| Part 1
(2:13 min.)
|
Between 1960 and 2000
the number of southern Black suburbanites grew by about 5.5 million.
This recent suburbanization, however, has neither erased nor overcome
historic patterns of spatialized racial inequality in the metropolitan
South. |
| Figure Referenced in
Part 1: |
|
| Part 2 (2:54 min.)
|
From a southern strategy of Black community building in “Negro
expansion areas” during the immediate post-WWII period, African
American suburbs faced intensified segregation and isolation by
the 1960s.
|
| Figure Referenced in Part 2: |
|
| Part 3 (4:47 min.)
|
During the post war period, Black neighborhoods in the metropolitan
South grew primarily through new home construction as community
leaders negotiated land allotments for single family homes, apartments
and public housing.
|
| Figure Referenced in Part 3: |
|
| Part 4 (4:59 min.)
|
Postwar development on Atlanta’s
west side, led by the Atlanta Housing Council, illustrates the process
of African American suburban growth through which self-contained
Black neighborhoods emerged, geographically removed from white areas.
|
| Figure Referenced in Part 4: |
|
|
Part 5 (4:21 min.)
|
By the early 1950s, developers had started rapid development of
single family homes and apartments, constructing twelve thousand
new residences in the city. Yet, political obstacles, discrimination,
and limited urban space curbed Atlanta's African American housing
boom by the end of the decade.The racialized neighborhood transition
in Atlanta left deep scars on the urban fabric and the body politic.
|
| Part 6 (4:00 min.)
|
An onslaught of highway
construction and urban renewal in the late 1950s altered the equation
between black neighborhood growth and the availability of new housing
on the suburban fringe. Thousands of displaced Black Atlantans moved
into neighborhoods on the city's west, south and southeast sides
as whites took flight to the outlying fringe.
|
| Figure Referenced in Part 6: |
|
|
Part 7 (2:40 min.)
|
The long-term impact of discrimination in housing and lending, coupled
with other types of spatially-oriented discrimination such as the
flight of capital — in schools, services, commercial and other
investments — are visually evident today in some suburbs of
south DeKalb County.
|
| Part 8 (4:09 min.)
|
Recent suburbanization continues to reinforce African Americans'
race and class identities in ways that are distinct from whites.
There is a stark spatial divide between white job growth, investment,
and population growth and African American suburbanization in Atlanta
and across the metropolitan U.S.
|
Andrew
Wiese is a historian of American urban and social history. He received
his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1993. Prof. Wiese’s areas
of interest include the history of housing and residential landscapes,
housing policy, suburbanization, and the spatial production of race and
class. He is the author of
Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization
in the Twentieth Century (2004), which won the American Culture Association's
John G. Cawelti Book Prize. Wiese recently completed an edited volume
of essays and documents on North American suburban history,
The Suburb
Reader (2006), co-edited with Becky Nicolaides.
Video of Prof. Wiese was taken at "The End of Southern Exceptionalism"
conference held at Emory University in March of 2006, an event organized
by
Prof.
Joseph Crespino of the Emory University History Department and
Prof.
Matt Lassiter of the Department of History at the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor.
Published: 29 September 2006
© 2006 Andrew Wiese and
Southern
Spaces 
