Atlanta’s reverse Obama moment (II)

Category: Notes from Atlanta Published on Saturday, 05 December 2009 07:21 Written by Farooq Kperogi Hits: 2062

Unfortunately, my expectations about the Dec. 1 runoff contest didn’t materialize. Atlanta did not, after all, have its Obama moment. Mary Norwood, the white female candidate who won the first round of polls on Nov. 3, lost by a razor-thin margin to Mohammed Kasim Reed, the black candidate. Reed defeated Norwood with mere 758 votes out of a total of more than 83,000 votes cast, representing a margin of less than one percent.

And, although both candidates garnered substantial votes across the black/white racial divide, the voting pattern largely followed the traditional racial fault-lines of the city. In the northern part of the city, which is 88 percent white and only 8 percent black, Norwood received 87 percent of the votes and Reed received only 12 percent. In the southern part of the city, which is 97 percent black and only two percent white, Reed got 81 percent of the votes and Norwood received 18 percent.

This shows that Norwood did better in black neighborhoods than Reed did in white neighborhoods. Or, put another way, more blacks voted outside their race than whites did. And in a city where over 50 percent of the registered voters are black, Norwood’s performance may signal a shift in the character of Atlanta’s politics.

(It’s important to note that the “city of Atlanta” is different from “Metro Atlanta,” although the city of Atlanta is the nucleus and urban core of Metro Atlanta. While the city of Atlanta comprises only one county, that is, Fulton county, and is only a little over half a million in population, Metro Atlanta comprises several different smaller cities that have been “swallowed” by Atlanta and are now practically indistinguishable from it. Metro Atlanta consists of 28 counties with a population of nearly 6 million people. In this article I talk only of the city of Atlanta).

Well, you see, Atlanta has not always been a predominantly black city. The “blackening” or, if you like, the “browning” of Atlanta started only in the 1960s when black people, for the first time, began to move out in large numbers from small rural towns to big cities in search for opportunities for upward social and economic mobility. As with all such movements all over America in the 1960s and the 1970s, the white population which, because of the newly passed Civil Rights legislation, couldn’t drive away the freshly arrived black migrants, decided to flee to the suburbs. They couldn’t bear to live with black people in the same city. This phenomenon is called “white flight.”

White flight has often led to the desolation or near desolation of many previously thriving cities, such as Detroit in the state of Michigan (dubbed America’s blackest city because its population is over 80 percent black). But Atlanta defied the trend. In spite of white flight (perhaps because of it) Atlanta became one of the most prosperous cities in America, and now has the distinction of being home to some of the wealthiest black entrepreneurs and managers in the world.

Atlanta’s string of virile, hardworking black mayors and entrepreneurial political establishment attracted an impressive flock of Fortune 500 companies (it has America’s third largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies) and helped win it the bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympics.

So Atlanta’s succession of black mayors from 1973, in more ways than one, exploded the myth of the intrinsic incompetence of black leadership. “We haven’t always gotten the credit for that, no,” former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young and U.S. Ambassador to the UN, who supervised the Atlanta’s dramatic transformations during the 1980s, told the Washington Times recently. “I brought in 1,100 companies from around the world - $70 billion in private investment - and generated more than a million new jobs. But most people think that’s automatic, that that would have happened anyway.”

Now that white people have realized that their race-induced fright of and flight from (black) Atlanta has not affected the city’s expansion and prosperity, they are moving back to the city in droves. According to the Brookings Institution, between 2000 and 2006, Atlanta’s white population grew faster than that of any other U.S. city.

In 2000, according to U.S. Census data, Atlanta was 33 percent white and 61 percent black. In 2007, the numbers were 38 percent white and 57 percent black. It’s conceivable that in 2010 the white population could exceed 40 percent.

Whites are not only recapturing Atlanta; they are also driving low-income black people out of the city through an apparently benign but dangerously effective strategy called “gentrification.” This is the term used to denote the deliberate act of restoring and buying off of run-down urban areas by the upper middle class with the aim of displacing low-income residents. This is done “by over-paying for (and over-pricing) the real estate and so economically expelling the original poor inhabitants.”

Norwood’s near-victory may not represent Atlanta’s Obama moment, but it does signal a dramatic change in the offing in this city that has been dubbed the Mecca of Black America:  with the unprecedented return of the white middle class to Atlanta and its attendant forced black flight, Reed (who was born a Muslim but is now a practicing Christian) may be the last black mayor of Atlanta.