Afro-self-determinism and the Rise of The Black Mecca

In 1971, the nation’s largest black oriented lifestyle magazine, Ebony, covered Atlanta, among other southern cities, in an issue on black quality of life in the South. Atlanta, the magazine declared, was the “Black Mecca,” because in the city, “black folks have more, live better, accomplish more and deal with white folks more effectively than anywhere else in the South—or North.” The article praised the Afro-self-determinism that distinguished the Gate City: the massive consortium of black institutions of higher education, black businesses, rich black civic and social organizations, black religious leadership, and even the expanse of black middle-class neighborhoods. “Evidently, Atlanta is not ready for integrated housing,” the magazine quipped, even as it measured these all-black, beautifully lush residential enclaves as points of praise. The article noted the rise of publicly-elected officials, like state senator Leroy Johnson, Atlanta Board of Education member Dr. Benjamin Mays and the “big and bold” thirty-three-year-old vice-mayor who served as the president of the nineteen-member Board of Alderman (the city council). The magazine mentioned several business leaders, including Jesse B. Blayton, Jesse Hill, the Paschal brothers, and Norris B. Herndon, president of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. Herndon inherited his business from his father Alonzo, who was enslaved as a child. In 1971, Norris was worth an estimated $18 million (nearly $131 million today), making him, according to the magazine, the richest black person in the country. In a country where people of color had been denied access to quality housing, employment and (until recently) the vote, these stories displayed social, political, and economic black excellence to thrive.

The celebration came as the city was roughly 51 percent black. Though one of the few predominantly black major cities in the country, Atlanta offered little in the way real black political power. In addition to a white mayor, fifteen of the nineteen members of the city council were white. Whites represented the overwhelming majority of leadership positions in municipal and county departments. The disproportionately white police force, under its white leadership, had only integrated its patrols two years earlier. Two-thirds of the 160,000 Atlantans in poverty were black. Adoring nods to the Confederacy were ubiquitous. Streets, schools and neighborhoods were named after virulent white supremacists, terrorists and enslavers, even in black communities of every class strata. Despite the article’s copious praise of black business in the city, touting, among other things, the black-owned insurance companies, and the new twelve-story office building erected by the black-owned bank, the portion of city’s contracts to black firms was about the same has it had been during slavery: less than 1 percent. In the arena of popular culture, from Gone with the Wind through Song of the South and Tales of Uncle Remus, Atlanta was firmly anchored in Old South tropes of genteel enslavers, civilized southern belles, joyful slaves and grinning Negroes. Huge swaths of black people languished in shanty-like homes in pressing poverty, with dismal rates of high school completion.

As civil rights veteran Julian Bond summed it up: Atlanta “is the best place in the United States for a black if you are middle-class and have a college degree. But if you’re poor, it’s just like Birmingham, Jackson or any other place.” Bond, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives noted that in his district of Vine City, “the average family income is $2,500 a year, and the education level is six years. This district also includes the colleges, but the professors don’t live here.”¹ Atlanta’s newest sobriquet, the Black Mecca, was just as complicated and lofty as its previous moniker, the City Too Busy to Hate. Yet it endured.

How did a city with so few examples of real political, economic, or even cultural power come to be regarded as the country’s veritable black city on a hill? Much of this can be explained by the historical moment. Only a handful of major cities had black mayors in 1971. No city with a sizable black population had a police force with black officers at parity with the city’s black demographics. African Americans were, for the first time in history, entering a decade where most were not enslaved, in poverty, legally constricted from voting, living in certain neighborhoods, or denied public accommodations. In historical context, Atlanta—even though deeply burdened by the legacies of racial subjugation—had achieved a considerable amount of success. Additionally, the article was released in the height of the black power movement, which had an indelible effect on how black people viewed themselves and their relationship with whites.

The utility of black self-determination became more popularized as the black power movement emerged as a mainstream expression among African Americans by 1970. As explained throughout this book, the fundamental tenets of what became known as “black power” had been dominant among the Atlanta black community for generations. Black power and Afro-self-determinism are not opposed to desegregation. Having a desegregated, open society, was fine, advocates insisted. Attending any hotel, hospital, or restaurant was desired over being barred from them. However, owning hotels, hospitals, or restaurants was preferred. Moreover, insisting that racial integration was critical to black advancement was anathema to black power agents, who argued that black control over institutions in black communities was more important than simple access to white-controlled spaces. As desegregation became law, by the rise of the Black Power movement, the dominant political expression among African Americans, was centered on the establishment, support, and celebration of black institutions. In the National Society of Black Engineers, the National Association of Black Journalists, and the Congressional Black Caucus, for example, black professionals who enjoyed unprecedented access to white professional organizations had established black ones between 1966-1975. Atlanta, in this context, was clearly on its way to become “the first citadel of black political power in the New South.”²

Perhaps most consequential to this historical moment was the ascension of the “big and bold” young politician, Maynard H. Jackson, Jr., who was described in 1971 as “aggressive and black-oriented.” Maynard H. Jackson, Jr.’s mayoral administration (1974-1982) achieved what few, if any, major municipal governments had in the history of the United States. He upended racist practices in hiring, promotions, contract negotiation, and more. Jackson established a new standard for successive black administrations that built upon his legacy of aggressive affirmative action and hard-nosed policies aimed at widening opportunities for a diverse city. Although white Atlantans—from the business class to the working class—were generally hostile to his regime, Jackson was incredibly popular with black voters, who reelected him overwhelmingly into a second term. His successor, Andrew Young, the civil rights leader, former congressman, and ambassador to the United Nations, offered Jackson-like affirmative action with an eye to mollifying white fears. He openly courted white supporters, corporations, international investment. Moreover, for the first time since Mayor Hartsfield in the 1950s, Young was able to win the majority of white voters when he ran for reelection. It appeared that he was able to balance the ambitious and impactful policies that opened opportunities for people of color without alienating Atlanta’s white voters. The Jackson standard would politically survive throughout subsequent mayoral administrations, transforming the city that had once been the “heart” of the Confederacy.

Black leaders in Atlanta were on the rise before Jackson became mayor. In August 1967 the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) hosted its annual meeting in Atlanta where none other than its cofounder, Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., insisted that it was essential for black people to support, invest in, and promote black-owned businesses for collective black advancement. King did not argue that that black people should avoid white banks, restaurants, or other institutions. They had choices. However, the struggle for freedom would not and could not stop at the vote or access to public accommodations. It meant economic advancement and uplift as well. To that end, black people needed to forge economic power by four major fronts: (1) encouraging/forcing white-owned private sector employers to hire and promote fairly; (2) demanding that the federal, state and local governments enforce policies that ensured fair employment for federal agencies and those that had public-sector contracts; (3) creating and supporting black-owned businesses; and (4) demanding government funding to establish economic stimulation in black communities. Among these four points, the one that could be immediately affected by black municipal control was employment and contracts with black firms. Those fundamental principles were neatly aligned with the tradition of Afro-self-determinism practiced in King’s hometown for generations.³

The effort to systematically desegregate the halls of power began years before Jackson’s election. That process would prove essential to the efficacy of his future administration. Much of this process came through the incredibly sensitive and controversial efforts at school desegregation. In Atlanta, that process conspicuously decentered and “de-pedestalized” whites, which was shocking for some old-line Negroes and whites alike. In the end, though, the notion that black people could, in fact, cultivate healthy, thriving communities without whites continued to gain traction as the black power movement matured. This had long been, however, the dominant expression among black leaders in Atlanta.

By the early 1970s, after various legal maneuvers to slow desegregation since the Brown ruling, the Atlanta Board of Education, it appeared, was out of options. On November 27, 1972, the court of appeals ordered the Board to submit a comprehensive plan to desegregate public schools within a month. Nationwide, racial tensions over equal access to schools grew more acute in the 1970s as federal judges forced busing plans on school districts that had made little progress. In many cities, black communities had also faced intraracial conflicts over school integration. In Atlanta, the prospect of a black mayor, coupled with the politics of the era, made school integration a vexing issue between and within black and white spaces.

In 1969 Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, who served as president of Morehouse College from 1940 to 1967, was elected to the Atlanta Public School Board. The next year, he was made President of the Board. A mentor and close friend to his former student, King, Mays was internationally known scholar, religious leader, “Dean of the Movement,” and a titan in the city. By 1970, Atlanta’s school system was three quarters black, but among its 153 public schools, 106 remained mostly segregated. Additionally, most administrators were white. Although Atlanta had a long, storied history of extraordinary black achievement in various professions, especially education, the white superintendent, John W. Letson, argued that the overwhelmingly white administration was a consequence of being unable to find qualified black people.⁴

Simultaneously, under court order, the Atlanta Public School system was in negotiations to bus nearly thirty thousand of its black students into white schools. Aware of the deep opposition among whites, black leadership, including the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP and its chapter president, Lonnie King, endorsed a compromise with the white leadership: only 10 percent of the original number of black students would be bused into white schools in return for a black superintendent of the Atlanta Board of Education and more black administrative control. King believed that “administrative desegregation” and a black superintendent of the 77 percent black school system was a more substantive policy to advance black educational equity than sending black children to schools with mostly white students, teachers, and administrators.⁵

On February 20, 1973, with an eight-to-two vote, the Atlanta Board of Education approved an out-of-court settlement of a desegregation lawsuit. The agreement created an administrative desegregation at a higher ratio than student desegregation, realizing increased black control of the school system.⁶ On July 1, 1973, amid the debates about desegregation of classrooms and administration, Mays appointed Alonzo Crim as the first black superintendent of the school system. This appointment aligned with the efforts to achieve some compromise between those hostile to busing and its supporters. Known as the “Ten Percent Plan” or the “Second Atlanta Compromise,” this agreement reflected the new realities of the Black Mecca: a self-assured black leadership class more concerned with black control of resources for the black community than integration into spaces where whites primarily determined how black resources were allocated.

Given that, for more than a century, black people in Atlanta had run everything from corporations to universities in the city, black control of the public school system was a feasible step. As one historian notes, “Supporters of this idea believed that if there was ever an opportunity presented itself for blacks to demonstrate the effectiveness of their administering community-controlled education, it was in Atlanta.”  For their part, black leadership insisted that the push for increased black administrative control, rather than busing, reflected the sentiment of the majority of black people, who preferred community control of well-funded black schools that were equipped with inspiring teachers, quality administrators, and peers who would forge amiable social spaces for education. Black parents consistently expressed opposition to busing their children to white schools, which likely led to abuse and torment of their children for the sake of an abstract idea of “racial cooperation” or a nebulously measured better education. This effort, black parents argued, “did not outweigh its detriments if it resulted in the degradation of their culture and institutions.”⁷

The compromise put power into black hands before the city had its first black mayor. It was a milestone in the advancement of black equity in education, even if it sacrificed integration for black management. It mollified many white and black Atlantans, but it infuriated the national leadership of the NAACP, which had long looked askance at the local chapter for its tepid demands for integration, even calling the local branch “anti-NAACP.”

Viewing the Gate City as different from most other cities working with desegregation plans, Lonnie King invited the national NAACP leadership to visit and survey the city and its people. Ultimately, the national leadership suspended King and the entire Atlanta branch because they had abandoned the core principles and mission of the organization. Legally, the organization believed that the action of the local branch would make for a troubling precedent for other cities fighting school desegregation. In his defense, King insisted, “I think Atlanta has a unique situation, one that is not present in many other cities in America. That’s why I am presuming that this won’t be a precedent, but it will be something which the Atlanta case with its uniqueness had to bring into focus in order to resolve this problem.”⁸

King was correct. Atlanta, once known as the “heart of the Confederacy” and the “Imperial City” of the Klan, had political leadership that was so obdurate to school integration that it desegregated its schools later than all but one other major southern city’s school system. Even the cities that had become iconic showcases for violent resistance to Brown v. Board were ahead of the “City Too Busy to Hate” on integrating schools. Opposition was widespread, when Imperial Wizard James Venable vowed to fight the “horror” of integration with his many silent white sympathizers throughout the metro. Moreover, Atlanta’s black leadership had generations of institutional management experience. Lonnie King and others in the leadership class had been fiercely proud alumni of and members of black institutions, including colleges, fraternities, sororities, churches, and social clubs. For many African Americans, black control of schools was more attractive than greater proximity to whites, especially if that proximity came a cost of emotional, physical, or mental harm. Although there were other majority-black cities by the early 1970s, there was, perhaps, no city best positioned to make this claim than Atlanta. Cities like Gary or Detroit did not have generations of black university deans, provosts, presidents or corporate executives. The responsibilities of these positions meant that there were generations of black professionals who managed massive budgets, staff, and hundreds of acres of property while simultaneously adhering to federal, state, and local compliance, finding funding, and, in most cases, undertaking international relations. The fundamental sentiment that privileged administrative integration over social integration would guide and shape the municipal and county government for the next fifty years, transforming the city.

In addition to the unique history of black institutional control in Atlanta, the city had an unusually high ratio of black people. In the South, where black people were leaving rural areas for cities, no major city was majority black, except Atlanta. Memphis, Charleston, New Orleans, Montgomery, and Birmingham remained mostly white as late as 1970.⁹ The demographic shifts were distressing for many white Atlantans: a convergence of circumstances meant not only that blacks were increasing their numbers in the city but also that traditional methods to politically neutralize them were becoming ineffective. Unlike earlier eras, under Mayor Hartsfield and others, annexing majority-white areas to dilute the power of the black vote was no longer an option when the Atlanta public school system was integrated. In fact, white communities outside of Atlanta resisted annexation because of explicit fears that their children would have to attend integrated schools. As noted above, black parents in Atlanta, though not mounting violent opposition to integration of schools, expressed little enthusiasm for busing. “Community control” of schools, equity of resources, and black administrators were vastly more popular among black Atlantans. Although the sentiment of Afro-self-determinism had permeated various sectors of black America, it was most popular among the youth. College students in the city were as important to local politics in the black power era as they had been during the 1960s.

In the fall of 1972, Rodney Strong entered Morehouse College, which had become an educational enclave of members of the black elite in Atlanta and beyond. The school also enrolled first-generation college students from poor and working-class backgrounds, providing a rich class diversity. In the midst of the black power era, various events mobilized students, including the November 1972 shooting at Southern University in Louisiana, the largest HBCU in the country. Police and National Guard troops fired on student protesters, injuring several and killing two. AU political science professor Mack Jones helped organize a demonstration around the shooting. Amid these circles, Strong forged connections with AUC student activists Adolph Reed, Vince Eagan, Mike Fisher, and others, ultimately forming a student group, University Movement for Black Unity (UMBU). Like most campuses, the Atlanta University Center had its share of ideological diversity, and UMBU pulled together some of this range. Some students were self-described revolutionaries, while others were black nationalists, and many were liberals. UMBU closely followed current events, such as school desegregation. Of course, the prospect of a black mayor electrified the group.

Amid the Second Atlanta Compromise controversy, on March 28, 1973, Maynard H. Jackson, Jr., the vice-mayor of Atlanta, declared his intention to run as mayor. Son of a prominent minister and grandson of the venerated John Wesley Dobbs, Jackson and his entire family were intimately tied to the institutions that had been critical to Atlanta’s black community over much of the twentieth century. In 1945 Maynard H. Jackson, Sr., a Morehouse alumnus, became senior pastor at Friendship Baptist Church, only a year after Edward Randolph Carter died. His wife, Irene Dobbs Jackson, was a professor of French at Spelman, her alma mater. Her father, Dobbs, was the leader of a Masonic Lodge and founder of the Atlanta Civic and Political League in 1936 (which later became the Atlanta Negro Voters League). Dobbs became a father figure to his grandson when the elder Jackson died in a car accident in 1953. As a thirty-year-old vice-mayor, Maynard swiftly moved into prominence, serving under Mayor Sam Massell, a Jewish Democrat.

To raise the stakes even higher, the Georgia General Assembly had passed a law in 1971 creating the City of Atlanta Charter Revision Commission, which shifted the municipal government from a “weak mayor” to a “strong mayor” form of government. Under the strong mayor model, as chief executive of the city, the mayor had the authority to appoint and hire people, and to create more administrative policy.

When Jackson declared his intentions, many were eager to commit to the promise of transformative power of black political leadership, particularly college students and other young people who volunteered for Jackson’s campaign. Through UMBU, AUC students formally organized a mock vote to determine which of two AUC alumni, Leroy Johnson or Maynard Jackson (both Morehouse Men), would receive their endorsement. Johnson, who was elected to the state senate in 1962, was the first Black state senator since Reconstruction. Although he was a prominent figure with the endorsement of the Atlanta Constitution, he struggled to gain traction with young votes. Many felt the state senator did not take the UMBU election seriously, while the vice-mayor visited each AUC school and every dorm at Morehouse. Jackson overwhelmingly won the mock election. In turn, UMBU endorsed him, canvassing neighborhoods and donating time and money to his campaign.¹⁰ With the support of the AUC and of black business leaders Jesse Hill and Herman J. Russell, as well as religious leaders, Jackson had a critical advantage in the election.

Many would benefit from the expansion of opportunities emanating from a mayoral administration that embraced Afro-self-determinism, but few were as well positioned as Russell. An Atlanta native who spent his childhood in poverty before cobbling together enough resources from various enterprises to attend college at Tuskegee, he built upon his family’s plastering business. He followed the tradition of E. W. Evans, Heman Perry, Chief Aikens, and other black construction pioneers in Atlanta. Like many of them, Russell poured resources into social justice work, befriending Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, and many others while also donating money to the movement. In his support of Jackson’s first mayoral bid, Russell introduced the young politician to white business partners and friends, who contributed to his campaign. For some, these contributions foreshadowed amiable relations between white business leaders and Jackson.

On election night, October 2, 1973, nineteen-year-old Rodney Strong was elated that Jackson had secured the most votes among a crowded field, winning 46 percent in the fall election, triggering a runoff against Massell. The sitting mayor campaigned that he should win because “Atlanta’s Too Young to Die.” He also released campaign ads showing Atlanta as a dystopian wasteland after a Jackson victory. In contrast, Jackson pushed themes of racial unity and forward-facing, modern movement for the city. On October 16, runoff returns came in along racial lines. Massell solidly won the white vote but not the election. Jackson carried around a quarter of white voters, and 95 percent of black voters.¹¹ Atlanta had elected the first black mayor of a major southern city. The Jackson victory on October was “the happiest day of my life,” Strong recalled.¹² The joy was national in scope, evocative of the telegraph that General Sherman sent President Lincoln 109 years earlier: “Atlanta is Ours and Fairly Won.”

It was in this moment that Strong had become an advocate of a community-engaged brand of black power that reflected the sentiment of one of MLK’s last proscriptions. King’s message of black political and economic power was deeply interwoven with the spirit of the black freedom movement that was also evolving. Much has been said about the fissure of the movement in 1966, as black power emerged. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the civil rights movement was not ideologically static; neither was its most visible exponent, King. In many ways, upon Jackson’s election the slain civil rights leader’s hometown became a testing ground for the application of the mercurial notion of Black Power in municipal governance.

Like W. E. Evans, Adrienne Elizabeth McNeil Herndon, John Hope, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. T. Walden, George Alexander Towns, and thousands of others, Strong was attracted to the opportunities that Atlanta institutions of higher learning offered African Americans. He anticipated that in this new political moment, Atlanta would be a shining example of the possibilities of black political power. His faith was undergirded by his direct involvement with Jackson’s campaign with Morehouse students and alumni like Paul Howard and Charles “Chuck” Burris. There they witnessed, up close, the political operations of a new, more aggressive style of black politics. Many of them found work in Jackson’s administration.

The new mayor agreed to meet with UMBU once a semester. Adolph Reed, a left-leaning doctoral student at Atlanta University, advised Jackson, and Burris worked in the mayor’s office. Strong worked with Jackson for three years after graduating college in 1976. By the time Strong finished law school in 1983 he was firmly ensconced in the political apparatus that the new mayor had created. Jackson was, in many ways, the personification of latest stage of the dramatic arc of Atlanta’s political history. From the postbellum era onward, the city, through the persistence of neo-Confederate nationalism and the struggle for Afro-self-determinism, had emerged in its newest iteration with a new sobriquet, the “Black Mecca.” The moniker had been applied to the city before it had actually earned it, but as with past nicknames, Atlanta’s boosters proved more aspirational than accurate.¹³

The black power that Strong came to endorse was best expressed in the newest mayoral regime in Atlanta. It was not a politics that relegated whites into a cast of immutably corrupt hostiles. Nor did it fetishize whiteness or measure proximity to it as a solution to racial oppression. The politics of Jackson was not revolutionary, nationalist or traditionally one that idealized integration. It was, perhaps, the most successful example of the mainstreaming of Afro-self-determinism in the expression of municipal governance in the United States. In this historic moment, it had become known as “black power.” Ultimately, the successes of Jackson’s first term were such that the subsequent administrations would be measured by what was achieved in Atlanta during 1974-1982. Scores of articles, books, theses, and dissertations have explored the example of Atlanta as a veritable beacon of black political achievement—and failure. Nevertheless, as with other narratives told by the city’s boosters, the failures have always rung with a quieter resound that any successes.

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The Herculean efforts of Jackson’s administration against inveterate resistance highlights the resilience of Afro-self-determinism rather than any pervasive sense of enlightenment found in the putatively racially progressive “Atlanta.” Much like the remarkable success of the city’s black colleges and universities or the upscale black suburbs, the successes of the Jackson administration were in spite of local organized neo-Confederate hostility to black advancement. The gaze should rightly shift to the efforts of those who envisioned, implemented and realized the efforts, not the phantom community of Atlanta’s racially progressive whole.

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There is no question that Maynard Jackson’s impact as mayor was consequential, not only for Atlanta, but for municipal governments across the country. He had succeeded in opening access to the political economy to African Americans as no mayor had done anywhere else.