America's Black Capital

Starred review from September 11, 2023
Historian Ogbar (Hip Hop Revolution) presents an illuminating and thought-provoking history of Atlanta from the 19th century to the present. Focusing on how, in spite of suppression by Georgia’s white nationalists and neo-Confederates, the city became a mecca for African Americans, Ogbar contends that this result was achieved through a commitment to “Afro-self-determinism” (“the belief that black people would be best served by creating institutions for, by, and in the best interests of black people”) and a rejection of desegregation, integration, and interracial cooperation as goals. Ogbar leads the reader through several eras, including the end of slavery, post-Reconstruction, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century, and provides a harrowing description of the 1906 Atlanta Racial Massacre. Throughout, he traces the efforts, initially on the outskirts of the city, of Black residents to build Black institutions. By the 1970s, Atlanta was home to Black universities and schools, Black businesses, Black suburbs, and Black political strength (in 1973, the city was the first in the South to elect a Black mayor). By the 21st century, Atlanta flourished as a center of Black life. Ogbar’s meticulous account is both an eye-opening reassessment of the origins of African American political power and a significant contribution to American history.

October 1, 2023
A chronicle of Atlanta's rise as the foremost city in Black America. It should come as no surprise that Black Atlanta turned the 2020 election in favor of not just Joe Biden but also two Democratic senators in a putatively red state. It came as a surprise all the same, writes University of Connecticut historian Ogbar, that the turnout was so stunning given so many efforts to impede the Black vote. Black residents of Atlanta, he writes, "cast more votes than black people in any other metro area in the United States." That's just one surprise in a narrative that takes Atlanta from the most important city of the Confederacy outside Richmond, to the so-called citadel of the KKK, to the first southern metropolis to elect a Black mayor. There are countless reasons for Atlanta's success as a city of global importance. For one thing, there are more Black institutions of higher learning in Atlanta than anywhere else in the U.S., and a solid Black middle class expanded from city center to suburbs long ago. The author traces the rise and persistence of white nationalism against this background of Black accomplishment. Up to the present, the white vote has largely gone to reactionaries, illustrating another of Ogbar's central points: "Whatever success that black people achieved in the city, they achieved in spite of the city's racist policies, not because white people (power brokers, city officials, or random white civilians) had aided them." Even if the year that the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain was unveiled was the same year that Ebony magazine called Atlanta "the Black Mecca," Black Atlantans have long come together in the ongoing project to overcome white resistance. A revealing history that points to a Black Atlanta destined to be an ever more important economic and political center.

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