Atlanta offers a sharp perspective of the Black experience
in the urban South during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
The emergence of its Black community reveals 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, Atlanta grew phenomenally to nearly 22,000
people by 1870.
As the major railroad hub in the South, Atlanta became a commercial and
financial center. Although the city's business leadership was
a new elite, its economy depended on many ways on the old
cash crop. The rail network distributed cotton throughout
and
beyond the South and stimulated
in Atlanta the growth of banks and brokerages, mills and factories. Atlanta
was the shining example of
Henry
Grady's New South ideology — 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 population contended with 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,
many of whom, like themselves, were poor migrants from the Georgia piedmont.
Without slavery to ensure white supremacy, white southerners
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
segregated 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's entrenchment,
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 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 social 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 many whites and the hopes of some Blacks
when he pleaded for accommodation to political and social inequality
for
the
sake of economic progress. His speech echoed Henry Grady's
appeal in the previous decade for economic growth and racial reconciliation
within the structures 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, increasingly excluded from their traditional
trades, were forced to find a market among their own race.
The
Riot of 1906, in which white mobs massacred Blacks, underscored the
failures of accommodation, confirming that violence, not justice, was
the reality of Jim Crow. For protection, survival, and uplift, the Black
community had 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 the United States. Along
Auburn
Avenue in the Fourth Ward on the east side, where most of Atlanta's
Black elite lived, a new stage of 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.
