Black voters delivered Hartsfield his 1949 mayoral victory by a razor-thin margin

Evidence

In the 1949 mayoral race, Bill Hartsfield and his main challenger, Fulton County Commissioner Charlie Brown, both reached for that vote. ANVL leaders eventually sided with Hartsfield, who pointed to his recent improvements and made specific promises for the future—more black police, a black fire station, additional parks and public projects in black neighborhoods, and so forth. Unwilling to concede the black vote, the Brown campaign tried to undermine the arrangement. On the night before the election, a doctored list of league endorsements appeared in black neighborhoods, this time with Charlie Brown chosen for mayor. While that served as testament to the new interest of white politicians in black votes, so did Hartsfield’s response. He contacted the editors of the Atlanta Daily World to denounce the list as a forgery and even sent a sound truck to patrol “those sections where negro citizens vote, for the purpose of notifying them of a false, fraudulent and forged ticket distributed in the late hours of last night.” His counterattack worked. In the primary, Hartsfield won with the slimmest possible majority—50.1 percent of the vote—over Brown and two other candidates. A change of just 102 ballots would have forced a runoff. The key to Hartsfield’s narrow victory, it seemed, was the solid support of black voters. In three predominantly black districts, for instance, the mayor trounced his challenger by a margin of 3,704 to 658. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 87

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Black voters helped pass an annexation that diluted their own electoral strength — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 96; Naming and airing black grievances disarmed black political challenges to Hartsfield. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 97

Broader Connections

• Naming and airing black grievances disarmed black political challenges to Hartsfield. #complicates (0.75) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 97
• Black voters helped pass an annexation that diluted their own electoral strength #complicates (0.72) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 96