Clouds over Atlanta
Williams, Roger M.
NEW-SOUTH SHOWCASE FACES NORTHERN-STYLE CONFLICT Clouds over Atlanta ROGER M. WILLIAMS THE downtown face of Atlanta never stops changing. No sooner does a skyscraper materialize than its...
...The mayoral campaign, which ended late in October in the election of Andrew Young, highlighted two facets of the new racial conflict: whites' anxiety at having "their" city run by a black administration and irritation at seeing "their" gleaming downtown populated by crowds of idle and-as they reckon it-menacing blacks...
...Atlanta's downtown developers, moved by visions of grandeur or by simple greed, seem determined to make it all disappear-and, in the process, to set new boundaries for the people it has served...
...To this former resident, the changes are startling, and more than a little saddening...
...In fact, the city may well be as racially polarized now as it was two decades ago, before a go-getter businessman mayor named Ivan Allen convinced his establishment colleagues that racial moderation would bring peace, prosperity, and national acclaim...
...Some whites talk defiantly about not "abandoning" downtown to the blacks...
...To them, the second Battle of Atlanta- their Atlanta, of growth, acclaim, and profit-is well underway.nd profit-is well underway...
...Certainly Atlanta's downtown business establishment felt that way...
...over 25 copies, 50c each...
...It is particularly tricky in present-day Atlanta, where a form of Reaganomics-the drying-up of massive federal funds-is sure to swell the new racial gulf...
...After all, aren't huge building projects good for everyone...
...The city has attracted a wealth of new businesses, has quickly risen to a leading position among tourism and convention capitals, has created many new opportunities for the black middle class...
...That would be a tough balancing act in any city...
...Dan Sweat, the able and temperate president of Central Atlanta Progress (CAP, a downtown chamber of commerce), calls black crime downtown "the city's number-one problem...
...Yet he was forced into a runoff by a white legislator named Sidney Marcus...
...In the final tally, the "crossover" vote (whites voting for a black candidate) was far smaller than in Young's congressional races...
...Yet the more Atlanta reaches for the twenty-first century, and for ROGER M. WILLIAMS, a free-lance writer, lived in Atlanta for eight years...
...He's really turned off his white supporters...
...for certain retail businesses, an additional sharp drop-off in white traffic would indeed be tantamount to abandonment...
...That notion, which proved to be accurate, was bought by Atlanta's black middle class...
...Although he was offered a $400,000 campaign chest to start with and plenty more later on, Fowler declined to make the race...
...A larger part is rooted in the anger and frustration of middle-class whites over what they regard as outrageously aggressive public behavior on the part of blacks: drunks and panhandlers who won't accept a simple brush-off...
...Jackson...
...Some of that, in the normal course of things, was bound to disappear...
...To them, there is no metaphor, only very different perceptions of the use and abuse of city streets...
...Young used to run especially well in the affluent white "Northside," where it became a badge of liberalism to host cocktail parties and kaffee klatsches in his behalf...
...the black "underclass" was too impotent to matter...
...But the charge contained considerable substance when applied to Maynard Extra copies of the special issue on abortion (November 20, 1981) are still a-vailable (10-25 copies, 60c each...
...In his two terms in office, Jackson has been a mediocre mayor...
...As black city councilman John Lewis told the New York Times, "We've been pushing an image...
...No sooner does a skyscraper materialize than its mirrored-glass sides are coated with dust arising from still another hotel or pedestrian mall or freeway-widening...
...Now it happens a long way up Peachtree Street...
...Whether he does that or not,"public safety," as it is termed in the list, will be the top item in the first discussions with the mayor...
...When I interviewed him recently, Andrew Young minimized the safety in the streets problem, saying that policemen on scooters would cut sharply into crime and that many of the alleged harassers pose a "perceived threat," rather than a real one...
...Not the old, Southern-style problems of bigotry and legalized segregation but the modern, national problems of poverty, crime, and despair among urban blacks...
...Metaphorically, the gulf flows directly through downtown, and on its opposite banks stand poor blacks and establishment whites...
...Gone with them are countless small restaurants, shops, and hotels, equally undistinguished and therefore equally part of the workaday city...
...Atlanta's worried whites will not be impressed by such blithe assurances...
...PART OF THIS problem lies in local naivete about life elsewhere...
...This stems less from a malicious design than from a native impulse among movers and shakers: They are remaking the city, with great effort and sometimes at great risk, and they are impatient with obstacles...
...Now the middle class has doubts, and the underclass, while still generally impotent, is much more openly hostile...
...status as an "international" city, the more it runs up against problems of race...
...Andrew Young, the former Congressman and UN Ambassador, would seem to have been an easy winner...
...His suitors then settled, with little enthusiasm but lots of contributions, on Marcus, who has gained a reputation in the Georgia House for being attentive to detail and a successful negotiator...
...the drafting of "enforceable ordinances" to "reduce peddlers, derelicts, vagrants, and other 'street people' "; consideration of proposals enabling businesses to hire off-duty policemen "with full off-premises power of arrest...
...His performance has been marred by a grating "do for blacks" attitude, administrative weakness at the departmental levels, and his own pompous style...
...It has also paralleled massive unemployment among young blacks and, more recently, severe cutbacks or threats of them in federal assistance programs...
...Sweat says, "I told that to one of our black business leaders the other day...
...Actual street crime, while certainly higher than in pre-development days, does not present so great a problem as harassment and the seeming threat of crime...
...CAP's unenviable task, explains an astute Atlanta politician, is "to keep downtown together as a tourism-convention attraction and as a viable business district-in the face of non-stop suburban growth.'' That task becomes more difficult in the presence of large numbers of unoccupied and sometimes unruly blacks...
...You used to get that only south of Marietta Boulevard [in the black commercial district...
...But the remaking of downtown has paralleled a familiar American malaise: white flight and a steadily increasing black majority in the city at large...
...More jobs, more attractions, more money pouring in, and so on through the familiar litany of downtown redevelopment...
...The local poor need not participate, except as service workers...
...A young woman shouldn't have to put up with the comments she'll hear on our downtown streets," a well-to-do lawyer told me...
...But can they press it successfully...
...The charge was plain wrong about Young, who, as a civil rights leader and a campaigner for himself and Jimmy Carter, repeatedly displayed an ability to negotiate, conciliate, and, as he puts it, "bring people together...
...Even if none of these realities existed, Atlanta's image, so dear to the establishment, would suffer incalculable damage if the city began stationing a get-tough cop on every downtown corner...
...Given their power and resources, the developers have the clear advantage...
...Young has intelligence, compassion, an impressive vita, and a record of political victories in the city...
...Together they formed the downtown habitat of thousands of low-income blacks, and many low-income whites as well...
...This election demonstrated the fragility of the black-white cooperation that Atlanta has long boasted...
...Gone are block after block of old buildings-most of them, to be sure, undistinguished, but part of the living fabric of a city...
...Last summer, however, Northside neighborhoods bristled with Marcus posters, and the most common political remark heard among whites was, "It's time for a white mayor...
...white Atlanta is still in social shock over the murders, separated by months, of a secretary and a conventioneer, as if such events do not occur in most downtowns...
...The city has taken a few steps to enhance street safety-assigning more patrolmen, erecting police sentry stands at key intersections-but CAP and its supporters want more: to quote from its list of demands, "a tough public position against crime...
...and he said, 'That's racist talk.' I said, 'No, sir, that's the fact, and we have to face it.' " Sweat is threatening to post, Martin Luther-like, a list of CAP demands on the new mayor's door...
...The basic elements of downtown's redesign-"megastructures" encompassing hotels, office space, and smart shops and restaurants-have been tailored to produce precisely this effect, as well as to attract suburbanites bold enough to venture into the glossy new central city...
...street dudes who direct crude sexual remarks at passing females...
...The developers', to make it safe for the civil and affluent...
...The issue is rooted in the physical and functional transformation of downtown Atlanta...
...Thus the lines are drawn, and one is tempted to ask, whose downtown will it be...
...There is a feeling among our people," Dan Sweat says, "that we've lost our lead to Houston and Dallas, that investors and so on will be scared away...
...The establishment, desperate to field a strong white candidate, sounded out Wyche Fowler, an attractive and capable Atlanta-area Congressman...
...Says a liberal white Atlanta lawyer: "Maynard has a genius for offending people...
...Those two qualities, whites said, had not been demonstrated by either Young or his black mayoral predecessor, Maynard Jackson...
...A whole segment of the population here has been left behind...
...Mayor-elect Andrew Young will not possess the legal power or law-enforcement muscle to sweep the streets of offending blacks...
...AS THE NEW mayor, one of Andrew Young's major tasks will be to turn them back on-while strengthening his tenuous relations with young black activists...
...the monitoring of "pedestrian harassment," with "police follow-up" on specific cases...
...Most of them supported a rival black candidate in the primary...
...Much of the litany is true, or at least defensible, and the Atlanta boom provides evidence...
...What was once an ordinary downtown that served the needs of ordinary citizens has been remade to serve the needs of others: tourists and conventioneers, businessmen and developers...
...Now we'll have to deal with it...
...Perhaps there are no more blacks on Atlanta's downtown streets these days than there were ten or twenty years ago...
...More broadly, it pointed up the growing but little-acknowledged disparity between the Atlanta of white entrepreneurial dreams and the Atlanta of black welfare reality...
...But they are bolder, more hostile, and, to a broad range of whites, more frightening then before...
...And Young, owing his election and primary allegiance to the black community, will not have the political assurance to do it...
Vol. 108 • December 1981 • No. 22
