Atlanta’s “Regime” Politics and its Limitations in Solving Social Problems
Law and tradition in the United States grants limited authority to local government, and so cities often turn to informal arrangements to underpin effective governance. This leaves an opening for the interests of business elites to invade and covertly drive local government, resulting in growth that benefits the middle and upper class at the expense of the lower class. The city of Atlanta is a posterchild for this system of governance, referred to as “regime” urban politics (Stone, 1989). The pervasiveness of informal allegiances and inside deal-making in Atlanta politics has resulted in a city mechanized by racial capitalism and limited in its ability to address deeply rooted social problems.
Before the Supreme Court deemed Georgia’s white primary unconstitutional in 1946, the state, and the city of Atlanta, were governed entirely by white politicians, looking out for white economic and social power. As Black electoral strength grew in the decades following the breaking of this barrier to voting, there arose an opportunity for new politicians to be held accountable for addressing deep-rooted inequality along racial lines. However, economically minded candidates prevailed over racial justice-minded ones and instead, new political alliances emerged to quell racial political conflict and surreptitiously maintain white economic control. Decades later, the city’s white business leadership was invading the new biracial government with a strategy that included extraeconomic efforts, forming new partnerships with Black elected officials as well as Civil Rights leaders and, by extension, the Black middle class they were a part of and supported by. These public-private alliances led to massive public works projects that physically redeveloped the city and pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the private sector, ranging from the airport expansion and construction of MARTA in the 1970s to building parks and facilities for the Centennial Olympics in the 1990s. While small businesses and working-class neighborhoods were destroyed to make space for these developments, elected officials were able to boast about economic growth, coining itself the “the city too busy to hate.” The big business owning class, who had established a stronghold in city government, benefited most from the stimulus.
Operating based on the selective incentives of the white business elite has meant inflicting systemic violence on the people who suffer from the racialized, classed, and gendered social structures intrinsic to racial capitalism and white supremacy. For example, in the 1977 sanitation workers’ strike, Mayor Maynard Jackson – who was Atlanta’s first Black mayor and had supported sanitation workers in their 1970 strike when he was vice-mayor – fired the striking workers because he claimed the salary demands would incur $10 million the city could not afford. This, during a time when the city spent $500 million on an airport expansion that ballooned in cost because of corruption (Woods, 2001). The workers in the sanitation strike were predominantly African American, and Maynard Jackson’s action divided the city’s Black population along class lines – the middle and upper class, as well as the Atlanta Daily World, were sympathetic to Jackson, blaming the working class and union for stirring controversy that they claimed eroded the electability of a Black congressional candidate (Hobson, 2017). This story exemplifies how the city’s governing regime that relied on class-based divides influenced policymaking and produced a government that can only serve limited purposes. While white business elites, Black politicians, and the biracial upper and middle class could come together to back Black politicians when they wanted to implement large redevelopment projects, their inattention and disinvestment in a large, mostly Black lower class left them unable to serve a wide range of human needs in the city (Stone, 1989).
Today, as Atlanta’s intown population grows wealthier and whiter at rates that outpace the rest of the nation, and the city becomes more unaffordable in the process (Lartey, 2018), it is important to recall the powerful regimes that occupy our city government. Unchecked, these same coalitions will continue to work to reproduce mechanisms of racial capitalism and white supremacy that have generated the highest income inequality of any city in the country (Jackson, 2022) and where poor residents have some of the worst chances of upward mobility (Green 2013, Curbed).
