Atlanta’s biracial coalition pursued white annexation to prevent a black-majority city

Evidence

In the workings of the coalition, the balance of power between the black community and the business elite was a delicate one. By 1950, for instance, blacks composed well over a third of Atlanta’s total population. Continued black migration into the city and white flight from it seemed likely to increase their percentage even further. For coalition leaders, the issue presented a special problem. The alliance relied on black numbers at the polls, of course, and would likely receive a boost there as a result. At the same time, coalition leaders worried that if the black percentage of the population became too pronounced, that would work against the coalition. As Hartsfield reminded blacks and whites alike, a black-majority city would be simply unworkable in the South. To Hartsfield and his allies, the solution was simple. Atlanta should annex the surrounding suburbs, thereby increasing its size and, more important, its white population. The mayor had pushed the idea as far back as the early 1940s. In a letter to several hundred “gentlemen” of the upscale Buckhead neighborhood, he presented annexation as a way to bring “decent people”—middle-class whites—into the city. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 93

Categorization

• XREF: Annexation-as-white-dilution connects to literature on municipal annexation as racial strategy (e.g. Trebbi and colleagues on post-1965 Southern annexation) and to the reader’s segregation-to-colorblind-conservatism frame. — connects to: Atlanta was simultaneously a civil rights center and a segregationist stronghold — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 41; Postwar Atlanta’s desegregation was driven by a white-black moderate coalition, not activists or reactionaries — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 50; Atlanta’s moderate coalition allied blacks with affluent whites against white workers — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 100 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s theme of spatial engineering to manage populations, showing whites used political geography to dilute black political power.

Broader Connections

• Atlanta’s moderate coalition allied blacks with affluent whites against white workers #expands (0.78) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 100