"New South" Racism

“New South” Racism

   By Class Struggle Education Workers

Atlanta has been run for decades by black Democrats in the service of the white capitalist rulers. Above: Mayor Kasim Reed speaking in 2016 at 130th anniversary of Coca-Cola. (Photo: Coca-Cola)

None of the Above is not only the important story of black educators wrongly accused and convicted. Shani Robinson and Anna Simonton reveal the political context and describe the social forces in Atlanta that conspired to turn the “cheating scandal” into a pretext to undermine the black community and the public schools that serve them.  Robinson and Simonton bring together the strands of intentional racial segregation in housing, charter schools and the corporate educational “reform” campaign that together weave a racist tapestry in the South’s cultural and commercial center. Today, Atlanta boasts the corporate headquarters of Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Home Depot, UPS, CNN, the Southern Company and ten other Fortune 500 companies., while Hartsfield airport is one of the busiest in the world.

It is politically revealing that a racist witch hunt against black educators occurred in Atlanta, this commercial powerhouse and shining example of the “New South.” Born as an anti-bellum railway terminus and bastion of the Confederacy, Atlanta was burned down as the Union army under General Sherman continued its decisive march to the older Georgia city, Savannah. After the Civil War, Atlanta rebuilt again as a railway hub and became a magnet for a nascent black middle class. Atlanta is home to this country’s oldest historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Morehouse and Spellman for instance, set up in conjunction with the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction. Atlanta continues as a center of African American culture.

Atlanta suffers the contradictions of a Civil Rights movement controlled and constrained by the Democratic Party. It was both a center of church-based civil rights agitation and a center of racist reaction. The Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue was home to “Daddy” King and MLK, Jr. A majority black city from 1970 until recently, Atlanta has been in the political hands of black Democrats since the election of Maynard Jackson in 1973 as the first black mayor of a major city since Reconstruction.

Andrew Young with Delta Airlines CEO Richard Anderson
in front of plane named for the former Atlanta mayor
and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. (Photo: Delta Airlines)

From the City Council to the school boards, to this day Atlanta is run politically by black Democrats acting as agents of the overwhelmingly white capitalist ruling class. Jackson was mayor for three terms with an inter-regnum of Atlanta Civil Rights Democrat, Andrew Young
whose mission was to make Atlanta even a better opportunity for big business at the expense of the city’s most vulnerable residents. To burnish its New South credentials and attract business, Atlanta’s boosters adopted the slogan, “the city too busy to hate.” But it was not too busy to tear down and gentrify historically black neighborhoods, underfund segregated black schools, and unleash police terror and mass incarceration on its desperately unemployed black youth.

The Old South still lives in busy Atlanta. And you don’t have to go far from Auburn Avenue Street to find more explicit expressions of it. A short car ride east from downtown is the infamous granite outcropping, Stone Mountain, scene of the reincarnation of the modern Ku Klux Klan in 1915. To claim their race terrorist continuity, the grandson of the original Grand Wizard, Nathan Bedford Forest, blessed the new Klan. The shrine to the Confederacy and its more modern “redeemers” now is also an amusement park and a draw for tourists.

Ku Klux Klan racist terrorists rally in favor of U.S. war in Vietnam, June 1967. Antiwar protesters in the background. (Photo: AP)

You can drive along Robert E. Lee Boulevard and Jefferson Davis Street to view the huge bas-relief sculptures of the Confederate masters of the slavocracy on horseback. Collaborating on this racist Mount Rushmore that wasn’t competed until 1972 was the sculptor who worked on the more famous monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In his 1963 “dream” speech, King said, “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain, Georgia.” But before freedom can ring out for African Americans, it will take a demolition of the Old South’s monuments and a thoroughgoing political demolition of the structures that are the racist legacy of slavery.

---

Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.