Class Warfare in Black Atlanta: Grassroots Struggles, Power, and Repression under Gentrification
Augustus Wood
University of North Carolina Press
Between 1966 and 2015, the city of Atlanta was transformed. In the late 1960s, Black politicians ascended to the top of the power structure for the first time thanks to newly enfranchised Black working-class voters. Through the early 1970s, the demographics of the city shifted, and the combination of Black empowerment and white flight produced a growing Black working-class majority that increasingly demanded Black Power policies that often clashed with the policies supported by affluent residents. But by the 2010s, Atlanta’s city core had been thoroughly gentrified, and the ability of Black working-class Atlantans to organize and build power had diminished significantly.
Paying close attention to political economy and class while drawing on unexamined archival sources and oral histories of Black working-class Atlantans, especially Black women, in Class Warfare in Black Atlanta, Wood reframes our understanding of contemporary Black urban life by highlighting the centrality of the dynamics of intraracial class conflict in urban space.