Building Black Atlanta and the Dialectics of the Black Mecca

This chapter starts with a brief and concise history of Atlanta after the Civil War and the events that influenced the development of post-1965 black Atlanta. A focus on black education is necessary to better understand black life in Atlanta and how the black Mecca image came to be. Through education we see how black political kingmakers emerging out of Atlanta’s black upper class began to take shape. Chapter one concludes by examining the Kerner Report, a report commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson and overseen by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner that concluded that America was segregated into two societies: one black; one white; moving in opposite directions. However, this chapter challenges that by observing Atlanta and noting that there were numerous black American communities within Atlanta’s black society: those that bolstered the image of a Mecca; and those that did not.