Metropolitan Secession and the Space of Color-Blind Racism in Atlanta

ABSTRACT:

The Reverend Joseph Lowery and the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus sponsored a 2011 voting rights suit, Lowery v. Deal, that demanded the disincorporation of several majority-white cities in Georgia’s Fulton and DeKalb Counties and preemption against attempts by affluent and majority-white north Fulton to secede from the rest of the county. Secession would have severe consequences for racial equity in the metropolitan area. Lowery’s 2011 dismissal by the District Court reflects ascendant color-blind racial ideology that defends white privilege in metropolitan space by attributing it to culturally and legally legitimate race-neutral processes. Historical analysis challenges this color-blind interpretation, identifying the nominally class-based interests of north Fulton residents with systemic racial discrimination and the politics of secession with historic patterns of spatial politics that have sought not only to exclude but also to manipulate political space to limit the ability of black voters and officials to make decisions affecting whites and their property.

Notes

A county named Milton, with its seat at Alpharetta, once encompassed the territory of northern Fulton County, before dire fiscal straits prompted its merger with Fulton in 1931.

The existence of “feedback relationships … between residential segregation, education, employment, socioeconomic status, the cost and quality of healthy food, community resources, and health care” (Reskin, , p. 23) illustrate how dense linkages among only a few social domains, in which overt racial discrimination may be difficult to identify, produce profound racial disparities in quality of life.

Judge Batten ordered the case dismissed before any discovery phase (Fox, ), indicating that historical or social science discussions of race in metropolitan Atlanta were not considered germane to his decision.

Using figures provided by the Atlanta Regional Council, researchers estimate that the “superdistrict” of Sandy Springs added more than 24,000 white residents between 1980 and 1997. The Roswell and north Fulton superdistricts grew even faster, adding more than 48,000 and 59,000 white residents, respectively (Jaret, Ruddiman, & Phillips, , pp. 126–127).

Similar dynamics in the insurance industry had also subsidized white flight; while expensive new homes in areas like north Fulton actually held greater risk for loss, insurance companies charged lower premiums there than in majority black communities in Atlanta (Emling, ).

These were House Resolutions 275–279 (Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, ; Georgia General Assembly, n.d.).

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Michan Andrew Connor

Michan Andrew Connor is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies (School of Urban and Public Affairs) at the University of Texas at Arlington. He earned his PhD from the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California in 2008 and spent the 2012–2013 academic year as a visiting fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Emory University. He is currently researching and writing Twenty-First Century Secession, a manuscript addressing the relationships between political boundaries, power, and identity in metro Atlanta, with particular attention to the ways that localism, privatization, and taxpayer politics have emerged as defenses of white privilege in a notionally “postracial” society. His work has been published in the Journal of Urban History and the Southern California Quarterly.