The South is a region of many myths, and Kevin Kruse takes on one of the most durable of them: Atlanta as the “city too busy to hate.” Kruse finds that Atlanta, like many other southern and northern cities in the postwar era, was a city in which “race and residence stood at the forefront of [Atlanta's] racial politics” (p. 42). He traces the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Mayor William Hartsfield's biracial, elite-controlled regime to manage the struggle between whites and blacks over urban space. White flight, the decades-long movement of whites to the Atlanta suburbs, was not only the result of this struggle over space; it was also the source of a new form of southern white conservatism based on whites' resentful exit from the urban South. For political scientists, this book is a reminder of the “long civil rights movement,” that began in the 1940s, before the Brown decision, and extended throughout the 1970s. At the local level, the Civil Rights movement was a struggle over politics that earlier political scientists would be quick to understand and appreciate: a struggle over who gets what, when, where, and how. By taking an in-depth yet rigorous look at southern politics that goes beyond the limitations of National Election Study data or roll-call votes, the book provides valuable historical context to recent works on the transformation of southern politics.
In Kruse's skillful hands, Atlanta's struggle over integration takes on many of the characteristics of low-level urban warfare: Block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, white lower middle- and working-class Atlantans battled their African American counterparts in a conflict over control of urban space. Occasionally there were spectacular public displays of power and resistance to these changes in the shape of the Columbians (and former World War II vets), as well as, not surprisingly, the Ku Klux Klan. More often than not, the warfare was on a lower scale, in the shape of psychological skirmishes, from neighbor to neighbor and from church congregation to church congregation, as whites tried to build a collective and “respectable” resistance to integration. City officials, led by the Hartsfield regime, at times tried to intervene and fashion compromises between whites and blacks, yet most whites ultimately saw no benefit to these compromises.
The battle for Atlanta was an individual as well as a collective battle, and individual interests won out. While neighborhood control and community identity have long been touted as the bedrock of local politics, white Atlantans found that neighborhood identity stood no chance in the face of individual self-interest, which was in turn shaped by institutional practices and real estate markets. Exhortations to stand firm against encroaching black residents provided momentary moral support, but despite occasional attempts to persuade whites that integration would not be harmful, most white residents' intuitive knowledge of the real estate market played a role in eroding collective solidarity and resistance. As Kruse astutely points out, “racism in real estate practice,” in the workings of the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), the Federal Housing Administration, and the Veterans Administration, explicitly created and reinforced the color line and therefore real estate values. Indeed, for whites, “all of the authorities in their lives insisted that the presence of blacks would destroy” both home and neighborhood. Thus, white Atlantans' defense of their homes and communities was rooted in their defense of these significant investments that marked their middle-class identity and status.
Integration in Atlanta (and other cities) during these decades was rarely stable; it usually lasted as long as it took the last white family to decide to sell before they lost not only their neighborhood but also, more importantly, the all-white neighborhood school. Kruse's discussion of school politics traces how school officials tried to balance blacks' attempts to access better facilities and whites' attempts to defend their “freedom of association,” as battles over integration of the school system heated up in the 1960s. The rise and fall of private segregation academies within the city demonstrated to many white Atlantans the futility of remaining in the city. Meanwhile, the Hartsfield regime's hold on power increasingly weakened in the face of younger and less conciliatory African Americans and the growing restiveness of white small business owners like Lester Maddox, who felt that the white civic elites no longer respected their concerns.
For Atlanta's “greatest generation” of whites, integration was perceived as a homegrown attack on what they would eventually come to define as their individual rights to property, free association, and freedom from government intrusion. Although these rights and values would contribute to the conservative Reagan Republicanism of the 1980s, in the Atlanta of the 1940s through the 1960s it was a new definition and articulation of rights and beliefs that was inescapably intertwined with these racial battles. While recent books, such as David Lublin's The Republican South: Democratization and Partisan Change (2007), or Byron Shaefer and Richard Johnston's The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (2006), argue that it was class, or rather postwar economic transformation and growth, that created the rise of the Republican South, Kruse provides solid evidence that in the South, race played an inescapable and fundamental part in this transformation. Integration for many whites had come to have only one real meaning: the loss of home and neighborhood. Thus, any kind of concession to black citizenship rights was simply one concession too many.
African Americans won the battle over urban space: Atlanta by 1980, with the exception of longtime exclusive white neighborhoods such as Buckhead, was a majority-minority city. African Americans had come to control the city and schools. But it was a hollow victory except for those positioned to take advantage of the new opportunities provided by black-controlled city politics. Atlanta's schools, which had been at least 23% white by 1973, were by 2002 nearly all minority. Poverty among African Americans in the city was among the highest in the nation. Only the commitment of a few large corporations such as Coca-Cola saved Atlanta from the fate many other majority-minority cities faced in the 1970s, once the battle for integration had been won.
Although Atlanta's whites may have lost the battle for Atlanta, they won the war over integration. In the suburbs and other private-public spaces to which they retreated, they gained an absolute control over their neighborhoods and communities that had eluded them while they were city residents. On one hand, these new communities would fuel the economic engine that would power Atlanta's spectacular growth throughout the rest of the twentieth century. On the other hand, these new communities were able to block such moves as annexation attempts and expansion of the rapid transit network that could have increased regional efficiency and equity. The white former Atlantans, along with new regional transplants, had created a political movement in which they articulated an expansive definition of rights and values that melded their racial fears and resentments with free market ideology. This new suburban ideology would justify and expand their worldview across the South, and ultimately the white suburban nation.
Richard Nixon would recognize the political power of the new suburbia, southern and northern, in his choice of Supreme Court justices. And his new Court obligingly reinforced these suburban redoubts by decisively ruling, in Milliken v. Bradley, against any form of racial integration that went beyond city limits. The sons and daughters (and later grandchildren) of this strategic retreat to the suburbs would have little to no direct contact with the racial battles that had led to their relocation. While free markets and free choice—the hallmarks of the new conservative revolution—had seemingly created the new suburban Atlanta, Kruse argues that the very meaning of these terms had been forged in a political battle over race and space within the city limits. Newt Gingrich, who, as the author relates, could neatly address their racial fears without mentioning race at all, would embody the apotheosis of this new movement.
Atlanta's booming and inexorably spreading edge cities have prospered: They are full of elegant retail gallerias and ordinary malls, McMansions and starter homes, all of which are increasingly populated by a white, black, and increasingly Latino middle class. White Flight traces in one city several of the radical transformations of the American state in the twentieth century: the quest for full citizenship on the part of African Americans, the rise of suburban America as the political and economic engine for much of the nation, and the rise of the Republican Party from minority status in the 1940s to majority status by the end of the twentieth century. In these connections, Kruse illuminates a key phase in American political development.
