War-Making and the Violent Legacy of Atlanta as the International City
Atlanta was first founded as “Terminus,” a railroad settlement for the transport of cotton. Its existence and prominence have relied on American imperialism and white supremacy from the beginning. The city would not exist had it not been for the forced removal of Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people from Northwest Georgia. It would not have served as a commercial hub for cotton had it not been for the enslavement of people of African descent. And it would not have continued its rise in regional importance had it not been a shipping hub for Confederate Army supplies during the Civil War (Ambrose, 2022).
Through World War I and World War II, wartime activity continued to be centralized in Atlanta because of its railroad connectivity. In World War II, this activity brought unprecedented growth to the northern suburbs of Atlanta, when the U.S. War Department spent $73 million on the Bell Bomber plant in Marietta. This plant built the B-29 bomber and employed over 28,000 people at its peak, most of whom moved from rural communities in north Georgia to take these factory jobs (Scott, 2020). Only 8% of employees were Black, despite Atlanta’s population being about 30% Black at the time. The bomber plant went on to outlive the end of World War II and continues to operate today doing U.S. defense work under the ownership of Lockheed-Martin. This bomber plant development transformed Marietta into one of the main industrial centers in the southern U.S., kicking off the rise of Atlanta’s northern suburbs that quickly became the destination for white residents leaving Atlanta en-masse after integration. As wartime industrialization provided new opportunities in the suburbs, white flight and deindustrialization were having a detrimental impact on the city.
The city’s population declined starting in the 1960s, until about 1990, which had mixed effects on lasting residents. Tax revenues for the city declined, and so social services, most prominently public housing, deteriorated. In response, the city revamped their approach to public housing, demolishing public housing projects and replacing them with private/public mixed-income developments out of the financial reach of most previous tenants. The swiftest transformation came north of downtown in the early 1990s, as the city hid its poor and unhoused in preparation for the 1996 Olympic games. To be the international city and leader of racial harmony that mayor Maynard Jackson and former Civil Rights leader Andrew Young sold to the International Olympic Committee, the city needed to “clean up” the poverty, violence, and vagrancy that city leaders viewed as endemic to the people and structures that were north of downtown prior to the Olympic redevelopment (Hobson, 2017). Here, the Techwood/Clark Howell Homes project as well as 21 acres of commercial businesses were razed, the Olympic village and Centennial Olympic Park were constructed, and thousands of unhoused people were illegally arrested and moved into the city jail for the lead-up and duration of the Olympics (Gustafson, 2013).
The 1996 Centennial Olympics brought a tragic bombing to the city of Atlanta, carried out by a white supremacist, anti-abortion domestic extremist. This offender was part of the Army of God, a violent anti-abortion group which had coalesced and radicalized at the city of Atlanta’s own Prison Farm over the previous decades. The radicalization of this extremist group within the city’s own jailing system presents a concrete connection between discrete acts of violence and the structural violence that Atlanta’s leaders willfully participate in. Along with this, there is an ideological thread of white supremacy and oppression of less powerful groups – whether exercised through removal of people and groups who don’t fit the mold of the new city, wartime dominion over other nations, or control over women’s bodies – that has been an inextricable part of the making of modern-day Atlanta.
