation, all three of the proposed bills (including a temporary anti-rent gouging bill which would have capped rent increases at ten percent up until August of 1996) died in the state legislature.

Although the Olympics have brought rent gouging, housing demolition, and other negative consequences to the neighborhoods surrounding the new stadium, Father Ford says the effects could have been worse if not for the work of Ethel Mae Mathews, president of a residents’ rights group based in Peoplestown called Atlanta Neighbors United for Fairness (ANUFF).

Having first learned of the Braves’ stadium site thirty years ago when her landlord evicted her from her Summerhill apartment, Mathews immediately mobilized ANUFF after seeing a story about the proposed Olympic stadium site on the television news (a source she was forced to rely on, she says, because city and ACOG officials never notified residents in the surrounding neighborhoods about the site of the new stadium or attempted to include them in the planning process).

ANUFF’s repeated letters, phone calls, public meetings, and protest marches at city hall, at the new stadium site, at ACOG’s headquarters, and even at ACOG President Billy Payne’s home in suburban Dunwoody were all intended to make sure “they couldn’t build that second stadium with ease,” Mathews says. “We held the stadium up for six months. And that accomplished a lot.”

ANUFF won several concessions in the revised stadium deal between ACOG, the city of Atlanta, Fulton County, and Ted Turner’s Braves: the stadium was moved slightly so that housing for the elderly could be saved; the number of parking spaces was reduced by 1,100, saving additional housing; and the Braves agreed to put 8.5 percent of the team’s revenues made from parking into a community fund.

Although proud of what ANUFF accomplished and proud that her organization was able to remain “free of ACOG’s control,” Mathews says she believes the group could have won more concessions if all the people who

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had first worked with ANUFF had “stuck together.” “When we first started out, we had a lot of support from all of the neighborhoods that were going to be hardest hit by the stadium. But after we got into it, and we got strong, someone from ACOG came into the neighborhood, waving dollar bills, promising money, saying ‘Don’t fight us, come over to our side, and we’ll make it worth your while.’ Then over half of the people who started out with us sold us down the drain.”

A “big part of the sell out,” continues Mathews, was Summerhill Neighborhood, Inc., a non-profit community organization based in Summerhill and founded by former State Representative Douglas Dean in 1989. Instead of adamantly opposing the location of the new stadium, as did Ford and ANUFF, Dean and SNI sought to form a partnership with the Olympic organizers that Dean said would “speed along the rebeautification” of Summerhill and make it a “showplace by the time the first caravan of athletes rolls into town.”

Father Ford, too, dismisses the work of Dean and the SNI as a “sell-out” that divided the grass-roots opposition to ACOG by voicing support for the stadium project. “Douglas Dean and the SNI were one hundred percent behind the Olympics from the very beginning,” Father Ford says. “They were no help at all. I think if we could have gotten Summerhill, which was the neighborhood most immediately affected, to join with the rest of us in trying to get some concessions for the community, we could have had a better deal. But Dean and the others had signed on so completely, that that wasn’t possible. The business community simply adored Douglas Dean, because he was going along with everything they wanted.”

Dean says that he understands the “fears and frustrations” of Father Ford, Mathews, and other community leaders who are concerned about the Olympic stadium in light of the adverse affects of the Brave stadium, but he insists that this time around the result will be different. Because the Summerhill community was organized enough to take advantage of the situation Dean believes that the siting of the new stadium near th neighborhood is now bringing real benefits to the area–a refurbished commercial district, street improvement; renovated recreational facilities, and, most importantly, new houses. Instead of reacting against the location of the Olympic stadium, Dean says SNI had been “proactive” by developing its own comprehensive plan for the neighborhood even before it was announced that the Olympics would be coming to Atlanta. Developing a concrete, long-range plan was the key to SNI’s success, Dean says, largely because it “made the environment better” for a partnership with the business community.

In particular, Dean argues that the creation of a comprehensive plan encouraged the banks to loan money for mortgages and for the construction of new houses in Summerhill. “Out of all we proposed,” Dean says, “one of our real issues was getting the banks to reinvest in the neighborhood. And we’ve done that. That’s so important to revitalization because unless somebody’s loaning money for mortgages, you’re not really going to revitalize your community.”

The money from the banks, as well as money from the federal government and private foundations, enabled the construction of 190 new homes in Summerhill, the first new houses to be built in the neighborhood for fifty years. Located directly across from the Braves stadium, easily in view of the Olympic visitors, are the seventy-six new townhomes of Greenlea Commons, which sell from $100,000 to $139,000. In the celebratory prose of the local newspaper, these townhomes are meant to transform Summerhill “from a poor, predominantly black enclave to

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an economically stable, multicultural community.” Further away from the stadium, scattered throughout the neighborhood, will also be seventy-nine, 35,000 homes with no-interest nun gages set at $250 a month.

The disparity in the prices of the new houses will encourage the growth of a mixed-income community, which is “essential for revitalization, Dean says. In the case of Summerhill. Dean insists “revitalization” into a mixed-income community does not mean gentrification into a community with no place for low-income populations to live. SN1’s strategy involves both turning the current low-income “renters into stakeholders” and attracting previous residents of Summerhill back into the neighborhood with new housing.

Dean’s claims aside, the benefits to the Summerhill community have been “minimal,” says Rev. Tim McDonald, former head of the local activist group, the Concerned Black Clergy, and minister at the First Iconium Church, located a few miles north of the new stadium. “Summerhill,” continues Rev. McDonald, “is the only community that has gotten minimal benefits from the Olympics. That’s unfortunate. I think our city missed a great opportunity for enhancing the communities. Summerhill was the only affected neighborhood with an organization in place to try and get dollars. Mechanicsville and Peoplestown probably needed money even worse, but they didn’t have any viable organization. To Doug Dean’s credit, he got the mechanism in place, but it could have been just as easy for ACOG to assist the other neighborhoods to put those mechanisms in place.”

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The “Revitalization” of Techwood/Clark Howell

For Rev. McDonald, the struggle in the Olympic stadium neighborhoods did not represent the “biggest fight of the whole Olympics.” Rather, the real battles were waged north of Summerhill and west of the central business district, in another hub of Olympic-related activity. Here sits the Georgia Dome, a stadium built for the city’s professional football team on land cleared in the 1960s for low- and moderate-income housing. Also in this area west of the central business district lies the just-built, fifty million dollar, twenty-two acre Centennial Olympic Park, the proposed “gathering place” for Olympic visitors. Al-

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though the state of Georgia will pay for its maintenance after the Olympics, the actual construction of Centennial Park was financed solely through private funds–but at the expense of turning in the park into a large advertisement. In return for payment of tens of millions of dollars, ATT will be allowed to construct an Olympic Global Village in the park, Swatch an eighteen-foot high clock tower, General MotorsMoters [sic] a “Century of Motion” complex, and Anheuser Busch a hi-tech beer garden. Bordering the park’s northern edge will be Coca-Cola’s own $30 million, twelve acre “Coca-Cola City” amusement park.

The low-income mixed-use area which was plowed under for these parks/advertisements was labeled a “cancer” by the former head of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. It included three homeless shelters (which housed ten percent of the city’s shelter beds), one large single occupancy hotel, and day care centers, as well as housing which has not been replaced, and small business which had nowhere to relocate.

Just north of Centennial Park, between the world headquarters of Coca-Cola and Georgia Tech, is the just-built $169 million Olympic Village, the dormitories for the Olympic athletes. The village rests on the former site of 114 low-income units of Techwood/Clark-Howell Homes, the first public housing project in the nation In addition to the destruction of these units, the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) has approved a plan to replace the remaining 1,193 units of Techwood/Clark Howell with a nine-hundred unit mixed-income development–with forty percent market rate housing, twenty percent low income, and forty percent public housing. Essentially, then, this $42 million, federally-funded “revitalization” (in the words of AHA officials) will result in the loss of almost eight-hundred public housing units.

Rev. McDonald feels that the “Techwood fight” was the most heated battle of the Olympics and that the final plan to replace Techwood with a mixed-income development is a “hoax” generated by Atlanta’s business commu-

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nity to get the kind of development they want in that area. ‘There are business folks who always wanted that area because of its proximity to downtown,” McDonald says. “They used the Olympics as a catalyst to get that area. Now they have it, and all those folks who lived there are going to be displaced. All the business community wants is out of sight, out of mind. I admit that some of those displaced folks may find a better place with Section 8 vouchers, but I would challenge them to produce ten of those families who have been relocated. There was no tracking, there were no real attempts to relocate them. They just wanted to get those folks out so they could on with their business.”

Another church leader and community activist, Joe Beasley of Antioch Baptist Church North, agrees with Rev. McDonald that the loss of Techwood was perhaps the worst of the Olympics’ “tremendous negative impact on poor people.” “You drive down through that area,” observes Beasley, “and you see all of these public housing units being torn down, and you ask, `Where have all the poor people gone?’ Frankly, I don’t know.”

Techwood/Clark Howell Homes are only one of several of what AHA has designated “Olympic Legacy Communities”–public housing units (most of which border Olympic venues) that will be demolished and “revitalized” into “mixed-income housing.” According to a consultant with AHA, Rick White, AHA has aimed to “leverage the excitement around the Olympics to gain the political and community support that was needed” to demolish not only Techwood/Clark Howell, but also John Hope Homes near Clark Atlanta University, John Eagen Homes near the Georgia Dome, and East Lake Meadows in southeast Atlanta.

According to Beasley, the destruction of public housing around Olympic venues represents only part of a larger attempt on the part of the “Olympic People to get the world to believe a big lie–that Atlanta has no poor people.”

“They’re hiding the homeless, chasing them away, and locking them up because they’re afraid people are going to see,” he says. “They’ve put together ordinances to sweep the downtown corridor.”

Southern Inhospitality: A Sanitized Downtown

The ordinances Beasley mentions were passed by the Atlanta City Council in July of 1991, less than a year after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Atlanta would be the site of the 1996 games. The ordinances make it illegal for “suspicious-looking” people to remain in a parking lot if they don’t have a car in the lot (thirty-five percent of downtown Atlanta’s acreage is devoted to parking lots), to beg in an “aggressive” manner, and to enter vacant buildings.

Equally concerned about what they call the 1991 “Anti-Homeless Ordinances” are the members of the Open Door Community, a residential Christian center of thirty men and women who help assist some of Atlanta’s estimated 15,000 to 20,000 homeless. Located just north of the Olympic Ring on Ponce De Leon Avenue, Open Door’s kitchens prepare thousands of meals each month for the city’s hungry. Its facilities offer the homeless restrooms and a place to shower. Its front and back yards provide a safe haven. According to Murphy Davis, who founded Open Door in 1981 along with her husband Ed Loring, this haven has become even more necessary in the growing “atmosphere of hostility” toward the homeless and poor created by the Olympics.

One of the most recently exposed incidences of overt hostility against the homeless is Fulton County’s Homeward Bound program, which offers one-way tickets out of town to those homeless persons who sign a statement promising never to return and who can show they had a job or family waiting on the other end. Murphy Davis, however, began noticing “really strange things” even before Atlanta’s selection as host city, when Billy Payne’s group was still attempting to sell the city to the IOC.

“We serve breakfast every morning downtown to about 250 people,” says Davis, “and one morning we got down there and there were only ninety-five people. This happened several times. We couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then we learned that the IOC had been in town looking at Atlanta. The police had obviously just gone through and swept the streets. They just picked up everybody, and soon as the IOC and its limousines would leave, they’d let them loose again.”

It is relatively easy for Atlanta’s police to “sweep” the streets in preparation for the Olympics, Davis says, both because most homeless people cannot effectively resist if they are detained illegally and because the police are now armed with a slew of ordinances that enable them to legally arrest the homeless whenever they want to. The enforcement of an older ordinance against public urination particularly irks Davis because the homeless have no legal place to pee. For over a decade, she and other homeless advocates have been campaigning to get the city to use the money it spends arresting people for urinating in public to purchase public toilets. Although the Atlanta City Council promised to provide these facilities downtown in 1993, the city reneged on this promise.

In addition, Davis says she has learned ACOG plans not to set up any portable toilets outside of the venues during the Olympics but is simply encouraging restaurant owners (who routinely deny the homeless access to

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their facilities) to open their restrooms to the millions of Olympic visitors. “One of the almost funny things about this,” Davis says, “is that by trying to make the city inhospitable to certain of its citizens, it’s making it inhospitable to our visitors as well.”

Shortly after Davis spoke, a wealthy, Atlanta-based businessman, J. B. Fuqua, also realized how inhospitable the central city would be to Olympic visitors due to the absence of toilets, drinking fountains, and shade structures. Fearing that the lack of such accommodations between venues would “not only be a great inconvenience, but would have made a bad impression,” Fuqua donated $1.5 million to ACOG to provide the necessary facilities. The toilets, shade, and drinking stations, however, will all be portable and removed after the Games are through.

To fight for permanent restroom facilities for the city’s homeless, Davis and other members of the Open Door Community participated in a “Pee For Free with Dignity” rally in the city’s Woodruff Park, a site which adds to the sense that much-needed funds (from both public sources and private foundations) are being misused to remove the homeless from downtown rather than to help their situation. Woodruff Park has recently undergone a year-long, five million dollar redesign, which includes such expensive amenities as a thirty-foot decorative fountain and a seventeen-foot cascading waterfall. The new design also includes facilities specifically engineered to discourage homeless people from using the park–such as benches all facing in the same direction, with arm rests that make it impossible to lie down. Left out are any facilities than might attract the homeless, such as bathrooms, drinking fountains, or the older, wrap-around-bench tree planters that encouraged face-to-face conversation. For Davis, the park represents “precisely what the powers-that-be say they want: a ‘sanitized zone,”vagrant free,’ and deserted enough to appear safe.”

“Devoid of the color of a rich, urban culture whose life has never been celebrated,” Davis continues, “we see in this new Woodruff Park a city that is boring, antiseptic, colorless, cold, and heartless.”

The construction of inhospitable spaces, the passing of ordinances which have the effect of targeting the homeless, and the pervasive sense that enforcement of these ordinances is on the increase as the Olympics approach are not the only forces creating a hostile atmosphere for the homeless in downtown Atlanta. Central Atlanta Progress, an association of large downtown businesses and property holders, has just spent two million dollars to post its own force of fifty private security guards (or “goodwill ambassadors,” as CAP prefers to call them) around the central business district.

Adding to the sense of “security,” ACOG has announced that Centennial Park will be surrounded by a fence to “control the crowds and keep out the riffraff.” During the actual three weeks of the Olympics, 25,000 federal, state, and local law enforcement officers and military personnel will be assigned to security downtown. “If the people who come here follow instructions,” assured ACOG’s A. D. Frazier in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, shortly after FBI statistics showed Atlanta to be the second most violent city in America, “they’ll be in the most secure place on Earth.”

While “secure” for middle and upper class visitors who “follow instructions,” Murphy Davis thinks that the homeless will feel threatened by this environment and stay out of the Olympic Ring during the games. “Things are really going to be hot,” she says, “and I think homeless people know they had better just disappear during this time. There are people who have been positioning themselves for years to make a lot of money off this event, and they don’t mean to be inconvenienced by any poor people. And homeless people are not the only ones who’d better stay out of the way. Young African American people, especially in groups, and all people who are poor or in any other way unlike the button-down business crowd had better watch out.”

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Davis sees the Olympics as a “trial run” to achieve what the downtown business community has long desired: the permanent removal of the homeless from the city center.

Open Door partners are also concerned that the Olympics could leave an equally troublesome legacy: more homeless people. Open Door’s Todd Cioffi says he has noticed a lot of “new faces” in their facilities, breakfast lines, and soup lines and wonders whether all of these new arrivals will stay in Atlanta after the Olympics and remain homeless. Cioffi says some of these new faces are people who have lost their homes due to the destruction of housing facilities (such as former Techwood residents). Some are among the thousands who have been forced out of apartments because rents have escalated. But most of the new homeless Cioffi says he has talked with have come from out of town searching for work.

Typically these new arrivals find no jobs at all or they find only temporary work with the sixty labor pools in the metropolitan Atlanta area–labor pools which all Olympic venue construction companies use for at least some of their workers. Making anywhere from $4.25 to $6.00 an hour and taking home as little as $27 for a full day’s work after all deductions are made (for transportation fees, lunch, equipment rentals, and state and federal taxes), labor pool workers most often do not make enough to afford even the cheapest rental housing. “Money’s being made off the backs of these people,” says Cioffi, pointing out that labor pools perpetuate homelessness by paying only day-to-day subsistence.

Along with condemning the exploitation of labor pool workers by private construction companies, Cioffi and Davis further denounce the use of scarce public resources on these Olympic projects. Although the Olympics are supposedly a completely privately-financed business venture (a “fact” the private, “non-profit” entity ACOG repeatedly points out when it is asked to help redevelop poor neighborhoods or to make its completely closed decision-making process more public and democratic), public investment in the Games is considerable. So far, the city has spent $327 million on projects being executed specifically for the Olympics. Virtually all of the projects are aimed at making the city more amenable or attractive to Olympic visitors rather than helping the economic situation of the city’s poor residents in any direct way.

The city has spent $250 million of these funds on renovating Hartsfield International Airport for the influx of tourists. Just recently, the airport’s newly built, plush atrium–replete with upscale shops and fast-food eateries, sofas and chairs, and personal computer hook-ups–has become a campground for the city’s homeless, perhaps driven here by the hostile atmosphere downtown. While the homeless say they need a place to go and are not hurting anyone, airport administrators and shop managers are furious. “We’ve had an element of predators discover the airport as a very warm and comfortable place to prey on other people,” Hartsfield Aviation General Manager Angela Gittens told the Atlanta Constitution.

Come July, however, the homeless most likely will be “swept” from the airport as well. Although the airport is a public facility owned by the city of Atlanta, the city’s loitering ordinances prohibit people from occupying any public places if they’re not there to “do business.” Armed with these ordinances, police have been telling all of those homeless who can not produce a plane ticket to take the MARTA train out of Hartsfield (although they do not waive the $1.50 cost of the ride).

In addition to the $250 million airport renovation, another $32 million in city funds has gone to the Corporation for Olympic Development in Atlanta (CODA) for streetscapes, park improvements, and public art. Those parts of CODA’s $220 million plan for the Olympic Ring neighborhoods aimed more directly at economic redevelopment were left unfinanced. Along with the city, the state of Georgia has spent $235.4 million on the Olympics and the federal government has spent $248.3 million, bringing the total amount of public funds directly involved in the Games to more than $810 million.

While homeless advocates such as Cioffi and Davis tend to wage most of their battles over the use of public funds within the shrinking city of Atlanta, Steve Suitts, former executive director of the Southern Regional Council, warns against looking no farther than City Hall and downtown business associations to “find the enemy.” Such an approach, Suitts says, ignores both the limited options available to a financially-strapped municipality and the suburbanization of the Atlanta metropolitan area that has left the residents inside the city limits city to deal with a disproportionate amount of poverty.

“The irony,” maintains Suitts, “is that the people at City Hall are probably the most sympathetic of all. They’re the only ones among all the metropolitan region’s elected officials who are willing to do anything for the homeless. They’re the only ones who are ever asked to do anything, and they’re the only ones who are criticized for not doing enough. Is it only the city of Atlanta’s responsibility because homeless people collect themselves in the most numbers in the central city? Does that mean that folks who run away to the suburbs of Gwinnett and Cobb counties shouldn’t have to address these issues?

“Assuming the territory of responsibility is only where the homeless happen to find themselves camping out at night,” Suitts continues, “is an awfully limited notion of responsibility and does not respect in any way the metro-

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politan economic situation which has caused this situation.”

Regarding the Olympics in particular, Suitts also points out that getting the Games to Atlanta was not primarily a project of City Hall but rather of Billy Payne, a real estate lawyer who was not a core member of the city’s power structure but who did have the crucial support of Andrew Young–former US Ambassador to the United Nations, former mayor of Atlanta, and former lieutenant to Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Billy Payne wasn’t selected by either City Hall, by the state government, by the downtown business leadership, or by the international corporation leadership here,” Suitts notes. “No one truly foresaw that Billy Payne, with the help of Andy Young and others, would, in fact, succeed, so ACOG wasn’t mounted by anybody’s coalition. Everybody gave it their approval but nobody really thought seriously enough of it that they invested anything substantial in the beginning or got concessions or terms by which things would run afterwards. Nobody controlled Payne’s group before Atlanta got the opportunity of hosting the Olympics and therefore ACOG has had the opportunity of creating new relationships for the purposes of running the Games.”

Always Constructing the Image

When ACOG was created in January of 1991 by an agreement signed between Billy Payne and then-Mayor Maynard Jackson, Payne was appointed as the new body’s president and chief executive officer. He proceeded to assemble around him an upper-management cohort of people similar to himself–white, male, middle-aged lawyers and businessmen. As Clark Atlanta University’s Bob Holmes notes, “Among the policy makers of ACOG, in the inner circle of about ten folks, you’ve only got one African-American: Shirley Franklin, who was appointed in 1993 as ACOG’s chief senior policy advisor and who was Andrew Young’s former chief of staff. On the next level, you’ve also got only one African-American: Morris Dillard, who’s the director of transportation and security.”

A state representative and the director of Clark Atlanta University’s Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy, Bob Holmes has co-authored a 1995 study entitled “The 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics and Their Impact on African Americans,” which analyzes ACOG’s employment patterns, among other issues. In the study, Holmes notes that if you look at all of ACOG’s employees and not just those of upper management, the organization was “doing a good job” in hiring African Americans up until 1993, when more than one-third of ACOG’s employees were African-American. By the end of 1994, however, the relative percentage of blacks had slipped to 26.4 percent, and Holmes said he intends to see if this downward trend continued in a follow-up study which will published after the Olympics.

Holmes also notes that ACOG has had a good track record in awarding contracts for merchandise and services to minority-owned business. Of ACOG’s total purchases of $114.23 million in 1994, $38 million, or thirty three percent, went to female- or minority-owned firms, with $35.20 million or 30.8 percent going to black businesses. ACOG had not, however, been collecting information from the contractors and vendors to see whether they have been in compliance with the Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action plan. Holmes says he will also have to wait until after the Olympics to collect this information.

For the most part, however, Olympic contracts and

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benefits will be enjoyed by a relatively affluent minority, and the “economically underprivileged majority” will get nothing at best, and see their situation decline at worst, Holmes says. “I don’t see the lives of the poorest in the African American community being improved at all,” he says. “There are major social and economic issues that have just not been addressed by public officials, and I hope the media will examine this and does not just focus on the glitz and glamour.”

Bob Holmes, too, decries the loss of thousands of public housing units without specific plans for adequate replacement and with an existing “five thousand plus” waiting list in the city. He also notes the apparent inability of residents in the Olympic Ring neighborhoods to get construction jobs on the projects disrupting their communities. Holmes says it is visibly obvious that very few local residents are getting construction jobs at the various sites. “This is just an impression, but you drive through the city, and I would say about eighty percent of those workers are Hispanic,” he says. “You know very few of those people are from the surrounding neighborhoods, because those neighborhoods are predominantly black.” Most of metro-Atlanta’s estimated Hispanic population of 197,300 is concentrated in the suburban counties of (in descending order of numbers) DeKalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, Fulton, and Clayton.

Tom Fisher, district director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, could not confirm Holmes’ eighty percent estimate, but he says contractors are certainly employing “a lot” of Hispanic workers. A year ago, Fisher and the INS apprehended thirty-seven, predominantly Hispanic, workers–the majority of whom were from Mexico–being employed illegally to work on the Olympic Village construction site. In addition, the INS arrested forty (also predominantly Hispanic) immigrants working illegally on the Martin Luther King Historic Site, which is being redeveloped for the Olympics.

Since these busts a year ago, Fisher says the INS has taken into custody more than five-hundred illegal immigrants from “twenty to forty different countries” who were working on construction projects. Fisher estimates a quarter to a third of these projects directly involve Olympic-related construction, but adds “it’s hard to define” exactly what counts as Olympic-related construction. “The Olympics have given construction in general such a boost, in essence you could say almost everything is Olympic related,” he says. Fisher believes lower wages motivate construction companies to hire illegal immigrants. “The employers use this rhetoric that these are jobs Americans wouldn’t take because they’re only paying six or seven dollars an hour. But, in my opinion, these are ten dollar per hour jobs they rolled down to seven bucks.”

Bonnie Berry Wilder, an attorney who represents injured workers, says Hispanics, whether employed legally or illegally, get paid less primarily because they are not unionized. “In eight years of representing Hispanics in workman’s comp, I have only had one client who was union member,” Wilder says. “I don’t know if they’ve been purposefully excluded or they just don’t know the

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system or process well enough to know how to go about getting into the union. My solution to foreign workers driving down wages would be to open up the union and get out and recruit some of these people.”

Low wages are not the only reason Wilder says construction contractors prefer to hire Hispanic workers, many of whom she says are skilled craftsmen. The many employers she has talked with say they “love to hire them because they work very hard, they don’t complain, and they don’t demand overtime.”

Employers also tend to take advantage of those Hispanic workers who do not know English or who are not familiar with their rights as workers. Particularly with illegal immigrants, contractors often lie to those workers who get hurt on the job to avoid having to report the injury (and hence the illegal employment) to the insurance companies.

The Atlanta Labor Council (ALC) has not had the resources to precisely monitor the number of non-unionized Hispanic workers or the number of labor pool workers being employed on Olympic-related projects. Each project can have up to fifty private contractors hiring their own employees, making careful documentation extremely difficult. Information could be collected on the Olympic stadium construction, however, because it was the only venue on which all of the work was covered under a union agreement governing wages and benefits. Constituting about half of all Olympic construction, the work on the Olympic stadium has been “eighty percent-plus union” and forty percent African American, according to ALC president Stewart Acuff.

In contrast, the construction of the Olympic Village–managed and largely financed by the Board of Regents of the State of Georgia–has been marred by an “atrocious labor policy,” Acuff says. At the Village, private contractors have hired non-unionized Hispanic workers “off the streets” or have out-sourced to temporary services, resulting in a work-force which is “eighty-five per-cent non-union,” according to Orlando Jones, representative of Carpenters Local 225.

Many Atlantas, Many Souths

The prevalence of unorganized Hispanic workers in the anti-union environment of the New South is a story unlikely to be featured in media portrayals of a harmonious “tradition.” Georgia State University historian Cliff Kuhn says journalists doing feature articles on “Atlanta” and “the South” can avoid flattening out such complexity if they learn one important point: “There is no monolithic South. There are a diversity of Souths. And, in fact, the greatest tension in the Atlanta region right now is the tension between traditional and modern forces. It’s a fast growing area of the country, and you have these tremendously disparate ways of doing things side by side. In the far-out Atlanta suburbs, you have chicken houses, next door to defense plants, next door to bulls raised by investment bankers, next door to new Asian immigrants.”

If media visitors choose to address the differences or tensions between various populations of the South at all, they will most likely do so by referring to the civil rights movement. Here Kuhn worries that the movement will be sanitized and oversimplified into the globally recognizable symbol of Martin Luther King. A historian who has worked on many public history projects, including an oral history of Atlanta, Kuhn is particularly worried about not losing the “grassroots quality” of the movement.

“It’s important to conceive of the civil rights movement as going beyond the icons of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks,” Kuhn says. “The movement involved thousands of people and hundreds of communities all over the South. It involved grassroots organizing. We’ve had a King-centrism, which, without denying the very real contributions King made, has blinded us to the grass-roots quality of the movement. This King-centrism has also made us only think of King in terms of his movement activity as an apostle of non-violence, and not really look closely at King’s evolution of thought–toward his anti-war statements and his critique of the American economy.”

Another historian of Atlanta, Ron Bayor from Georgia Tech also worries that the history of race relations in Atlanta will be distorted in mass media presentations. The author of Race and the Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta, Bayor is concerned that the media will perpetuate the image of the city as a racially tolerant place that has succeeded because it has avoided the racial prejudice of the rest of the South. “I think the Chamber of Commerce vision and the vision that’s portrayed by ACOG is that Atlanta got the Olympics because it has this reputation of racial moderation,” Bayor says. “But in almost every sense of the word except for violence, Atlanta was as bad and as segregated as every other city in the South. Atlanta is really not unique at all, and race played a major factor in the shaping of the city.”

As in most cities, Bayor observes, the strategic use of urban renewal is one way race has played a role in physically shaping the city. City officials used the construction of highways, stadiums, civic centers, hotels, and office buildings to clears slums and remove blacks from certain sections surrounding the central business district. “The city didn’t just grow haphazardly, there were plans, there was money put in certain directions and not in others, and so we wound up with the city we have today. Certain parts of the city were politically available for black use, certain parts weren’t. We see a white part of

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the city in the northeast, we see a black part of the city in the southwest and the southeast. That was created through earlier efforts to control blacks’ residential patterns. It was created by the very careful placement of black public housing in certain areas and not in others. No black housing was ever placed in the white northeast section, for example. Those are the type of things that created a city later on that is segregated, not officially, but segregated none the less.”

Despite the reality of de facto segregation, Atlanta developed an image of a racially tolerant city–of a “city too busy to hate,” as Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield said in 1955–both through careful cultivation on the part of the political and business leaders of the city and by avoiding the outbursts of violence occurring in other Southern cities such as Birmingham and Little Rock. Admitting that the relative absence of violence was “certainly no small issue,” Bayor sees this absence resulting from a very well-organized black community and a white business community that was willing to form a political coalition with them, with “blacks as junior partners.” This coalition aimed to “work out disagreements peacefully and behind the scenes.”

Realizing that industries “ran away from Birmingham” and that Little Rock had “lost both population and industry after their 1957 fiasco of not admitting a few black children to their schools,” the white business community, Bayor says, wanted to “try to keep things cool racially to attract business.” Mayor Hartsfield–“an expert at public relations and getting the newspapers down here to see only what he wanted them to see”–heavily promoted the “image of a city that’s not trying to keep its black citizens down, that’s trying to be fair.”

“It was an image,” Bayor argues, “that was very cultivated, but it wasn’t the reality. The truth comes out in the 1960s because there are a lot of sit-in demonstrations here, there’s a lot of protest, indicating that much more has to be done in the city to reach any kind of equality. The really important aspects of the city, who controlled, who were the city department heads, who were r the people who made the decisions, that was kept in white hands, I would say up until Mayor Maynard Jackson comes in.”

Despite the ascendancy of a black mayor in the early 1970s, Bayor believes that the city s black political leaders have, for the most part, only been able to promote programs that help middle class blacks, such as affirmative action and the minority business enterprise program. They have been able to do very little for the black lower income groups in Atlanta, whose “quality of life in terms of economic well-being has not really improved.”

“It’s very difficult,” Bayor concludes, “to get anything done in this city that the economic elite does not approve of. The economics of Atlanta are still controlled by the whites. The banks are still white, the big corporations are still white. It’s difficult to be a mayor in the city and buck the business community–to instead of building, let’s say, a Centennial Park or a civic center, to pour money into housing or more jobs for lower income people.”

Rick Beard, the executive director of the Atlanta History Center, reverses Bayor’s focus on Atlanta’s similarities with other Southern cities by emphasizing difference. “There’s not enough attention paid to the fact that Atlanta has always been different. It really isn’t of the Old South. The city wasn’t founded until 1837 and it was nothing, in terms of population, until the twentieth century. So the idea that you’re going to come here and drink mint juleps on the verandah just isn’t true. It’s always been a city that’s been commercial in intent. It’s always been a city that has been able to put the past behind it very quickly. The reason that Atlanta is the hub-city of the South is that it got over the Civil War and was willing to take Yankee dollars.

“Atlanta does not honor its history,” Beard continues. “It is so constantly remaking, reshaping, and redefining itself, that I think it’s really hard for anything, including the Olympics, to have a lasting impact. Although the Olympics will be like a massive photo-op for Atlanta’s businesses, I don’t think the Games will have any lasting impact on the fabric of the city or the people who live here. Atlanta will just move on to the next big thing, whatever that will be.”

Sidebar: Gainesville’s Country Club Venue

Preston Quesenberry

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 p. 15

Although the Centennial Olympic Games will be the most compact in history, with competition venues for sixteen sports located within a 1.5-mile radius in downtown Atlanta called the Olympic Ring, almost half of the Olympic events will still be held well outside of Atlanta’s city limits throughout both Georgia and the South. Outlying venue cities include Columbus, Gainesville, Athens, and Savannah in Georgia, as well as Birmingham, Alabama; Miami, Florida; and the Ocoee River area in Tennessee.

These outlying cities are spending a combined eighteen million dollars in preparing Olympic-related projects, and questions about who is really benefiting from the use of public funds for the Olympic Games, and at whose expense, are therefore not limited to the city of Atlanta. One outlying city were the debates have been particularly heated is Gainesville, Georgia, where Olympic rowers will compete on Lake Lanier. Located about fifty-two miles northeast of Atlanta, the city of Gainesville is racially segregated by Highway 129, know as Jesse Jewel Parkway. The city’s African American community, which lives southeast of the dividing line in an area called Newtown, is currently up in arms about what it considers a gross misuse of desperately needed community development funds for Olympic-related projects. “The city of Gainesville,” says Rose Johnson, program director of the Georgia Project of the Center for Democratic Renewal, “for all practical purposes, is giving a higher-level and better treatment to people who are coming in from the international community than it has to people of color who actually live in that community.”

The city council of Gainesville has decided to use $2.4 million of state and federal development fund dollars to renovate the exclusive, private Chattahoochee Country Club, where the city’s business leaders will entertain Olympic visitors. Part of the funds will also go to building a rowing venue on Lake Lanier. The Newtown Florist Club, a organization formed more than forty year ago to care for Newtown’s sick but which has since tackled many issues of racial justice, has issued a proclamation to the city council denouncing the decision. The president of the Newtown Florist Club, Faye Bush, says this “fervent objection has a history and a context” that makes these particular uses of such funds particularly “unconscionable.”

For one Newtown has historically been the victim of what Bush calls “environmental racism.” The area, she says, has been called the city’s “industrial fallout zone” because of the numerous industrial developments that immediately envelop the African American communities. The resultant pollution in the area has been linked to unusually hight incidences of Lupus and cancer. Newtown residents have repeatedly asked the city council to help remedy this situation and have submitted proposals for redevelopment, but the council has so far refused to carry out any of these proposals, using “lack of funds” as the “most frequent excuse for inaction,” Bush says. “Just try to imagine our shock and outrage to discover that there are $2.5 million of state and federal ‘development funds’ dollars sitting in an account only to be doled out to the private country club and an Olympic venue!” Bush wrote in a memo addressed to the city council. “It is all but impossible to recall a time when African Americans have been admitted, much less welcomed, at a private country club! This particular use of public funds is obviously not for us to enjoy.”

The construction of a rowing venue was another “slap in the face,” Bush says, because the African American community has been trying in vain for years to get its own recreational facilities renovated. Rose Johnson agrees: “The city of Gainesville for the last twenty-five years has repeatedly insisted that there was no money for the renovation or the building of recreational facilities on Gainesville’s south side. Gainesville has fourteen or fifteen recreation sites. The ones that are in the worst shape and that will cost the most to repair are the ones in the black community, and except for the ones on the south side, Gainesville has top notch recreational facilities.”

Adding to the insult, the community development funds the city is using at the country club and the rowing venue in the north side came from model cities-urban renewal projects in the south side, Johnson says. Land in the south side was purchased, cleared, and sold, and the money from the sale went into the community development fund, she said. Bush says all of the black businesses were located in the area of the community that was cleared during the 1960s. “Because they were all wiped out during urban renewal, now we don’t have any black businesses,” Bush said. “So I don’t see how black folks can benefit from the Olympics.”–P. Q.

Preston Quesenberry is a graduate student in the Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University.

Assessing the Olympic Legacy

By Charles Rutheiser

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 pp. 16-19

Compared to the massive displacements that accompanied the Olympics in Seoul (1988) and Barcelona (1992) , the demolitions and removals occasioned by the 1996 Centennial Games in Atlanta are relatively minor. For example, several hundred thousand people were displaced by the Korean government’s efforts to make its capital a showplace for its new-found economic prosperity. Barcelona, too, utilized the occasion to relocate large numbers of its poor, although it did so as part of a comprehensive vision that included building a twenty-first-century urban infrastructure for itself. In the case of Atlanta, a good deal of damage has already been inflicted by three decades of renewal, redevelopment, and revitalization, although the fundamental unevenness of these processes has often been obscured by the metropolitan area’s fervid, long-lasting boom and the manifold labors of myriad imagineers.

What is highly ironic, given the course of subsequent events, is that Atlanta got the Games, in part, on the basis of what the AOCG and city leaders liked to call its peerless modern infrastructure. By this they referred not to the city’s roads, sewers, and viaducts–which actually proved in need of approximately a billion dollars in repairs–but such things as the MARTA rail system, Hartsfield International Airport, the Georgia Dome/World Congress Center complex, and the most extensive fiber-optic network in the world. Aside from the $150 million realized from the bond issue, which probably would have not been passed without the occasion of the Olympics to provide the motive force, most of the monies expended on infrastructure improvement will be spent to provide the World Congress Center with a new parking deck and International Plaza ($30 million) and the airport with a flashy new $300-plus-million postmodern ambience. The State Assembly declined, however, to provide the necessary 10 percent of expenses (the federal government would have provided the rest) to build a central multimodal station for a heavy rail system that would have ameliorated the metro area’s unwholesome addiction to the automobile. Instead of an integrated commuter rail network, Atlanta’s Olympic transportation legacy (aside from seeing if MARTA can work beyond its designed capacity for three weeks) will be the neo-Orwellian Advanced Transportation Management System and high-occupancy vehicle lanes for the expressways within the Perimeter.

While neighborhood revitalization will be limited to some showpiece developments in the vicinity of the stadium such as Summerhill’s Greenlea Commons North and Mechanicsville’s Street of Dreams (another pod of thirty upscale townhomes), the material legacy of the Games will consist of the venues, the Centennial Olympic Park, and the articulated network of pacified corridors and green spaces wrought by CODA, along with the controversial redevelopment of the Martin Luther King Historic Site. The Atlanta University Center will get three new athletic venues, while Georgia Tech gets a spanking new Natation Center and several hundred new dorm rooms. Georgia State University gets an improved gym, as well as the Techwood Olympic Villages to utilize as dormitories. Unfortunately three of the dorm buildings were constructed with defective foundations and are settling at an accelerated rate (over nine inches within the first year) . The University System of Georgia–and, by extension, state taxpayers–will be liable for dealing with these “minor” problems. Ted Turner’s Atlanta Braves are, however, the greatest beneficiary of Olympic largesse, receiving a new stadium with all the trimmings, and sticking Fulton County taxpayers with a bill that they had little say in negotiating. Indeed, it is quite likely that the latter will be ultimately responsible for the cost of converting the Olympic Stadium into a baseball facility and demolishing the existing Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

The Olympic/Braves stadium, along with non-Olympic plans for the new Hawks arena to be built on the bones of the existing Omni Coliseum, provide good examples of both Atlanta’s lingering fascination/compulsion for not-so-creative destruction (a condition with its origin in General William Tecumseh Sherman being “a little careless with fire”) and the accelerated dynamic obsoles-

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cence of the built environment in our contemporary era. While the market-driven urban landscape has always been by nature “restless,” the increasingly frequent proclivity for building demolition into the construction plans for large civic structure verges on hyperactivity. Despite all the talk of the Olympic’s material legacy, many of the venues are, in fact, temporary constructions. In addition to the northern third of the Olympic Stadium, the rowing venue at Lake Lanier and the velodrome and the archery facilities at Stone Mountain will disappear after the Games, along with the water polo pool at Georgia Tech’s Natation Center. Almost a quarter of a million bleacher seats will be erected and dismantled (including the 52,000 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium), along with one million square feet of tent space and twenty-four miles of fencing. Indeed, the 1996 Olympics will be the most transient ever, leading one observer to refer to them as “the Disposable Games.” Without end-users, such as the State of Georgia and local governments, agreeing to assume the cost of maintaining these facilities after the Olympics, it was cheaper for ACOG to build ephemeral venues that only give the appearance of permanence.

The financial legacy of the Games is its most complex and elusive to pin down. The latest estimate of the Olympics’ impact on the Georgian economy amounts to $5.1 billion between 1990 and 1996, with most of that accruing in the Atlanta area, as well as some 80,000 jobs. The $5.1-billion figure includes everything from ACOG’s expenditures to those of the various governmental agencies to the estimated $900 a day that the average family of four will spend to attend the Games. Where that money will go and how much of it will affect the run of the mill Atlantan is unclear. Certain segments stand to benefit, and already have benefited, more than others. The construction industry, for example, has received an enormous boost from Olympic-related building, although its extensive use of labor pools limits its positive impact on construction unions. In addition, the Olympic construction boom has dramatically raised the price of materials in the metro area, which have been passed on to the consumer in a multitude of ways. This “invisible add-on,” however, is nothing compared to the anticipated rise in the cost of living, if restaurateurs and other retailers jack up their prices to fleece the Olympic hordes, as is widely expected. Property owners in or near the Olympic Ring stand to profit considerably during the Games from Olympic-related rentals, but that picture is nowhere near as rosy in the post-Olympic future, as millions of square feet of office and retail space will be dumped back on the market.

Despite the billions coursing through the local economy, “the questions” still remain. That is, will ACOG break even, and if it does not, will taxpayers be stuck with the tab? ACOG leaders have been insistently answering “Yes” to the first question, and emphatically “No!” to the second. Public concern deepened in February 1995, when ACOG announced it was delaying its final financial report until the fall. When the forecast was released in late October, ACOG chief operating officer A.D. Frazier pronounced it was “just about bulletproof.” That is, ACOG was assured of no worse a fate than breaking even. However, in early November 1995 this assertion was contested by the normally complacent watchdogs at MAOGA (Metropolitan Atlanta Olympic Games Authority), whose accountants noted that ACOG’s revenue projections were on the high side of ambitious, and could easily be penetrated by the armor-piercing rounds of economic reality. Given the controversy that has surrounded the issue from the start, however, it is extremely unlikely that taxpayers will be directly responsible for bailing out ACOG if the worst-case scenario does indeed occur. That dubious honor falls to NationsBank, which extended an Olympian line of credit to Payne and Company. Still, if the city and ACOG are unable to come to agreement about the latter’s reimbursement of the former for municipal services necessitated by the Games, such as police overtime, sanitation, etc. (as is possible given their intense disagreements over the city’s marketing program), Atlanta’s already overburdened taxpayers will ultimately be the ones to foot that particular bill.

ACOG has been reluctant to conclude an agreement on paying for city services, arguing that the tax windfall the city stands to reap more than offsets the cost of what the city will spend. Indeed, holding to the line that it has maintained since 1990, ACOG argues that it is really doing the city and people of Atlanta an enormous favor by staging the Olympics, indeed, that the Olympics are the best thing that ever happened in, and to, Atlanta. Although they like to emphasize the material aspects of the Olympic legacy, Billy Payne and A.D. Frazier are quick to emphasize that enhanced “image, prestige, and pride are the real residuals.” Payne even went as far as claiming that the Olympics will establish Atlanta “as one of the top cities in the world; right up there with the Parises, and the Tokyos, and the New Yorks, and the Moscows, and the like. We’re in for a quantum leap in terms of image and reputation.” Many other non-ACOG business leaders agree that the unprecedented publicity and media attention will inevitably result in increased tourism, investment, and business growth, especially from abroad. While it is by no means inevitable, such a scenario seems likely though if current development trends are any indication, much of the new investment and activity will take place out on the peripheries in Gwinnett, Cobb, north Fulton, and Buckhead rather than in the urban core. In addition, Payne and Co. seem to truly believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Approximately 15,000 journalists will be descending upon Atlanta in the summer of 1996, an unspecified percentage of whom will have the express purpose not of covering the Games, but of demonstrating how Atlanta is not really what it claims to be.

The aspect of the Olympic legacy that has received the least amount of public attention is easily among the most important. A crucial component of Atlanta’s success over the past two decades has been the development of a biracial civic-business partnership, which reached its apogee in the mayoralty of Andrew Young. The bestowal of the Olympics coincided with several independent developments that deconstructed the fabled coalition. The re-election of Maynard Jackson in November 1989, and his succession by a protege elected without either strong ties to the African-American grass-roots or the support of the business community, coupled with the intensifying perception of the city council as bloated and corrupt, divided and demeaned the public sector. Meanwhile, the absorption of major local corporate citizens by larger national concerns, and the siphoning away of the private sector’s sunk investment in the core to the new downtowns of the periphery increasingly fragmented “the” business community. Nonetheless, enough fragments of the latter have endured to constitute what former city councilman Jabari Simama and fellow investigative reporters from Atlanta’s free weekly Creative Loafing have called a “shadow government.” Though it is an ephemeral, nominally private corporation, the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games evolved as an organizational entity that drew heavily on personnel used to working with each other from the heyday of the 1980’s public private partnership. How these persons will be reintegrated into the governing coalition that emerges after 1996 remains to be seen, but the intense hostility that has emerged between city hall and ACOG in the course of the preparation does not bode well for an easy or early return to business as usual.

Indeed, if the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Centennial Olympic Park are any indication, we may well see the emergence of a new kind of urban regime in Atlanta, one in which the city is reduced to the status of junior player or partner, while the crucial decisions are made by a coalition of private business leaders and quasi-public state authorities. Just as decision-making has been privatized, or at the very least removed from public accountability, the park itself is exemplary of contemporary tendencies towards the privatization and spectacularization of public space. Sold to the people of Atlanta as a state-of-the-art open gathering place, the park, in its Olympic manifestation at least, is neither all that open nor public, nothing more than an ephemeral simulation of a public open space of an earlier age. The failure to address the problems of adjacent poor neighborhoods, public housing projects, and the homeless raises the prospect of the park becoming as empty and objectionable to the business community as the current “void” is, if not more so given the heightening of expectations. Then again, the lack of linkage between specific projects and the surrounding urban whole is a general failing of virtually all ongoing efforts at urban redevelopment in Atlanta and elsewhere.

But all of these consequences lie in the not-so-distant future, on the other side of the Olympics. As an all-too rainy winter gave way to an abbreviated spring and a premature onset of summer, the attention of most Atlantans was fixated on efforts to get the city ready to handle the expected two million visitors. From the fall of 1992, the banner of the Journal-Constitution bore a running countdown of the “days to go.” At key points around the city, digital clocks provided an even more precise accounting of the days. hours, minutes, and seconds until the Games begin. Within this frame, certain dates were imbued with an importance that seemingly owed more to numerology than public relations. With a hundred days to go and counting, local and national mediators alike were prompted to ask the highly-ritualized, but actually not-so-rhetorical question: “Will Atlanta be ready?” Despite ACOG’s and the city’s confident (and hardly surprising) assurances to the affirmative, the unfinished state of construction–not to mention the belated recognition of the true scale of the juggernaut to come–raised considerable doubts, even among the faithful. This most un-Atlanta-spirited anxiety provided an almost irresistibleirresistable [sic] motive force for endorsing whatever is necessary to get the city ready, regardless of the consequences. There was liter- ally no time for argument or serious rethinking of priorities. As in the case of their computer generated mascot, Whatizit?, Atlanta’s Olympic imagineers, faced with a product of dubious appeal, have focused their resources on a superficial makeover, leaving a complex and troubling set of problems to be “rediscovered” in 1997.

Charles Rutheiser is associate professor of anthropology at Georgia State University. This essay is excerpted from his book, Imagineering Atlanta; $18.95 paperback, from Verso Press, 180 Varick Street, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10014; or phone 1-800-233-4830.

Organized Labor and the Olympics

By Stewart Acuff

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 pp. 19-20

On September 18, 1992 the Olympic Flag arrived in Atlanta from Barcelona, Spain signifying the transfer of the Olympic Movement, the Olympic Spirit, and the Olympic Games.

The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games held a celebration at Underground Atlanta to greet the flag.

The Atlanta Labor Council held a ten thousand person march and demonstration to greet the flag.

The march and rally led by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Dr. Joseph Lowery was the largest and most-noticed event in a three year battle between the labor movement and its allies and the Olympic committee to make sure the work done for the Olympics was done without exploiting local workers or undermining local labor standards and wages.

Although the labor movement didn’t get everything it wanted, our campaign is a remarkable story of success resulting from a long-term strategy that combined direct action and political action. We are proud of a victory that almost every union in metro Atlanta contributed to.

The Olympic stadium was built under an agreement negotiated and signed between the building trades council and the contractor. Even the bricks in the stadium were made in a brick factory represented by the United Steelworkers.

All the communication work is being done by members of the Communication Workers of America.

Much of the printing is done by the Graphic Communication International Union.

Members of the building trades have been on all the construction projects controlled by the Olympic committee.

Members of the Amalgamated Transit Union have provided most of the Olympic transportation through our city’s mass transit system. When the Olympic committee announced that the temporary bus drivers would only make six dollars per hour, quiet negotiations upped the wage by

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fifty percent to nine dollars per hour.

Even most of the staging work–particularly on the opening and closing ceremonies–is being done by members of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees.

And since early 1994 I have served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.

Early negotiations with the Olympic committee were frustrating and unfruitful. Olympic committee leaders–with the exception of Andy Young committed to putting on the Olympics without public funds were determined to do the work as cheaply as possible.

We knew we didn’t want to fight unless we had to because we could easily be accused of being too self-serving or not thinking of the good of the community or opposing one of the world’s great international peacetime events and institutions. But we were equally aware that we had to be part of the process because a $1.6 billion infusion of work at substandard wages could pull down everyone’s wages, working conditions, and living standards. We were afraid that workers who never get close to the Olympics would suffer if the work was done without regard for the workers and their communities.

So, by the beginning of 1991 we were determined that the work done on the Olympics would be done at fair wages and benefits and where possible under union contracts.

After early discussion with ACOG proved unfruitful we began a political lobbying strategy we hoped would encourage ACOG to deal with us. Then Mayor Maynard Jackson agreed. He made numerous public and private statements that the Olympic work should be done with union labor. The City Council passed a resolution urging ACOG to ensure the work was done at fair wages with benefits and training by local workers and contractors. No effect.

We then turned to the community. We developed a relationship with the leaders and organizations representing the people in the community where the stadium was built. We agreed to call for the work to be clone union with ten percent of the jobs set aside for the people in the community. Longtime community leaders Columbus Ward, Duane Stewart, and Gene Ferguson proved to be critical allies. ACOG began to get interested in the issue of training and jobs for people in the community but not in union contracts or agreements.

Then after a year and a half of lobbying and meetings and coalition work we heard that the Olympic flag would come to Atlanta on September 18, 1992 and that there would be a huge celebration. We began a six-month planning process to disrupt the celebration, demonstrate our collective anger, and raise the stakes for ACOG. The planning ended on that Friday when every union construction job in Atlanta was shut down, when ACTWU closed one of their clothing plants so their members could march in solidarity, when ten thousand workers hit the streets in a march led by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Dr. Joseph Lowery that shut down downtown Atlanta, affirming in the most dramatic way the historic alliance between civil rights and organized labor.

The march got their attention. But they still weren’t ready to deal.

Two months later, at the end of November, community activist Duane Stewart, building trades leader Charlie Key, and I met in Charlie’s office. We put together a Christmas demand list and planned a small but very dramatic demonstration.

On December 22, eighty five construction workers and fifteen community activists physically took over ACOG’s headquarters forcing a meeting with Chief Operating Officer A.D. Frazier and holding the office for two hours. We got even more of their attention. But still no deal.

The following spring ACOG announced that the groundbreaking for the Olympic stadium would be held June 10. We said there wouldn’t be a groundbreaking without a union agreement. With our allies from the community we set up a tent city on the edge of this property five days before the announced time of the ceremony. I moved in with several community activists. We planned the demonstration that would take over the groundbreaking.

Then at 6:30 p.m. June 9, the building trades council signed an agreement with the contractor setting union wages and benefits and setting aside ten percent of the jobs for community residents.

Although the agreement covered about half of ACOG’s total construction, there was still a lot of work left. We weren’t done.

On July 22 the Atlanta Labor Council endorsed Bill Campbell for Mayor. Although Campbell was the underdog in the three-way contest, he was pro-union and very energetic. The labor movement threw everything we had into his race and I became a deputy campaign manager. Four months later he won with seventy three percent of the vote.

He came to the first labor council meeting after his inauguration–press in tow. He thanked the delegates for labor’s support, acknowledging that he wouldn’t be mayor if not for organized labor. Then with a dramatic flourish, announced his appointment of me as a representative of labor to the Board of Directors of ACOG.

We got their full attention.

Stewart Acuff is president of the Atlanta Labor Council.

Passing the Torch, Torching the Past

By Barry E. Lee

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 pp. 21-22

Known as many things since its founding in 1837–a city resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War to lead the South in commerce and industry, a city supposedly above the racial intolerance which has typified the United States, and a city poised to join the international metropolitanmetropolian [sic] ranks–Atlanta enjoys a reputation that is the cumulative handiwork of generations of local business moguls, newspaper publishers and editors, politicians, and civic boosters. One of the most extended and impressive public relations campaigns waged in this century of PR has constructed the climate that envelops the daily lives of so many greater Atlantans. With a shrinking population inside Atlanta’s city limits that is increasingly black and poor, the polishing of the metropolitan image is being taken over by movers and shakers who live in the affluent, predominantly white, suburbs to the north.

Atlanta’s advertisements for itself began in earnest in the wake of the torching given by General William T. Sherman’s troops during the Civil War. Henry Grady, part owner and managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution after 1880, set the tone of a New South intent upon the money-making potentials of reconciliation with the North. The symbol of this resurgence, the phoenix, remains attached to the city in a series of Olympic-year print and TV ads, or the iron grates of the newly rebuilt Woodruff Park.

It was the administration of Mayor William B. Hartsfield (1937-1940 and 1942-1961) that boosted Atlanta past other Deep South cities. In the wake of the 1946 Supreme Court decision declaring white primaries unconstitutional, Hartsfield combined a liberal rapprochement with such Atlanta black leaders as Grace Towns Hamilton, A. T. Walden, and Warren Cockran with a campaign for increased business investment and infrastructure improvement. By the 1950s Atlanta was the leading commercial and industrial city in the South.

By the 1960s, nearly one hundred years had been invested in grooming Atlanta’s image, but the agitation for social and political equality by African Americans threatened the luster. While cities like Birmingham, Montgomery and Jackson, Mississippi revealed themselves as havens of racial violence, Atlanta worked to camouflage its underlying tensions. This effort was personified in 1961 when Mayor Hartsfield reiterated the phrase he had coined, a phrase which had become the city’s manufactured hallmark for race relations. In announcing an end to the boycott of downtown businesses and lunch counters on March 7, 1961, Hartsfield concluded that the agreement proved once again that “This city is too busy to hate.” When the South was exploding with racial violence, a powerful biracial coalition of elites had formed for the explicit purpose of keeping the peace.

In 1970, the Journal-Constitution published a special Sunday supplement entitled “Amazing Atlanta, 1960-1970,” celebrating the “the psychology of success.” A year earlier, National Geographic had featured an essay “Atlanta, Pacesetter City of the South.” So grew the image of Atlanta as a city booming with economic growth, groomed by progressive leadership, and stabilized by social and racial harmony.

The African American leaders certainly held up their end of the bargain. According to Austin Ford, a local Episcopal priest and community activist at the time, “there was a triumvirate of blacks who ran things. It was Sam Williams, and Jesse Hill, and Leroy Johnson. You know, Martin Luther King, Jr., never had a SCLC chapter here during his lifetime. The establishment just was not going to have Atlanta disrupted if they could help it.”

Anyone living in Atlanta (luring the modern Civil Rights Movement knows that the city was racially polarized. This was particularly evident during the battle to desegregate the public schools. During the fifteen-year struggle, which officially ended in 1973 with drafting of a compromise agreement, African American students never achieved more than token desegregation of a few formerly all-white schools. By the time the desegregation suit was settled, white flight had rendered desegregation a moot point.

Urban renewal became a buzzword in the 1960s, and the new mayor elected in 1961, Ivan Allen, Jr., was determined to maintain Atlanta’s progressive profile. Allen used federal urban renewal dollars to “stop the spread of urban blight” by demolishing what was labeled dirty, filthy, substandard, overcrowded slums to make room for new development. During this period, more than 67,000 people were displaced from predominantly African American communities–such as Buttermilk Bottom and Summerhill–which were poor, yet stable, to make way for “civic improvements” better known as Interstate Connector (I 75/85), the Civic Center, and the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

Reflecting the city’s changed demographics, Maynard H. Jackson became Atlanta’s first African American mayor in 1973. He arrived as downtown began to fade as Atlanta’s center of commerce and trade. With the support of white business elites, Jackson pursued the construction of several new buildings–Peachtree Center, the Hyatt Regency, the Westin Peachtree Plaza, the Omni complex and the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC).

Peachtree Center, created by developer John Portman, was billed as the “Rockefeller Center South.” By the early 1980s, Atlanta boasted of great convention facilities, abundant hotel space, Southern hospitality, a first-rate airport, boundless shopping and good restaurants.

During the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Atlanta appeared clean and prosperous, thanks to a sweep of the homeless off downtown streets. While many large urban centers with African American mayors were crumbling, Atlanta seemed to thrive.

The world travels of Andrew Young, known as an absentee mayor during his tenure in office from 1982 to 1989 , paid off in 1991 when the city was named host for the 1996 Olympic Games. Young’s reputation with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) combined with the energy of former University of Georgia football player-turned-lawyer Billy Payne to advance Atlanta’s bid.

Given his involvement in the civil rights movement, his ties to the King family, and his international visibility, Young was the ideal spokesperson. Atlanta portrayed itself as the embodiment of civil rights and American justice.

As the Games begin and the city’s homeless are swept out of view, beneath the surface of what is now generations of image building, not only is the city’s infrastructure crumbling–with many bridges and sewer lines in need of repair and replacement–but unaddressed realities of class and racial division threaten sooner or later to collapse the happy scene.

Barry E. Lee is a graduate student in the Women’s Studies Institute at Georgia State University

Remembering Another Atlanta: Gate City

By Julian Bond

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 pp. 22-24

“South–that part of the United States south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line, the Ohio River, and the southern boundaries of Missouri and Kansas.” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, Second Edition, G. & C. Merriam Co., 1956).

My forty-year-old dictionary gives this equally ancient definition–stark and geographical, it barely describes the South, its cultures and peoples, its peculiarities, the distinctions that made it different from the rest of the nation.

Over time, this distinctiveness has given way to the sameness that afflicts all of America–similar fast foods sold everywhere, dialects and accents disappearing, once-regional musics now enjoyed by all, and the history of racial oppression no longer a territorial taint.

But the South I returned to almost forty years ago, as a college freshman in 1957, had much to commend it. My family had lived for the first five years of my life in rural Georgia on a college campus where my father was president; as a child of the leading figure in that small world, I harbor pleasant childhood memories–a supportive cast of students, college professors and townspeople, lush orchards of juicy peaches, bright cotton fields and warm sunshine.

Now, after twelve years north of Mason’s and Dixon’s line, we were coming back.

The South we came back to had its attractions, and I was old enough to appreciate them. It was warmer than the North I left behind, and the people seemed warmer, too–their accents, white and black, were soft and pleasant, unlike the clipped speech of rural Pennsylvania; their words more welcoming because of their slowness; their smiles more eagerly produced and, seemingly, more sincerely meant.

My grade and high school years had been spent in rural Pennsylvania, and my new classmates at Morehouse College were quick to spot my Northernness–my non-Southernness.

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My speech and clothing were giveaways. Coca-Cola was “pop” to them; movies were the “show.” Policemen were “po-licemen.”

No one wore the “highwater” trousers that I did.

They also quickly spotted my unfamiliarity with what made the South utterly different then from the rest of America, if you were black. They knew the racial etiquette that governed relations between the races, and while never yielding to it, felt more comfortable than I did navigating downtown Atlanta.

That whites held absolute power over Southern blacks was a given to them. It had only been a distant truth to me. That any white person could strike or kill a black person without fear of retribution became gospel in Atlanta, more real than the distant preachments of black newspapers that had come into my Pennsylvania home. Once we relocated to Atlanta, the far-away horrors they reported took on substance and encouraged me to spinelessly leave the ordinary task of buying a suit for college to my mother–surely not even the worst Klansman would dare molest her, and her cowardly son could remain at home, safe from harm.

Atlanta was then short years away from declaring itself the “City Too Busy To Hate,” its Babbitt-like explanation for the absence of violent racial conflict over the integration of a handful of black children into formerly all-white schools. It was too busy making money. It had long considered itself exceptional among Southern towns–the South had few real cities then. With Birmingham as a brutally severe example of what Atlanta was not, the city’s business community touted its airport, its many regional offices of national firms, and its benign race relations as reasons why Atlanta was different, the city never too busy to hype.

And it was.

At home, on the Morehouse College campus, and in the business blocks that boasted more wealthy black individuals than any other city, I was surrounded by women and men who gave the lie to my skewed picture of the South.

On Hunter Street–renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard today–and on Auburn Avenue, black businesses abounded. A bank, insurance companies, a savings and loan, real estate companies, the country’s only daily black newspaper and only black-owned radio station, gas stations–these and other, more usual enterprises made Atlanta Booker T. Washington’s dream writ large.

(That a black man owning a gas station was remarkable demonstrates how sharply race limited black opportunity and made the smallest, most ordinary accomplishment a triumph for the whole race.)

Atlanta’s sizeable black middle class–public school teachers and administrators, professors and administrators from the four black colleges, its graduate school and collection of theological schools, doctors, dentists and lawyers, even the nation’s first black Certified Public Accountant–made Atlanta special.

Most lived on the sprawling West Side. Unlike northern ghettoes, however gilded, where blacks inherited homes whites had abandoned, many of Atlanta’s middle-class blacks lived in homes built by black contractors with black labor, sold by black realtors. And what homes!

Our out-of-town visitors in the late fifties didn’t want to see downtown and couldn’t see the present-day city’s most visited site, the Martin Luther King Center For Nonviolent Social Change; in the late 1950s, King still pastored Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. In the late fifties and early sixties, these visitors wanted to see the black homes on the West Side, with their swimming pools and multi-car garages.

Black Atlanta was a self-contained world. Unable to join white professional groups like the Atlanta Bar Association, blacks named their organizations the Gate City Teachers Association or Gate City Bar Association. If you lived in “The Gate City,” you could travel through life from birth to death without having to see anyone who lived in “Atlanta.”

Gate City could be wonderful. It had joys that made it a college student’s delight. Sweet Auburn Avenue’s nightclubs–the Auburn Avenue Casino, the Royal Peacock–presented the best in entertainment. Restaurants like Frazier’s Cafe Society and Paschal’s served the best in food.

Gate City was what sociologist Aldon Morris calls a “protest community.” It was dotted with organizations and institutions that kept alive a tradition of challenge and resistance. Walking down Auburn Avenue or Hunter Street, you could see the man or woman who had mounted

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a fight against racial restrictions. It had living, breathing heroes and heroines.

From this environment Atlanta’s sit-in movement was born in 1960; Lonnie King, Jr., and Joseph Pierce, fellow students at Morehouse College, approached me in early February at an off-campus hangout, Yates and Milton’s Drug Store, to suggest we imitate a sit-in protest four North Carolina A T students had begun in Greensboro a few days before. With a how-to description of the Greensboro sit-ins printed in the Atlanta Daily World as our guide, we organized students from Clark, Morris Brown, and Spelman colleges, Atlanta University and the Interdenominational Theological Seminary, and by mid-March launched sit-ins at segregated downtown restaurants.

We knew we had borrowed inspiration and organization from the Greensboro sit-ins, but had little notion that we were building on a foundation others in Gate City had established before us. I knew my grandfather, James Bond, had been arrested in Atlanta in the early 1900s for “moving onto a white street,” but, like my comrades, had little knowledge of Gate City’s rich history of protest and rebellion that predated our 1960s action.

Daily college assemblies brought us the major black figures of the clay. We were introduced early on to the larger, current world outside the campus, but had little knowledge of the rich tradition on which we would build.

We did not know that the Atlanta NAACP, inspired by Morehouse College’s first lady, Eugenia Burns Hope, had established six-week citizenship classes to teach potential voters in 1933. We did not know that young Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. had led a 1935 march on City Hall to demand voting rights. We did know that our college campus was surrounded by slums, and those crowded projects and sloping shacks were nesting places for crimes and despair. But that world was alien to most of us then, as it is foreign to too many Atlantans today.

Our efforts were supported by many of the elders who had paved our way; by the middle 1960s, spurred by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Atlanta had become an “open city.” Racial barriers fell, and the black electorate that had moderated the city’s earlier politics became supreme.

Yesterday’s Atlanta–a mean milieu, tainted by white supremacy, rife with unfairness and inequality despite neonationalist utopian fantasies that recall a united, nurturing community–hopefully can never exist again.

Atlanta today is both product and prisoner of its past. In Race and The Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta, Georgia Tech history professor Ronald H. Bayor explains in detail how race shaped the city’s physical development from the Civil War through the 1980s.1

His sober study is a warning to today’s visitors, who, dazzled by skyscrapers and stadiums celebrating a succession of black mayors and enumerating the wealth of the city’s sepia millionaires, cannot see the serious problems these monuments obscure.

He writes about the history of race relations in America’s cities and its effect on Atlanta:

This legacy remains very evident in present day Atlanta. Politics, the school system, neighborhood development, highways and roads, traffic patterns, public housing placement, city service delivery and amenities, the transportation network, and employment still show signs of its impact. Racial issues, now increasingly combined with class factors, still strongly influence policy. One recent example is the dispute arising out of Olympic site development in neighborhoods that were urban renewal victims decades earlier. The mistrust of city government generated years ago has carried into present discussion of housing removal and resident relocation, even though city officials are now black.2

Gate City and Atlanta are still two different places. Atlanta has the largest percentage of poor people living in public housing of any American city except Newark, New Jersey. In spite of the electoral accomplishments of some and the enrichment of a few, most black Atlantans remain untouched by the latest in a series of New Souths.

Gate City is still barely there. Walk down Auburn Avenue. Drive out to Collier Heights. Stroll across the Morehouse Campus. Read the World or the Inquirer or the Voice. Eat at Paschal’s.

Today’s visitor ought to remember this past, while rejecting any attempt at resurrecting yesterday’s mythic organic community, where everyone had–and knew–their place. That Gate City is better left in memory. No fond nostalgia for simpler and better worlds calls for its rebirth.

Gate City and Atlanta remind us not of what we’ve lost–a wholly imagined and false romantic remembrance of a world where family values triumphed in a classless community upon which whites never intruded. That world never was. It cannot–should not–be renewed.

Instead, they remind us of how false the victories we thought we had won really were, of how little we may have actually gained.

Julian Bond is a Distinguished Professor In Residence at American University and a History Professor at the University of Virginia. He lived in Atlanta from 1957 to 1987.

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.

A Modest Remedy

Reviewed by Ellen Spears

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 pp. 27-29

In Defense of Affirmative Action, by Barbara R. Bergmann (New Republic/Basic Books, 1996, 213 pages).

“Before we gave up on integration, we should have tried it,” wrote Jack E. White in “Why We Need to Raise Hell,” part of Time’s April 29 cover story on the death of school integration. The same must be said about affirmative action–we should have tried it.

In her straightforward book, In Defense of Affirmative Action, American University economist Barbara Bergmann makes the case for this modest remedy to centuries of white supremacy in the U.S., documenting the nation’s reluctant use of affirmative action and the unlikelihood of achieving fairness without it.

While surveys indicate that most white Americans

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see racial discrimination against black Americans today as comparatively minimal, an artifact of the past, Bergmann provides evidence that workplace “segregation by race and sex continues to be the rule rather than the exception.” For example, in a 1989 survey of workers in North Carolina, researchers found 84.7 percent of managers and 86.5 percent of supervisors work only with people of their own sex; 91.5 percent of managers and 86.4 percent of supervisors work only with their own race.

In the years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, although implementation of affirmative action programs was modest and halting, some progress towards equity was recorded. Black men’s wages moved from 69 percent of white men’s wages in 1967, to 79 percent in 1976, but have since relatively declined. Though the inflation- corrected wages of white men have been sliding since the mid-1970s, white men retain the superior position. Wages of black women have improved from 1967 to the present, but have not kept pace with white women. In 1995 white women’s wages were 73 percent and black women’s wages were 63 percent of white men’s wages. Even when statistically adjusted for nondiscriminatory factors, the gap remains.

Carefully argued, backed up by useful data, and enriched by her own research, the resource Bergmann offers adds to the arsenal of any defender of affirmative action. The book charts the sorry performance of selected large U.S. corporations in hiring women and African Americans. Bergmann also takes to task the poor oversight record of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), where a staff of 918 supervises nondiscrimination in 150,000 workplaces with federal contracts which employ one-fourth of the U.S. workforce. The OFCCP wields more power than the primary other government agency charged with examining equal opportunity, the EEOC, which is limited to responding to complaints, only a tiny portion of which are brought to trial each year. Yet, the OFCCP enforcement effort has been understaffed, is poorly managed, lacks vigor, and has few effective ways of encouraging compliance, writes Bergmann. The list of forty-one firms barred from receiving federal contracts since 1972 includes only four major companies–Prudential Insurance, Firestone, Uniroyal, and Timkin Roller Bearing. All four were debarred during the Carter administration, and none longer than three months. And, debarment virtually ceased during the Reagan-Bush years, she points out.

Despite the failure to seriously implement remedial measures and a twenty-year campaign to malign affirmative action by tagging it to quotas and preferences, she finds some good news. In her own research reported in the book, Bergmann finds that only 11 percent of those responding to a scenario about race segregation want no remedy to be drawn. Remedial actions that receive broad support include exhortations to personnel managers to consider blacks (89 percent support) and women (84 percent support) and recruit more black applicants (69 percent agree) and women applicants (52 percent agree). But when asked if personnel managers ought to “try to fill at least 10 percent of the vacancies with women and blacks who have been judged competent,” the support drops to 34 percent of respondents for women applicants and 32 percent for black applicants. Of course, majority support was not the criterion when affirmative action measures were first mandated; only acquiescence was required.

Bergmann picks apart the whole range of anti-affirmative action arguments. She attempts to dismantle the contentions of those who never supported affirmative action and conservative black spokespeople, a la Clarence Thomas, who claim that affirmative action should be discontinued as demeaning to its intended beneficiaries. In her research among black students, “By a majority of 64 percent to 12 percent, the students thought that affirmative action did more good than harm; 24 percent said they believed it made no difference. However, 82 percent thought that its abolition would make it harder for African Americans to get jobs.”

In addition, she argues, precious few alternatives have been offered to affirmative action–and each has limitations: help to the disadvantaged, enforcing the laws against discrimination, education and training, testing, and prayer. Bergmann tackles head-on the now fashionable argument that class-based programs are a fairer substitute for race- or gender-based programs.

While polling suggests the class-based remedies are more palatable, especially to white Americans, the same forces that oppose affirmative action programs are out gunning for the class-based remedies as well. A Congress that has a vindictive approach to aid to families, is hostile to financial aid to schools and students, would like to reduce medicaid and social security, and has only grudgingly passed a meager election-year increase in the mini-

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mum wage, can hardly be counted on to vigorously pursue aid to the disadvantaged, or other meaningful alternatives. Besides, as Bergmann and others have pointed out, though such programs are very much needed to cure poverty, they will not, by themselves, end discrimination. That takes a targeted remedy.

Affirmative action is not among the top ten issues that concern U.S. voters, but as it provides a sharp divide between pivotal Democratic and Republican voters, there is every likelihood that it will be used as a wedge in the 1996 elections. Polls suggest that only a minority want to outlaw it. The Feminist Majority Foundation asked voters in 1995 about the California “Civil Rights” Initiative which will be on the November ballot and reads: “The state will not use race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin as a criterion for either discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group in the operation of the State’s system of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” The results showed 82 percent in support of the deceptive language, which would end affirmative action in that state. Yet, when asked if they wanted to abolish affirmative action, only 29 percent agreed.

In closing, Bergmann comes back to an additional bit of hope that we have to build on: “a majority of Americans do want to live in a country that is fair.”

Bergmann has not limited her advocacy to the book. She is touring the country debating Terry Eastland, author of Ending Affirmative Action: The Case for Colorblind Justice. Anyone who cares about ending racial inequity ought to have Bergmann’s facts and arguments at the ready–and join her in the debate.

Ellen Spears is managing editor of Southern Changes. She is also working on a research project at the Southern Regional Council on attitudes toward remedies to racial inequity.

Tilling the Ground for Change

Reviewed by Matthew Lassiter

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996

Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era, by Patricia Sullivan (University of North Carolina Press, 1996, 335 pages).

The travails of Southern liberals and radicals during the 1930s and 1940s have recently moved to the center of pre-Brown era Southern and civil rights history as scholars continue to probe beneath the surface of white supremacy in the so-called Solid South. Following closely on the heels of Speak Now Against the Day, John Egerton’s extensive chronicle of dissenting Southerners, Patricia Sullivan’s welcome new book examines the changes brought to the South by the New Deal and World War II. Through the perspectives of Southern-born New Deal policymakers, indigenous voting rights activists, and especially the labor-liberals in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), Sullivan portrays the rise and fall of a progressive alternative to the white supremacist South: “days of hope” during which a New Deal-inspired biracial movement for economic and social justice emerged as a challenge to the region’s reactionary politicians. The repercussions of this effort shaped national as well as regional politics; in the decade between 1938 and 1948, Sullivan argues, the fate of the labor organization drives and voting rights campaigns of the South largely determined the future of New Deal liberalism and the Democratic Party, and the commitment of Democratic policymakers in Washington substantially influenced the fate of Southern progressivism.

The harsh realities of the Great Depression weakened the South’s traditional political opposition to federal intervention, and the events of 1938 in particular “opened the way for a new political realignment in the South” (p.5), ushering in a pivotal decade of extraordinary fluidity in Southern politics. Southern New Dealers drew up the Report on the Economic Conditions of the South, which labeled the region the “nation’s number one economic problem”; Roosevelt traveled to the deep South to campaign against recalcitrant New Deal opponents from his own party; the NACCP won its first significant legal victory against educational segregation in the Gaines v. Missouri law school case; the CIO escalated its push to organize black and white Southern workers; and an eclectic group of Southerners organized the SCHW, with repeal of the poll tax at the top of the new organization’s agenda.

Sullivan disagrees with many scholars who have focused on how political constraints and policy compromises resulted in an essentially conservative thrust for the New Deal. Despite a caveat that many New Deal policies reinforced racial discrimination, she paints the era as a time when, across the country, “there was a deep, abiding awareness that a sea change in American politics was under way” (p.24). It would have been helpful if this thesis were better qualified; Days of Hope leaves the impression that racial egalitarians and labor sympathizers had more power in formulating New Deal policies than they actually exercised, and it glosses over the clearly significant influence enjoyed by industrialists, bankers, and other conservative interests. This is partly because for Sullivan, the truly radical potential of the New Deal lay in its ability to raise consciousness and engender protest, as the federal government’s aggressive new stance

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brought an unprecedented opportunity for biracial challengers to the South’s manifestly undemocratic political structure. Even the New Deal’s limitations had an indirectly progressive impact: it was precisely the disjuncture between the optimism it inspired and the realities of everyday life under segregation and economic hardship which motivated a diverse array of Southerners to mobilize in demand of equal rights and economic justice.

Throughout the narrative, Sullivan combines the broader sweep of national-regional political developments with a narrow focus on individual Southern activists. Although at times extensive biographical sketches disrupt the narrative flow of the book, we are treated to evocative portraits of Southern New Dealers such as Clark Foreman, Virginia Durr, Palmer Weber, and Robert Weaver. Days of Hope is in large part a tribute to the Southern progressives who demanded large-scale federal action in the South, integrated race and class analyses through campaigns for labor and voting rights, and envisioned an interracial democracy in place of segregation and white supremacy. Coalescing in the SCHW, they forged a popular front with labor leaders such as Sidney Hilman at the CIO-PAC, civil rights activists such as Charles Houston of the NACCP, and Washington allies such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Agricultural Secretary and eventual Vice-President Henry Wallace. The book is a “study of a generation”–a more radical generation than the prominent academics and journalists who led the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and its successor, the Southern Regional Council. To Sullivan, white SRC moderates were “apologists for the segregation system” (p.166) because they believed that social change would have to come gradually and be led by elites such as themselves, not the federal government and certainly not ordinary black Southerners.

Sullivan is much more sympathetic toward the pragmatic compromises of her heroes in the SCHW than those of the moderate progressives of the SRC, but the latter also supported the New Deal and opposed voting discrimination, and the two organizations were not as far apart as she implies. The white activists in SCHW rejected segregation more forcefully but, like the SRC, often phrased their protests in economic rather than explicitly racial terms. Fighting for Southerners such as the sharecroppers who formed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the black citizens who protested the all white primary which rendered the Fifteenth Amendment irrelevant, SCHW progressives advocated federal action against anti-democratic voting laws and campaigned against conservative politicians who red-baited and race-baited them in response. The transformations wrought during the war years provided an even wider opening for the South’s progressive vanguard, especially after the 1944 Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright signaled the demise of the white primary, the linchpin of efforts to deny the right of African Americans to vote.

Sullivan’s passages about black efforts to gain entry into the Democratic primary are among the most compelling in the book. These middle chapters are a significant contribution to scholarly discourse, demonstrating that during the 1940s the voting arena witnessed many of the same conflicts which would rock the South during the desegregation struggles of the late 1950s and early 1960s. For the Southern black reformers who mobilized under the “Double V” campaign, Smith v. Allwright was as inspirational as the Brown decision would prove to their successors. In South Carolina, for example, a statewide movement for black voter registration led by John McCray and Osceola McKaine resulted in increased political power and a firmly established NAACP network which would provide the basis for the legal civil rights protests of the following decades. In response to black challenges to the white primary, conservative politicians through legal machinations and the Ku Klux Klan through intimidation pursued the same strategies which would later be known as massive resistance. The foreshadowing took place at the national level as well, as the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party organized by McCray and McKaine challenged the state’s all-white delegation at the 1944 Democratic national convention but met the same fate as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would twenty years later in Atlantic City.

The 1944 convention also provided a bitter battle over Vice-President Henry Wallace’s renomination, an event Sullivan presents as a symbolic struggle over the fate of New Deal liberalism. The NACCP, the SCHW, labor unions, and other New Dealers rallied around Wallace, who denounced Southern conservatives and stirringly advanced a progressive vision sympathetic to organized labor and hostile to racial discrimination. Although party leaders, with Roosevelt’s knowledge, defied

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the will of convention delegates by replacing Wallace with Harry Truman, progressives felt that momentum was on their side. Wallace and his allies believed that changing the South was critical to the survival of New Deal liberalism, and after Roosevelt’s reelection Wallace remarked that “a spirit of liberalism is abroad in the South.” According to Sullivan, the changes wrought by the New Deal and World War II comprised “the seedbed of a genuinely liberal and progressive movement,” “an opening for racial tolerance and political democracy in a society steeped in segregation and white supremacy” (p.188, 194).

Could interracial democracy have transformed the South and, by extension, the nation? The key to this progressive hope was a class-based alliance which reached across racial boundaries, and in 1945-46 voter registration drives constituted a political challenge which “revived the democratic promise of Reconstruction and moved beyond the tentative interracialism of the Populist movement. “(p.220) But despite substantial increases in black voter registration and a number of electoral victories, the labor-liberal movement to shore up the national Democratic party by transforming its Southern base was ultimately unsuccessful. Southern politicians successfully exploited anti-union and pro-white supremacy sentiments, but in Sullivan’s analysis it was not the Dixiecrats but rather the national Democratic party which slammed shut the progressive window in the South by failing to enforce constitutional guarantees. In the new arena of Cold War politics, liberal anticommunists attacked labor unions and groups such as the SCHW for supposed Communist ties, fragmenting what was left of the Popular Front. Truman, who “lacked any basic commitment to the social democratic thrust of New Deal reform” (p.223), cracked down on organized labor and abandoned the South to conservative Democrats. Under fire, the CIO distanced itself from the SCHW and purged the radicals and Communists in its ranks. Branded a Communist-front organization by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the SCHW descended into internal bloodletting and disbanded after Henry Wallace’s campaign as the 1948 presidential candidate of the Progressive Party.

The epilogue of Days of Hope is a beautifully written account of Wallace’s Southern campaign swing in 1948. Wallace questioned the Cold War foreign policy consensus, adamantly supported the rights of laborers and unions, and told white Southerners to their faces that segregation was a sin. He was greeted by determined supporters but also jeered and assaulted by amazingly hostile mobs, at times even afraid for his life.

On one hand, Wallace’s defeat symbolized the end of the New Deal era and the failure of interracial democracy in the South. During the 1950s the southern black freedom struggle operated in relative isolation, and only after 1960 did the federal government through the Democratic party join forces with progressive Southerners once again. On the other hand, the “activists of the earlier decades tilled the ground for future change” (p.275), fighting to establish the legal precedents and political power which would be crucial to civil rights activists of the next generation.

Sullivan’s book embodies the contradictions of hoping against hope that things might have been different in the South. The window of opportunity approach is a mainstay of progressive Southern historians but is always problematic because it dwells on what might have been and by definition must downplay the often overwhelming evidence of why history turned out the way it did. In Days of Hope, the depth of interracial democracy in the South during the 1940s seems exaggerated; Sullivan does not provide evidence that a popular interracial movement existed, as opposed to a more limited cooperation among political activists and New Deal supporters. White farmers and industrial laborers rarely were willing to work on equal terms with their black counterparts; one of the fundamental dilemmas facing progressives was that white working class Southerners overwhelmingly supported Roosevelt and simultaneously resisted other components of what Sullivan calls interracial democracy. The CIO’s 1946 Operation Dixie drive to unionize the Southern textile industry was only the latest example of how many obstacles lay in the path of biracial class-based politics.

In its attention to the fluidity, radical potential, and reservoir of dissent which existed beneath a rigged political system, Sullivan’s book is a compelling challenge to easy generalizations about the Solid South. Its greatest contribution is the chronicling of Southerners who knew that their region had to change from within and knew that federal intervention was also a prerequisite, a lesson which still resonates today. The book opens with an official of the Hoover administration telling Congress that “federal aid would be a disservice to the unemployed,” and its main villains are the Southern politicians who opposed New Deal liberalism and the national Democrats who abandoned it. Days of Hope is an eulogy for an earlier time when the pragmatic and freewheeling New Deal offered hope and provided inspiration to millions of Southerners and Americans caught in desperate circumstances, but it is also a reminder of the possibilities of social change and the necessity of aggressive action in these less hopeful days, when the legacies of the New Deal are again under assault from traditional enemies and only half-heartedly defended by many traditional supporters.

Matthew Lassiter is a graduate student at the University of Virginia.