Carole Merritt, African American Community Building in Atlanta:A Guide to the Study of Race in America

Held within the ever-tightening grip of Jim Crow, the African American community was forced to save itself. The Black church became the agency of temporal as well as spiritual salvation. The church was the community's first autonomous institution -one that could not be reclaimed by Jim Crow. As an all-Black organization, it was compatible with Jim Crow and the system's effort to control Black behavior. But removed from the ownership and power of Whites, the church was inherently subversive of White control.

In Atlanta, as Black migration from the country increased phenomenally, churches sprang up everywhere in Black neighborhoods, much as they had done in rural areas when Blacks withdrew from second-class membership in White congregations. By 1900 Black Atlanta was served by innumerable churches.

The impact of the Black church on the community's institutional development was profound. Because public education in Georgia was slow in coming and for most Blacks was unavailable, Black churches and White mission societies from the North took the lead in supporting African American education in Atlanta. In Atlanta private education at all levels for Blacks predated public education in the city for Whites. And within twenty-three years of emancipation, six private colleges were established in Atlanta, making the city a regional center for Black education. Though most of the students in these institutions were in elementary and secondary courses, within a decade of its founding in 1867, Atlanta University awarded its first bachelor's degrees. And within thirty-five years of emancipation, most Blacks were literate.

Together the church and the school sought the moral and intellectual redemption of a newly freed people. The church was in the vanguard of that mission, offering a range of social services before social agencies were founded and providing the facilities and financial support for schools. Schools in turn prepared ministers and teachers and reached out to promote the development of their surrounding communities.

Confined for the most part to the deteriorating neighborhoods east and west of downtown, relegated to the lowest paying jobs in common labor and domestic service, and effectively disfranchised, many Black Atlantans experienced after emancipation conditions that rivaled their hardships in slavery. The city was a harsh test of their survival in freedom. At the turn of the century, Black household income in Atlanta was only half that of White households. And as Jim Crow tightened its noose, Blacks lost the dominance they had had during slavery in skilled trades like barbering, shoemaking, and masonry. Low income and poor health comprised only one side of the conditions that placed Black Atlantans at risk. Jim Crow made for a volatile situation. Separation and exclusion in neighborhoods, schools, and public accommodations did not eliminate the potential for conflict between the races in the street and on the job. The politics of race heightened tensions still more. In an eighteen-month campaign for the governorship, Hoke Smith and Clark Howell debated the merits of Black disfranchisement with racist rhetoric. As news extra after news extra was published one Saturday night erroneously reporting attacks by Black men on White women, a crowd of carousing young White men grew to a mob of thousands of all ages and classes intent on wholesale lynching. The four-day rampage in which countless Blacks were slaughtered became known as the Atlanta Riot of 1906. It was worst incidence of racial violence in the state. Violence, not order, was the handmaiden of Jim Crow. The African American community and its institutions sought peace and protection as well as moral and spiritual uplift and social reform. A distinctive corps of institutional and business leaders managed these initiatives.

Atlanta's leadership was largely professional and business elite: the ministers of the city's leading churches, college presidents and professors, physicians, and the prominent entrepreneurs and skilled tradesmen of the day. Relative to the masses of Blacks they were upper class, advantaged by income, education, and ancestry. They were for the most part light-skinned, a mixed race subcaste whose White ancestry had provided property, money, education, or a skill. The professional elite, who had trained at the normal schools, seminaries, and colleges in Atlanta and elsewhere were the "talented tenth," destined according to Du Bois to guide "the Mass away from the Worst." Because the needs of the community were so great and the leadership corps so small, Black leaders generally addressed more than their immediate area of responsibility. Ministers preached educational enlightenment and sponsored educational and social services. Teachers taught Bible for the moral uplift of their students, and businessmen were often the community's advocates in dealing with the White power structure.

One of the most prominent clergy in Atlanta was Henry Hugh Proctor, pastor of First Congregational Church, which like Atlanta University, was organized by the American Missionary Association. Under his ministry, the church conducted a number of community programs: afternoon Sunday schools at missions throughout the city; a home for working girls; a federal prison mission; and an employment bureau, cooking school, and library. W. E. B. Du Bois was among Atlanta's educational elite. As professor of economics and history at Atlanta University, he not only conducted pioneering empirical research on Black life, but also became the leading theorist and activist on racial equality. Challenging Booker T. Washington's accommodation to political and social equality for the sake of economic progress, Du Bois organized the Niagara Movement in 1905, the first Black civil rights organization in the twentieth century and the intellectual forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Through Du Bois, Atlanta became the focus of the national dialogue on the strategies for racial uplift. Participating in that dialogue was John Hope, the first Black president of Morehouse College and later of Atlanta University. As educational administrator and social activist, he fought Black disfranchisement and struggled to save Standard Life Insurance Company, one of the largest Black businesses in the nation; as the major advocate for University Homes, the nation's first black public-housing project, Atlanta became the laboratory for social engineering. Consistent with that effort, Lugenia Burns Hope, wife of John Hope, was instrumental in the Atlanta University's organization of the Neighborhood Union, the first social work agency of its kind in the South and a national model for other urban communities. If Atlanta was the laboratory of Jim Crow, it was also a laboratory for the Black community's institutional response to it. Clearly, Black progress was tied to an effective leadership. And in response to the divisions and exclusion of Jim Crow, Blacks struggled for unity. To survive they had to cooperate. To meet their needs they had to found their own institutions. To make money, they had to seek the Black market. Atlanta's business leadership was dominated by Alonzo Herndon, the city's premier barber, and founder/president of Atlanta Life Insurance Company, one of the largest Black financial institutions in America. Herndon's career spanned the major developments in Black enterprise in Atlanta. His business anchored the Auburn Avenue district, which in its heyday in the 1920s was considered the most significant Black business district in the country. Herndon's story captures a significant chapter of Atlanta's development as the commercial and financial center of the region.