Shooting, protests test Atlanta’s image of Black prosperity
Police cars burned in the streets of Atlanta as protesters smashed windows and spray-painted gra ti outside CNN headquarters. Even during the national outcry over police brutality and racial injustice, Chassidy Evans struggled to understand why her hometown, with its legacy of peaceful resistance, had erupted in chaos.
Then her uncle, Rayshard Brooks, was shot in the back by a white Atlanta police o cer after fighting a drunken driving arrest and trying to run away. The turbulent protests ignited by the May 25 police killing of another Black man, George Floyd in Minneapolis, had barely simmered down when Brooks was killed last week.
“We stood with the Atlanta Police Department when they were just tearing up our city and said this doesn’t happen here,” Evans said of violent protesters. Speaking through tears at a news conference this week, she added, “It makes you eat your words.”
Brooks’ killing so soon after the fiery demonstrations and Floyd’s death under the knee of a white Minneapolis officer have cast a harsh spotlight on the cracks in Atlanta’s reputation for racial harmony and Black prosperity. Brooks’ death rekindled upheaval in the streets, though it wasn’t as destructive.
Touting itself for decades as “the city too busy to hate,” Atlanta has had an unbroken succession of Black mayors since 1973. African Americans own more than 176,000 businesses in metro Atlanta, according to the Census Bureau, more than any U. S. metropolitan area outside New York. After hiring its first Black o - cers in 1948, the Atlanta Police Department is now 60% Black, higher even than the city’s Black population of 52%.
But activists and academics say those decades of progress haven’t bridged a gaping socioeconomic divide in the Black community. Three of four Atlanta residents living in poverty are Black. So are all nine people whose deaths by police have been prosecuted since 1997.
“There are a lot of African Americans that are doing well, but there’s a large number of them that are not,” said Gerald Griggs, an Atlanta activist, attorney and a vice president of the city’s NAACP chapter. “That’s part of why you’re seeing this unrest, because they’ve been neglected for 40 years.”
Atlanta faced a defining moment in 1968 when native son Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots flared across the U. S., and thousands of National Guard troops mobilized to restore order in cities. Atlanta refrained from violence, and crowds quietly lined the streets the day of King’s funeral to glimpse the mule-driven cart pulling his casket — a reaction that helped build the city’s legacy of nonviolent resistance.
Five years later, Maynard Jackson was elected Atlanta’s first Black mayor and was credited with a rmative action policies that gave Black- owned companies a greater share of city contracts. Jackson also pledged to prosecute police officers for acts of brutality.
But racial tensions persisted for decades as Atlanta grew its economy — and its national profile — often with few direct benefits to poorer Black residents, said Maurice Hobson, a Georgia State University historian and author of a book on race in Atlanta called “The Legend of the Black Mecca.”
Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium, which opened in 1965 and became home to baseball’s Atlanta Braves, encroached on Black neighborhoods. Decades later, the facility was razed to build an Olympic stadium for the 1996 summer games, prompting a real estate rush by whiteowned businesses and a crackdown on crime before Atlanta was thrust into the international spotlight.
King’s legacy was often evoked in promoting cooperation between the city’s Black leaders and white business establishment, Hobson said.
“Because this is King’s hometown and civil rights people live here, they have whitewashed the experience of the Black masses and made it about the middle class,” Hobson said.
He also noted that violent protests have rocked Atlanta at least six times since the mid-1960s. Protesters smashed store windows and hurled rocks and bottles in 1992 after a jury acquitted four Los Angeles police o cers in the beating of Rodney King.
Angry demonstrators faced off with police in 2006 after plainclothes o cers serving a warrant busted into the Atlanta home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson and fatally shot her when she fired a gun at them. Three officers received federal prison sentences.
Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard says his office has prosecuted o cers in nine homicides since he took office in 1997. All the victims were Black.
In the days since Brooks was killed, Howard has announced murder charges against the officer who opened fire and Police Chief Erika Shields has resigned. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has ordered new policies to limit o cers’ use of deadly force, while City Council members proposed greater police oversight.