America's Black Capital
How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The remarkable story of how African Americans transformed Atlanta, the former heart of the Confederacy, into today’s Black mecca
Atlanta is home to some of America’s most prominent Black politicians, artists, businesses, and HBCUs. Yet, in 1861, Atlanta was a final contender to be the capital of the Confederacy. Sixty years later, long after the Civil War, it was the Ku Klux Klan’s sacred “Imperial City.”
America’s Black Capital chronicles how a center of Black excellence emerged amid virulent expressions of white nationalism, as African Americans pushed back against Confederate ideology to create an extraordinary locus of achievement. What drove them, historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar shows, was the belief that Black uplift would be best advanced by forging Black institutions. America’s Black Capital is an inspiring story of Black achievement against all odds, with effects that reached far beyond Georgia, shaping the nation’s popular culture, public policy, and politics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Ogbar (Hip Hop Revolution) presents an illuminating and thought-provoking history of Atlanta from the 19th century to the present. Focusing on how, in spite of suppression by Georgia's white nationalists and neo-Confederates, the city became a mecca for African Americans, Ogbar contends that this result was achieved through a commitment to "Afro-self-determinism" ("the belief that black people would be best served by creating institutions for, by, and in the best interests of black people") and a rejection of desegregation, integration, and interracial cooperation as goals. Ogbar leads the reader through several eras, including the end of slavery, post-Reconstruction, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century, and provides a harrowing description of the 1906 Atlanta Racial Massacre. Throughout, he traces the efforts, initially on the outskirts of the city, of Black residents to build Black institutions. By the 1970s, Atlanta was home to Black universities and schools, Black businesses, Black suburbs, and Black political strength (in 1973, the city was the first in the South to elect a Black mayor). By the 21st century, Atlanta flourished as a center of Black life. Ogbar's meticulous account is both an eye-opening reassessment of the origins of African American political power and a significant contribution to American history.
