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 One of my favorite things about Atlanta..
by Steve
.. is the position it has always held at the forefront of the movement for broader equality.
Atlanta is fundamentally a black city. The population is almost two-thirds black. Starting around the turn of the century, a stretch of Auburn Avenue between Peachtree and Boulevard became "Sweet Auburn," the richest black street in America. With so many black universities, businesses, churches and solid communities there, this region produced a wealth of black leadership. Men and women coming out of this community were intelligent and educated, and aware of the acute differences between their relatively peaceful, affluent communities and the hell of rural Mississippi. With the stable base provided by community, the movement led by Dr. King grew.
John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, a story of a white man who became black and journeyed through the deep south in the late '50s, culminates in his arrival to Atlanta, where the civil rights movement was in full swing. By this point, the mayor and top newspaper publisher were voices for tolerance and equality. To a black man in 1959, Atlanta was a slice of heaven. (Griffin's book is superb, by the way; if you haven't read it, you should.)
I have a good friend who is a voting rights lawyer, and he told me a very illuminating anecdote once. While interviewing people for a case, someone was recounting to him a case of minority abuse by the police. He pointed out that the reason such abuses were allowed to occur is because the minority, who could not easily vote, had no political power. While he couldn't do much about a case of police brutality, he did intend to give them some political power. It totally transformed my impression of the importance of the franchise.
Voter suppression was also the hardest part of the segregation system to defend. Someone can come up with arguments for "Separate but Equal", but denying a class of people the right to political representation en masse? Ouch. With the enactment of the VRA, minorities began to achieve political leadership of their own communities.
In celebration, yesterday 100,000 people marched here. They were celebrating the transformative effect of the Voting Rights Act, raising awareness that key provisions are up for renewal and threatened, and celebrating the right to peaceful assembly.
That, plus the people here dig pretty much any excuse to get together and party, and this is a particularly good one.
So on the anniversary of Hiroshima, when we usually reflect upon humanity's capacity for destruction, there is the silver lining that we can also reflect upon our capacity to address deep injustice. And it's important that we do, because there is plenty of work still to be done. But it all starts with the simple right to choose your leaders.
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