Disintegration Read Online Free PDF Page A

unfairly pulled over by police for “driving while black,” or that the ensuing interaction with the police officer is disproportionately likely to spin tragically out of control. Until then, I’m convinced that race still matters, even if it matters less.
    But Johnson is onto something when he argues that a single black narrative no longer applies—if it ever did—and that heterogeneity of class and culture are as much a feature of black America as they are of the rest of America. He is also right when he says that it is time to look at black America—I would say the four black Americas—with a clear and critical eye.
    To find out where we are, we have to trace where we’ve been. There was a time before disintegration, a time before integration. So let us turn now to the era of segregation, a system designed to oppress and demean—and a time African Americans made much more of than we sometimes give ourselves credit for.

2
WHEN WE WERE ONE
    T he wooded hills around Atlanta boast some of the wealthiest black-majority suburbs in the country, sylvan tracts where cavernous McMansions line emerald-green golf courses and the relatively disadvantaged are marked by their puny entry-level BMWs and Benzes. It’s no exaggeration to say that the city whose destruction was so lavishly lamented by Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler in
Gone with the Wind
has become, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the closest thing to an authentic mecca for the black middle class. Thirty or forty years ago, upwardly mobile African Americans were all about making their way to Washington, D.C., also known as Chocolate City, a place of seemingly limitless possibility for the young, gifted, and black. Now the preferred destination is Atlanta—the ATL in the argot of hip-hop culture, of which Atlanta is a nexus—and nobody stops to think of the irony: Wasn’t the idea to get
away
from Tara?
    In the years following the civil rights movement, when Atlanta was struggling to shed its Old South historical identity and become a hub of the modern world, boosters called it “TheCity Too Busy to Hate.” A hundred years ago, however, hate was the main event. Black Atlanta was under an assault no less relentless than the scorched-earth campaign waged decades earlier by General William Tecumseh Sherman, but not nearly so well known—a campaign of terror against African Americans, with a climax that isn’t mentioned, for some reason, in the slick promotional materials handed out by the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau. Back then, the story of race in Atlanta mostly centered on a swath of more or less contiguous neighborhoods south of the city’s busy center—the University Center District, Sweet Auburn, Brownsville, and Darktown—and was largely defined by white Atlanta’s white-hot revanchist rage.
    By 1906, the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans in the states of the former Confederacy was well under way. Then, as now, Atlanta was the economic and cultural heart of something called the “New South.” Henry Grady, a prominent journalist, orator, and eventual co-owner of the
Atlanta Constitution
, had coined the term a decade after the Civil War to herald his vision of a reborn South, literally risen from the ashes of Sherman’s apocalypse—a New South in which the old order was reestablished, with whites as masters and blacks as their laborers and servants. The 1877 removal of the last federal troops from the South, along with the 1883 Supreme Court ruling in the so-called Civil Rights Cases that allowed states to enforce Jim Crow laws, put an end to the false spring of Reconstruction. For black people in Atlanta, the air turned bitter cold. A poll tax was imposed. Mixing in theaters, on streetcars, and at public parks was outlawed. Atlanta moved toward becoming the most segregated city in the South, its code of strict separation, white dominance, and black subservience enforced by all-too-frequent