Atlanta offers a sharp perspective of the Black experience
in the urban South during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
The evolution of its Black community reflects the constraints and opportunities
that characterized Atlanta's development as the leading city of the New
South. Born a
railroad
terminus in the 1840s, Atlanta was a town of less than 10,000 people
at the start of the Civil War. Rebounding quickly after the devastation
by Sherman's army, however, she grew phenomenally to nearly 22,000 people
by 1870.
As the major railroad hub in the Southeast, Atlanta became the region's
commercial and financial center. Although her business leadership was
a new elite, the city's economy was nevertheless based on the old cash
crop. The rail network distributed cotton throughout the region and generated
in Atlanta the growth of banks and brokerages, mills and factories. Atlanta
was the shining example of
Henry
Grady's New South - seeking industrialization through northern capital
and promising racial justice through segregation. But in spite of the
city's aggressive promotion of its economic agenda and its myth of racial
stability, Atlanta, like the rest of the South, would for the next several
decades struggle for a New South economy under the old racial order. The
city's African American community evolved within the framework of this
struggle.
In 1870, Blacks accounted for nearly half of Atlanta's population. As
free persons they competed for jobs and living space with Whites who,
like themselves, were poor migrants from the Georgia piedmont. Without
slavery to ensure White supremacy, the South developed a system of racial
segregation so encompassing and effective that it overturned the limited
gains of Reconstruction and guaranteed the subordination of Blacks in
every area of life.
Jim
Crow, as the system became known, had its full flowering in cities
like Atlanta where economic access, political power, and social interaction
were denied or severely restricted. Blacks were confined to the lowest
status, lowest paying jobs, disfranchised by the White primary, and excluded
from or separated in neighborhoods, schools, parks, libraries, restaurants,
and other facilities. Black Atlantans were concentrated in two areas of
the city located east and west of downtown. Although most were common
laborers, a small number, perhaps less than ten percent, stood above the
masses by virtue of their occupation, education, or income. These were
the businessmen, educators, clergy, and other professionals, who ironically
served the old racial order.
Following Emancipation and before Jim Crow was firmly entrenched, the
services that slaves had performed offered the best business opportunities
for freed Blacks. In a booming economy like Atlanta's a few Blacks made
a good income catering to Whites in personal services such as barbering,
shoemaking, tailoring and dressmaking, and in building trades like masonry,
carpentry, and plastering. Generally locating their establishments in
downtown along Peachtree, Broad, Marietta and adjacent streets, they were
the core of the Black business elite, an upper class relative to the Black
masses, but middle class by White community standards. An estimated two
percent of Black Atlantans like
Alonzo
Herndon, the city's premier barber, had substantial business earnings
and real estate, qualifying by any measure for upper income status.
The institutional development of Black Atlanta was as phenomenal as its
business enterprise. As the Black population in Atlanta grew five-fold
in five years after Emancipation, so too did the number of its churches
increase greatly. Having worshipped during slavery in segregated pews
in White churches or in independent Black churches under the supervision
of Whites, as was the arrangement for
Bethel
African Methodist Episcopal and
Friendship
Baptist, Blacks were eager for religious autonomy. Mutual aid
societies were the natural outgrowth of churches seeking to meet
their members'
financial emergencies in sickness and death. The support of schools,
however, was perhaps the church's most significant community endeavor.
Since the
Atlanta public school system did not begin operations until 1872 and
had only three grammar schools for Blacks, early Black education
in Atlanta
is primarily the story of private institutions supported by local Black
churches and White northeastern mission societies. Within twenty-three
years of Emancipation, five Black private schools in Atlanta were founded:
Clark,
Spelman,
Morehouse,
and
Morris
Brown colleges and
Atlanta
University. Atlanta had become a regional center for Black higher
education.
When
Booker
T. Washington delivered his "
Atlanta
Compromise" speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition
in 1895, the triumph of Jim Crow in law and custom was virtually complete.
Washington addressed the fears of Whites and the hopes of Blacks when
he pleaded for accommodation to political and social inequality for the
sake of economic progress. In broad terms, his speech echoed Henry Grady's
appeal in the previous decade for economic growth and racial reconciliation
within the framework of White supremacy.
By the turn of the twentieth century, a more firmly established Jim Crow
had altered the constraints and opportunities for Black community-building
in Atlanta. Black businessmen, who were increasingly excluded from their
traditional trades, were forced to find a market among their own people.
The
Riot of 1906, in which White mobs massacred Blacks, underscored
the failures of accommodation, confirming that violence, not justice,
was
the handmaiden of Jim Crow. For protection, survival, and uplift, the
Black communityhad to rely more heavily on its own resources and seek
new strategies.
W.
E. B. Du Bois, a professor of history and economics at Atlanta University,
challenged the compromise that Washington had negotiated in Atlanta.
In
1905, he and others founded the
Niagara
Movement, the first twentieth century civil rights organization
to seek full citizenship rights. On the economic front, Black cooperation
and self-sufficiency gave rise to one of the most significant Black commercial
districts in America. Along
Auburn
Avenue in the fourth ward on the east side, where most of Atlanta's
Black elite lived, a new stage of Black enterprise unfolded. An African
American market that had grown nearly four times its post-war size could
support a comprehensive mix of businesses. Auburn Avenue was virtually
a separate economy behind the color line. Not only were there barbershops,
drugstores, restaurants, and office complexes, but also, like the
characteristic
components of Atlanta's economy, there were banks and insurance companies.
From the profits he amassed in barbering, Alonzo Herndon capitalized
Atlanta
Life Insurance Company, which became the city's leading Black
business. Auburn Avenue would have its heyday from the 1930s through
the 1950s,
thriving on the crest of segregation. The civil rights movement of the
1960s, however, in eliminating the major barriers to political
participation
and public accommodations would usher in a new stage of Black community
building on the city's west side, leaving Auburn Avenue without
its market,
without its reason for being.
