Atlanta

Atlanta Outsources Collecting Tax Liens to Private Investors; Black Taxpayers are Losing their Homes

By outsourcing collection of delinquent taxes to private investors, Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, takes away incentives to keep people in their homes. Housing scholar Dan Immergluck says allowing private speculators to auction off properties is driving unaffordable housing and gentrification

Protests of Atlanta "Cop City" Show the Politics of the City's Elite Put the People Last

by Micah Herskind

A massive training facility for police to practice urban warfare reveals the decades-long abandonment of poorer Atlantans and the efforts of local business elites to use redevelopment and policing to cater to the wealthy and control the poor, as historians Dan Immergluck and Maurice Hobson help to explain. 

Blaming Atlanta "Cop City" Protests on "Outside Agitators" is Familiar and Shameful

by Benjamin Stumpf

Blaming outsiders for grassroots objections to turning valuable parkland over to the police to create an urban warfare training center is an effort to shift blame for violence from police to protesters and to assert that local communities accept the plan. Opponents of civil rights did the same thing. 

The Local Roots of Marjorie Taylor Greene's "National Divorce" Rhetoric

by Michan Connor

To understand her embrace of secessionist rhetoric, don't look to the Civil War; look to the political conflict that erupted in Atlanta's suburbs in the 1990s and 2000s. 

Atlanta's HBCU Students Call on Administrators to Oppose "Cop City"

Students say that the proposed training facility in south Atlanta will prepare more police to engage in paramilitary suppression of protest and denounced statements by administrators pledging support for "Cop City." 

Roslyn Pope, 84: Co-Author of "Appeal to Human Rights" Catalyzed Atlanta Student Movement

Pope and co-author Julian Bond punctured Atlanta's self-satisfied mythology as "the city too busy to hate" by cataloguing the institutional and cultural attacks on Black residents' dignity, demanding change. 

Pride in the South is a Story of Resistance and Resilience

by La Shonda Mims

In the urban south, LGBTQ residents are drawing on a half century of claiming public space through pride celebrations in the face of efforts to label them a threat to society. 

Atlanta's BeltLine Project a Case Study in Park-Driven "Green Gentrification"

by Dan Immergluck

Although the ambitious combination of multiuse trails and apartment complexes "was designed to connect Atlantans and improve their quality of life, it has driven up housing costs on nearby land and pushed low-income households out to suburbs with fewer services than downtown neighborhoods."

Can 500 Dinner Discussions Bring Atlantans to Recognition and Reconciliation over the 1906 Race Massacre?

Local activists seek to overcome a local pattern of forgetting of the events of 1906, a collective amnesia supported by the city's black and white leaders who have favored the image of a harmonious city as part of a good business climate. 

The Atlanta Braves Represent the Best and Worst of Baseball

by Ben Railton

A lifelong fan feels frustration that the team of Hank Aaron still tolerates the Tomahawk Chop. Renaming the club the Hammers would be a good start. 

The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre: How Fearmongering Led to Violence

The 1906 Atlanta Race Riots, a series of mob attacks on Black residents and their homes and businesses, originated in fears of black political and economic power that were stoked by the local press with fabricated, sensational stories of Black criminality. 

How Atlanta’s Public Housing Created Space for Black Women to Organize

City Planning Professor Akira Drake Rodriguez discusses her research on women's tenant organizing in public housing in Atlanta, which became more important as the city withdrew support for its low income housing program. 

Georgia’s Center of Political Gravity Shifting Toward Atlanta

"As Georgia transforms from a Republican stronghold to the nation’s premier battleground state, a seismic geographic shift is underway."

New Bills Target Stone Mountain, Confederate Monuments Across Georgia

Two bills would act to broadly prohibit the maintenance or construction of Confederate monuments except in museums or on Civil War battlefields and authorize the state-chartered agency that maintains Stone Mountain Park to remove or modify the park's massive bas relief tribute to Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. 

Georgia’s New Senators will Write the Next Chapter in Black-Jewish Relations

by Jeff Melnick

The history of the Leo Frank trial and lynching shows that, while both groups have faced prejudice and discrimination, "the glory of Black-Jewish relations has always been more aspirational than achieved." Georgia's two new senators have a chance to advance a coalition for progress and equity.

Ebenezer Baptist: MLK’s Church Makes New History In Georgia’s Senate Runoff

Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church was an incubator of the fight for voting rights; its current pastor seeks election as Georgia's U.S. Senator.

‘Year of the Reveal’: Runoffs Follow Pandemic, Protests and a Test of Atlanta’s Promise

Civil rights historian Calinda Lee places Atlanta at the center of political and economic changes in the south, but whether the change is deep or superficial remains to be seen. 

Terror in the City Too Busy to Hate: How the English Avenue School Bombing Challenged Atlanta’s Popular Myth of Racial Progress

by Max Blau and Todd Michney

Months before Atlanta’s public schools desegregated, someone bombed an all-Black school on the city’s Westside. On the 60th anniversary of that incident, Max Blau and Todd Michney revisit the forces that led to the attack and reflect on its legacy.

How Atlanta’s Politics Overtook the Suburbs, Too

Kevin Kruse is among the scholars of Atlanta who offer insight on how the growth of the metro area has overcome the division between the city and its suburbs and turned Georgia purple.

Georgia’s Political Shift – a Tale of Urban and Suburban Change

by Jan Nijman

If Georgia is demographically and politically becoming unlike neighboring Republican strongholds like Alabama and Tennessee, it has, in some respects, moved in a similar direction as Arizona, where the two major metropolitan regions of Phoenix and Tucson make up over 80% of the state’s population, and where Democrats have improved their standing in recent years.