The intersection of Ivan Allen Jr. Boulevard and Centennial Olympic Park Drive, which fronts the common that was the heartbeat of the 1996 Summer Games, was never more of a reminder of how Atlanta became the crown of the New South than it was last week.
“I could promise all I wanted about Atlanta’s bright, booming economic future,” Allen campaigned, “but none of it would come about if Atlanta failed to cope with the racial issue.” Keeping his pledge, Allen two years later became the only Southern mayor to testify in support of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title I of which guaranteed equal voting rights for people of color and lesser means.
Two years later, the the city had an NFL franchise and Major League Baseball moved a club there from Milwaukee. In 1968, the NBA relocated the St. Louis Hawks to Georgia Tech’s downtown coliseum.
In more recent years, Atlanta got a WNBA team, an MLS club and two NHL franchises (though it lost both). It has hosted several Super Bowls, Final Fours and those Olympic Games centered on that park off Allen Jr. Boulevard. It would have been the site of the 2020 Final Four, but that event was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In short, Atlanta became one of our country’s leading sports cities, largely thanks to Allen’s daringness to champion racial equality in the South, starting at the voting booth.
But this month, just over half a century later, reactionary Georgia politicians acted to shove their state and Atlanta back in time by passing draconian voter laws that threaten the protections for Black Georgians that Allen advocated for — with his actions ultimately attracting our national sports industry, which is at least symbolically representative of the meritocracy in which most of us strive to live.
So until further notice, what sports brought to Atlanta, it should take away.
As I argued early Friday upon seeing Georgia State Rep. Park Cannon (D), a Black woman, arrested by White state troopers for knocking on the office door of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) — mimicking the worst scenes of the old Jim Crow South — baseball should lead the way by moving its All-Star Game, scheduled for July at the Atlanta Braves’ ballpark, to another city. MLB players’ union head Tony Clark said his organization was open to talking to Commissioner Rob Manfred about exactly that.
“Players are very much aware,” Clark told the Boston Globe. “As it relates to the All-Star Game, we have not had a conversation with the league on that issue. If there is an opportunity to, we would look forward to having that conversation.”
Los Angeles Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts, one of two Black managers in the majors, also said last week he would consider declining to manage in the game as a form of protest.
Moving the game wouldn’t be unprecedented. The NBA moved its 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte in protest of North Carolina’s so-called bathroom bill, which discriminated against transgender people. The NFL stripped the 1993 Super Bowl from Phoenix after Arizona voters rejected propositions that would have made Martin Luther King Jr. Day an official state holiday. And in 1965, the American Football League moved its All-Star Game out of New Orleans after Black stars refused to play upon being shunned at hotels and restaurants in the city.
Baseball isn’t the only sport that can protest Georgia’s infringement on basic democratic rights with inhuman rules such as not allowing third-party groups to hand out bottles of water to voters standing in line. FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, should disqualify Atlanta as a candidate to be one of the 16 North American cities hosting the 2026 World Cup. It should nix the suggestion, too, that Atlanta’s broadcast infrastructure be the hub for the tournament’s media production.
An NCAA official recently said Atlanta would be given “significant consideration” for the next Final Four up for bid after losing last year’s canceled event. The NCAA should scratch that thought now.
This could be yet another example of how sport can serve a greater good and live up to its vision of itself as an agent of social change. Atlanta saw it exercised recently when WNBA players campaigned for Raphael G. Warnock (D) to unseat then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R), who was co-owner of the Atlanta Dream but dismissive of Black Lives Matter in particular and many women’s rights in general. The players not only succeeded in getting Warnock elected but also in forcing Loeffler out of the WNBA.
That was using sports as an agent for social change. What Allen did was turn sports into a reward for social change, a development he helped spearhead in Atlanta along with King and the city’s other legendary civil rights leaders. Sports even turned out to be a catalyst to recast the image of the state and its flagship city, propelling both into larger leadership roles in the South.
There was a time when Georgia and Atlanta were vying with Alabama and Birmingham to be the most influential region of the South. But a onetime baseball announcer in Alabama named Bull Connor, elected to Birmingham’s misnamed position of commissioner of public safety, became the face of the state’s brutal response to Black Alabamians advocating for civil rights. He enforced Birmingham’s checkers ordinance, which made it illegal for Black and White people to participate together in any recreation, including checkers. The law locked Birmingham out of the pro baseball exhibition circuit after Jackie Robinson was allowed to play in the major leagues. Connor even enforced it against an integrated all-star game organized by Robinson in 1953. The game was played only after Robinson sat the White players.
The racist intransigence of that generation of White Alabama leaders remains reflected in the state and Birmingham today. The South’s major airport developed in Atlanta. Birmingham never got an NFL, NBA or MLB team. The best it ever got was a football team in the short-lived USFL and Michael Jordan’s tenure with the city’s minor league baseball team.
That’s where Atlanta could be if not for Allen’s victory and leading role in ensuring voting rights for Georgians of color. And that’s what sports should remind those elected Georgians — the ones acting to take the state back to an ugly yesteryear — right now.