The New South's Capital Likes to Contradict Itself

This place, ATL, is so distinct from the Southern city that birthed it that you can now see bumper stickers demanding that residents "Put the 'anta' back in Atlanta." Austin's "ATL" inspired an unexpected backlash from residents who felt that an R&B song was not "inclusive" enough. Given the importance of music industry figures such as Austin, Jermaine Dupri, OutKast, India.Arie and Usher in crafting Atlanta's image, this was roughly akin to residents protesting a country song being used to promote Nashville. The dispute was resolved when Austin returned to the studio to craft an alternate, "bluesy" version of the song -- echoes of something that's long been known here as "the Atlanta way." And of progress.

Atlanta's roots run much deeper than ATL. Drive through the city today, and you encounter a maddening patchwork of street names that seem to change every two miles. Heading west, for instance, you can go from Dekalb Avenue to Decatur Street to Marietta Street to Perry Road without ever hitting your turn signal. The name changes are a holdover from the segregation era, a racial grid that indicated who was eligible to live where.

A century ago, that street map was seen as a novel approach to minimizing the kind of accidental integration on sidewalks and streets that could spark racial calamity. In September 1906, Atlanta exploded in a race riot that raged for days and left dozens of black residents dead. Afterward, the city ushered in the "Atlanta way," a kind of racial detente orchestrated by black and white elites that allowed commerce to thrive. Atlanta understood better and earlier than its Southern peers that macabre images of dead blacks strewn around downtown were, quite simply, bad for business.

During the civil rights era, Atlanta dubbed itself the "city too busy to hate" -- a slogan that James Baldwin later amended to the city too busy making money to hate. In 1961, Atlanta's public schools desegregated in a process that was quiet compared with the tense governor-in-the-doorway drama that characterized other Southern cities.

The 1973 election of Maynard Jackson as the city's first black mayor was the cornerstone upon which today's "Black Mecca" was built. Jackson transformed the way the city did business, increasing the percentage of contracts for minority-owned businesses from 1 percent to 38 percent during his first term, creating a group known as "Maynard's Millionaires." The five historically black colleges in the city have become an unofficial feeder system expanding the ranks of a black middle class whose lineage stretches back to pre-riot days.

No city can live up to its own marketing brochures, but the gap between image and reality is particularly unsettling in one whose reputation is built on the dream of a martyred visionary.

The large number of black Atlanta homeowners contrasts with the highest percentage of children living below the poverty line in any major American city. According to the most recent U.S. Census data, 48 percent of Atlanta's children and about 24.4 percent of the total population live below the poverty line. The disproportionate number of blacks with master's degrees coexist with one of the country's least efficient school systems.

In 2005, the majority-black city council passed a resolution banning panhandling in the downtown tourist districts -- an area that includes the King Center, a memorial to the civil rights leader's legacy. Thus the doctrine of progress has made it possible for a homeless person to be arrested for begging in front of the Gandhi statue on Auburn Avenue.

A tide of gentrification has dotted the skyline with condos and commercial developments; in more than one instance, low-income housing has been razed to make way for more profitable undertakings.

Perhaps the most tangled irony of ATL's outward image of black success is that it may be the precise reason for its own demise. The city's higher profile has attracted increasing numbers of white residents. The African American population has slipped from 67 percent in 1990 to 54 percent in 2007. For the first time since the 1920s, the black population is declining, and the white percentage is on the rise. Some neighborhoods in the downtown and eastern portions of the city have virtually priced out their black residents. Progress turns out to be a two-way street.

And that is the truth at the heart of the ATL metaphor. The years since King's death have yielded a strange harvest of success and failure in black America, and our current standing is as complicated as the Atlanta roadmap. And made even more complicated, now, by Obama's run.

jelani1906@gmail.com

William Jelani Cobb is an associate professor of history at Spelman College and the author of "The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays."