African American Suburban Development in Atlanta
Andrew Wiese, San Diego State University
Overview:
|
One of the most striking developments in recent
southern history has been the pace and scale of African American
suburbanization. Delving into the history of Black organizations,
civic politics, race-based policies, class economics and neighborhood
formation, Andrew Wiese examines the circumstances and motives accompanying
African American suburban development in Atlanta from the early
1950s until the early twenty-first century. In his discussion of
the Candler-McAfee neighborhood in south Dekalb County, Prof. Wiese
considers how race and class have influenced the community as well
as the landscape. |
 |
|
Racial discrimination applied to the places where
most African Americans live remains the most significant basis for
persistent racial inequality. Southern suburbia proves to be in
step with, if not at the cutting edge of, trends in African American
residential patterns writ large across the country. |
|
Presentation Sections:
Video:
| 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. |
|
About Andrew Wiese:
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.
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.
Presentation Sections:
