Disintegration (4 page)

Perhaps, for the first time, it is impossible for anyone to escape the fact that the black American experience is nothing more or less than an integral and necessary component of the American experience. In the summer of 2008, as the Obama campaign churned along, the writer, scholar, and MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner Charles Johnson published an article in
The American Scholar
titled “The End of the Black American Narrative.” He posited that a “unique black American narrative, which emphasizes the experience of victimization, is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people, even when it is not fully articulated
or expressed. It is our starting point, our agreed-upon premise, our most important presupposition for dialogues about black America.” This narrative is based on “group victimization,” Johnson writes, and it is obsolete; it blinds us to “the inevitability of change”—and the fact of change.
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His argument is deliberately provocative, and I believe it goes too far; he seems ready to dismiss race as almost irrelevant in today’s America, while I believe its relevance is changed and diminished but still clearly palpable. Someday, perhaps, I won’t worry that my two middle-class, educated, young-adult sons run the risk of being 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.

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 “The
City 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 lynchings.

The same thing was happening throughout the South: the virtual re-enslavement of African Americans and a return to what racists like Grady considered the “natural” order of things. Nowhere was this bitter pill more difficult for black people to swallow than in Atlanta, where the former slaves and their descendants had come so far. There, a critical mass of black ambition had ignited what seemed an unstoppable reaction. Black educational institutions such as Atlanta University and Morehouse College were producing an educated elite. Black businesses, while still small in relative terms, were expanding and producing real economic benefits for the whole African American community. The grand project of black uplift looked so promising; now it was being snuffed out. In Atlanta, which was the intellectual center of black America, prominent thinkers waged a vital debate: What could black people do about this brutal campaign to kill the black American dream?

It was in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, during the Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895, that Booker T. Washington gave his famous—or infamous—“Atlanta Compromise” speech. He was willing for “the race” to indefinitely postpone its demands for full equality; in exchange, he demanded only the chance for African Americans to make slow, steady economic and educational progress. Once black people were sufficiently prepared, he believed, the barriers that now confined them would simply fall away.

To the white citizens of Atlanta, Washington offered soothing reassurance:

And to black Atlantans, a warning not to get too uppity:

The other side of the argument was represented by W. E. B. DuBois, the brilliant black scholar who would later be remembered as one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A Northerner who moved to Atlanta to take a professorship at Atlanta University, DuBois initially had favorable things to say about the “Atlanta Compromise,” partly out of respect for Washington and his
position as the most powerful and influential black man in the country. Soon, though, DuBois lost both his patience and his tolerance for any kind of compromise: “Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission,” he wrote in
The Souls of Black Folk
, his landmark 1903 book of essays. “[His] programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races.”

DuBois continued:

The debate, for the moment, was academic: Jim Crow marched relentlessly through the South, regardless of what black intellectuals might have to say about it. In Atlanta, the black entrepreneurs who had prospered during the boom years of the city’s fin-de-siècle renaissance were forced to retreat from the bustling central business district and consolidate in segregated enclaves, especially along Auburn Avenue—Sweet Auburn—which
Fortune
magazine in 1956 called “the richest Negro street in the world,” a mile and a half of black affluence. Like Harlem’s Strivers’ Row or Washington’s LeDroit Park, Sweet Auburn became an important focal point of a new and growing phenomenon: the black middle class.

To the west of the Auburn Avenue neighborhood, a unique complex of African American educational institutions was being assembled—Morehouse College for men and Spelman College for women, Clark College, Morris Brown College, Atlanta University. If Sweet Auburn was black America’s most powerful economic engine, the University Center District was its most dynamic intellectual center. At the eastern end of Sweet Auburn lay a sprawling, dirt-poor, all-black slum known as Darktown—one of scores of black ghettoes across the nation known by that generic name. The economic and social disparities among black Atlantans were clear for all to see, but at the time everyone assumed that eventually these gaps would become irrelevant. Ultimately, the rising tide of uplift would benefit all.

The few black Atlantans who were rich and the many who were poor had something in common, after all, that trumped any differences in wealth or education: They were all black, and white Atlantans were increasingly determined to keep
them on the black side of town—and to do so “by any means necessary,” as Malcolm X would say decades later in a very different context. There was nothing subtle about this campaign to put “colored” folks in their place and keep them there. In the summer of 1906, for example, a leading Georgia politician, Hoke Smith, issued what had become a typical warning: “We will control the Negro peacefully if we can—but with guns if we must.”

On September 20, 1906, a white woman named Knowles Kimmel—a farmer’s wife who would come to represent the flower of Southern womanhood—made a shocking claim. While she was alone at the Kimmel farmhouse, in a western Atlanta suburb known as Oakland City, a “strange, rough-looking Negro” had appeared out of nowhere and sexually assaulted her, she said. The assault, if it indeed took place, was built into a cause célèbre by the race-baiting Atlanta newspapers. The idea of sexually rapacious black men defiling innocent, defenseless white women was uniquely powerful—and, to white supremacists like Henry Grady and Hoke Smith, uniquely useful in radicalizing and mobilizing white public opinion.

Sensationalized reports about the Kimmel incident helped ignite a conflagration that turned out to be one of the most pivotal, least-remembered milestones in the history of race relations in the United States. In 1908, a muckraking New York journalist named Ray Stannard Baker—a contemporary and colleague of legends such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens—published a groundbreaking book,
Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy
. In the first chapter, he told the story of what happened on September 22, 1906, when Atlanta reached its flashpoint:

By the time his book was published, Baker had thoroughly investigated the alleged incidents. “Two of them may have been attempts at assaults,” he wrote, “but two palpably were nothing more than fright on the part of both the white woman and the Negro. As an instance, in one case an elderly woman, Mrs. Martha Holcombe, going to close her blinds in the evening, saw a Negro on the sidewalk. In a terrible fright she screamed. The news was telephoned to the police station, but before the officials could respond, Mrs. Holcombe telephoned them not to come out. And yet this was one of the ‘assaults’ chronicled in letters five inches high in a newspaper extra.”
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