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March 30 - April 7, 2020
the textile mills served as a ripe recruiting ground.7 In mill neighborhoods across Atlanta—the Exposition Cotton Mills, the Whittier Mills in the northwest section, the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills on the East Side, and especially the Piedmont Mills off Ashby Street—the Columbians made their pitch directly to working-class whites.
“We’re telling them stuff they want to hear—that they, the white Anglo-Saxons, are the best people on earth, and that they’re entitled to more than they’re getting.”8
“Our heroes in Europe didn’t die to give a nigger the right to marry a white American girl,” he thundered. “That’s right!” roared the crowd,
the Columbians claimed they defended Anglo-Saxon civilization from communism, which called for an “ungodly doctrine of one nation and one race.” “This doctrine, if not repelled,” the Columbians warned, “will bring about a condition where all men will be colored and no man will be white.”
Dr. Samuel Green. In late 1945 Green, an unassuming man with wire-rimmed glasses and a toothbrush mustache, anointed himself the Grand Dragon of the Association of Georgia Klans and led his new recruits to Stone Mountain on Atlanta’s outskirts.
hooded men who constructed it, the blazing crucifix was meant “to let the niggers know the war is over and that the Klan is back on the market.”
the Association of Georgia Klans appealed mainly to working-class whites, who “will not stop to think but will fall in line with ‘Dr. Green’ as a person of such ranking can easily deceive people who lead an uneventful life.”
Joe Wallace seemed the embodiment of respectability.
His most treasured membership, however, was to Klavern No. 297 of the Association of Georgia Klans. There, Wallace made a name for himself as head of their “Housing Kommittee,” leading the fight against black “invasions” in the area.
West End Cooperative Corporation (WECC). Though technically outside the Klan, the group adopted the hooded order’s means and methods, not to mention much of its membership.25
the organization successfully shifted the terms of debate from one that stressed the defense of white supremacy to one that stressed the defense of home, neighborhood, and community. “You of the middle class,” Joe Wallace asked
“you with that Southern accent, Georgia-born and reared, are you going to stand by and lose your birthright without a struggle?”
Wallace gave a simple pitch. “We don’t hate the nigger,” he would tell them. “We love him—in his place!”
“The Eagle will stand for the rights of Southern people.” Those rights—to private property, segregation, and self-determination—had been trampled on by petty politicians and minority groups.
From the 1930s on, leading appraisal manuals linked the worth of property to the status of its occupants, warning that the arrival of “undesirable” racial and ethnic groups would cause home prices to plummet.
The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), for instance, instituted the practice of “red lining” minority areas—identifying them on color-coded maps as neighborhoods in decline and decay, where property values were in doubt and, therefore, where loans were strongly discouraged as a risky investment.
“A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing to a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood.”
“community integrity”
A community which has “integrity” as defined by that committee was a complete, homogenous community. It was a community composed of neighbors who were accustomed to living together, and whose children go to the same schools, churches, and parks. It had its own shopping center and a variety of homes in various classes.
If a contested area lacked “community integrity,” the WSMDC stepped aside and let racial transition continue. But if the WSMDC decided that an area indeed had “integrity,” it threw its considerable strength behind private efforts to maintain the racial status quo.
By 1960 three-fourths of the homes in Moreland Heights were occupied by blacks. Just as WSMDC planners and local residents had feared, the churches were “wiped out” by the racial transition.
Three years time
counted their home as their only investment of note. They too understood racial transition as a threat to property values and reacted accordingly.
“all of the hell being raised is mostly by people not directly concerned.” “They do not want to live next to colored people, but they want us to,” fumed another man. “I feel that if they want to control my house, they should buy it themselves. I will be happy to sell it to any of these people who are nailing up the ‘WHITE AREA’ signs.”
“We are very interested in our neighbors, and if [our house] was for sale, we will never sell to a negro,” wrote a paint store salesman. “We are one hundred per cent for our white people to live & stand by each other.” Helping blacks move into the area was not merely unconscionable but unpatriotic. “My house is not for Sale,” a saleswoman with a home decorating outfit informed the committee. “I am a red blooded American and a true Southerner.”
Despite the feelings of the rest of the neighborhood, these whites on Dewey wanted out. They signed a compact the following summer promising to “stick together” by selling their homes on the black real-estate market together and then fleeing the neighborhood en masse. Oddly enough, it was in deserting their “community” that they most acted like one.
Soon after World War II, however, a wave of white Atlantans, unable to find housing inside the city, began building a new community there from scratch. Modest homes, priced in the $6,000 to $10,000 range, soon dotted the newly laid out streets. “The thing about Collier Heights that no one in the neighborhood realized at the time,” an observer later noted, “was that it lay astride the corridor out which the city’s expanding Negro population was moving.
Selling to blacks meant selling out whites. “It is recommended before you sign,” the Civic Club warned, “that each of you take the time to thoroughly think through and consider just what you as an individual stand to lose both financially and morally by the action of several people in the community selling to colored and leaving you or your neighbor in a predicament created by this selfish few.”
“We ask you, as a fair-minded individual, to refuse to make a fast dollar at the expense of the majority of the 150 or more home owners in this always white community.”
Avery appealed to the residents’ racial pride. “If our Negro real estate people can play fair, certainly our white real estate men can do as much,” he chided. “Please refuse to have anything to do with sales of white owned homes in Collier Heights to colored.”36
Without unanimous support for staying, the alternative of selling gained strength as 1954 wore on. While white homeowners wished to sell their homes to buyers of the same race, they realized that no white buyer would pay full price for homes in a “transition neighborhood” like theirs. Ultimately, financial concerns trumped racial ones. “I will not take a loss on my home,” noted a typical resident of Collier Drive. Therefore, much of the neighborhood turned to the black real-estate market, where the homes would sell at much higher prices.
Finally, when 87 percent of the neighborhood supported the idea of selling, the group decided to list their homes with black brokers. (Absolute unanimity was not needed in this instance for the same reason it had been needed for the plan of defense. If a single sale could start a domino effect of white flight, everyone understood, then a vast majority of sales would quickly overwhelm any holdouts.) Indeed, the transition was swift. Within three months, all 135 homes in Collier Heights changed ownership from white to black.40
The fundamental flaw with the stress on “community” was that city planners sought to impose the boundaries of a community from above, when in reality a community could only be created in the minds of local residents. Whites on the fringes of a defended neighborhood—those living on Del Mar Lane in Adamsville, for instance—often rebelled against their inclusion in a “protected community.”
In the mind of the author, and countless other white Atlantans like him, the politics of progress was a zero-sum game in which every advance for civil rights meant an equal loss for whites.1 As the poem suggested, this phenomenon
Although the two terms are commonly conflated, “desegregation” did not, in practice, mean the same thing as “integration.” To be sure, many whites acquiesced to court-ordered desegregation, but that did not mean they were themselves willing to share public spaces with blacks. A majority of white Atlantans recoiled at the thought of social contact between the races, which they more commonly disdained as “interracial intimacy.”
In the end, court-ordered desegregation of public spaces brought about not actual racial integration, but instead a new division in which the public world was increasingly abandoned to blacks and a new private one was created for whites.
large numbers continued to ride, taking comfort in the knowledge that the racial code would be strictly enforced by the conductors.
the violent behavior of Georgia Power’s drivers became so pronounced that company officials worried it would hurt business.
all Atlanta motormen were deputized and armed with revolvers.6 But arming the drivers only made matters worse, as they became prone to use deadly force against even verbal infractions of the racial code.
This was Atlanta of the mid-1940s—before the rise of Bill Hartsfield’s biracial coalition and before the city started to worry about the impact that racial conflicts had on its image.
A private survey of bus usage from 1960 echoed the fact that blacks were becoming a predominant presence on the lines as working-class whites fled. Although African Americans represented only a third of the city’s population, the report noted, they made up “59 percent of the bus patronage during the rush period.”
The most glaring discrepancy in the distribution of these services, however, stood in the municipal golf courses. While blacks had at least some access to other sites, they were barred completely from the city’s five golf courses.
On November 8, 1955, the Court did just that. In a ruling of just fifty-eight words, the justices decided unanimously that lower courts had been wrong to apply the “separate but equal” doctrine to public facilities. Blacks had to be admitted to Atlanta’s golf courses on a completely equal basis.23 Segregationists were outraged.
Talmadge, for instance, suggested the city sell its parks and playgrounds to private interests who could keep them white. The Supreme Court’s ruling, he predicted dourly, would “probably mean the end of most public golf courses, playgrounds, and things of that type.” Governor Griffin agreed. “I can make the clear declaration that the state will get out of the park business before allowing a breakdown in segregation in the intimacy of the playground,” he announced.
study from 1960 showed that municipal facilities were still offered on a decidedly unequal basis: 20 football fields for whites, none for blacks; 22 baseball diamonds for whites, 3 for blacks; 16 recreation centers for whites, 3 for blacks; 119 tennis courts for whites, 8 for blacks; and 12 swimming pools for whites, 3 for blacks. The major municipal parks were still predominantly white spaces, with 42 reserved for whites, but just 3 for blacks.
More than anything, they were outraged that the city’s public pools would be desegregated in June 1963. “That summer people talked about the integration of the swimming pools and little else,” Police Chief Herbert Jenkins remembered. “Frankly, the police hoped for a rainy summer, for there were more eyeballers and agitators driving around trying to see how many Negroes were using the pools than there were people swimming.”
“SHALL YOU CONTINUE TO PAY FOR THEIR PLEASURE?” one segregationist sheet asked. “While they sit in the shade and spoon in the moon light, multiplying like rats, we continue to bleed ourselves with heavy taxes to carry the socialistic burden of feeding and clothing them.
He denounced the decision in no uncertain terms. “The court has thrown down the gauntlet,” Talmadge thundered. “Georgians accept the challenge and will not tolerate the mixing of the races in the public schools or any of its tax-supported public institutions.”
“Declaration of Constitutional Principles” of March 1956. Better known as the “Southern Manifesto,” the declaration was a joint statement from 101 of the region’s 128 representatives in the Senate and House, including the entire Georgia delegation. Condemning the “unwarranted decision of the Supreme Court” and announcing support for southern resistance, the manifesto was, in the words of one legal scholar, nothing less than “a calculated decision of political war.” Taken together, these pronouncements assured that segregationists projected a united front of opposition to desegregation.
the heart of their plan to defend school segregation, for instance, stood a revolutionary scheme called the “private-school plan.” In 1953, a full year before Brown, Governor Talmadge advanced a constitutional amendment giving the General Assembly the power to privatize the state’s entire system of public education. In the event of court-ordered desegregation, school buildings would be closed, and students would instead receive grants to attend private, segregated schools.
“by reverting to a private system, subsidizing the child rather than the political subdivision.”
