Atlanta, crucible of democracy: How the city's tortured history got us here

The tumultuous aftermath of our last presidential election keeps washing up not just in Washington, D.C., but on the doorstep of Atlanta, Georgia. Of the four recent indictments of Donald Trump and his associates, the most sweeping is slated for a likely-to-be-televised trial as early as next March 2024 in a courtroom of Fulton County, where most Atlantans live, promising to keep the nation's political spotlight fixated on this southern metropolis for months if not years to come.  

The national headlines emanating from Atlanta started well before that, in November 2020, when Georgia provided nearly half (44%) of Joe Biden's electoral college margin and then held two runoff elections the following January that delivered a de facto Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.  

Why has this particular city, former icon of moonlight-and-magnolias myths about the Confederacy and supposedly "too busy to hate" during the turbulence of the 1950s and 60s civil rights movement, turned into such a pivotal locus for our nation's recent political dramas? Only the eighth-largest metropolitan area in the United States, Atlanta is the capital of a state with fewer than half the electoral votes of Florida or New York.  

No doubt Georgia's own Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, passed in 1979 to furnish more expansive grounds for going after organized crime than did the federal version, helps explain the singular breadth of District Attorney Fani Willis' election case: Nineteen defendants are charged with 41 criminal counts, as opposed to the four charges brought by federal special counsel Jack Smith against a single defendant, Donald Trump.  

But the current prominence of an Atlanta-area prosecutor and courtroom owes much more to this city's larger and longer legacies. Since Reconstruction a century and a half ago, radically different versions of electoral democracy have battled one another in this capital city of a Deep South state. Each has gained dominion over the city for a portion of its last 150 years, providing starkly opposing precedents for the confrontations that may soon be beamed from an Atlanta courthouse into America's living rooms.  

The Trump team's intimidation and threats in the weeks after the 2020 election distinctly echoed the violent end that white Southerners brought to Atlanta's Reconstruction starting in the late 1860s. When the federal government widened the electorate to include recently emancipated Georgians, Southern whites turned to vigilante violence, terrorizing Black people away from the ballot box. In Columbus, Georgia, in 1868, some went so far as to assassinate a white Republican politician named George Ashburn whose advocacy for the Black vote qualified him as "Radical." With Georgia still under federal occupation, the presumed killers were taken to Atlanta to stand trial in a federal military court.  

What happened next holds up a cautionary historical mirror to the impending Trump case.  Anti-Reconstruction newspapers and politicians turned the proceedings into what historian William Link terms "a story of northern oppression" and of "racial insubordination" by Ashburn himself, who was accused of consorting with Black people sexually as well as politically. The outcome augured what Georgia Republicans who are now targeting Willis for investigation may be hoping for with the Trump trial. When Georgia re-entered the Union, the military court closed up shop and newly empowered state prosecutors abandoned the case, letting the murderers off scot-free.      

Over the next few years, Atlanta became a bastion of white supremacy, as state headquarters for the first KKK and then the cradle for the Klan's rebirth in the early 20th century. Paradoxically, the starkness of Georgia's color line also made the city a welcoming haven for Black people fleeing the harsh poverty and racial violence of the Southern countryside. Despite Klan violence, Atlanta's growing ranks of Black residents exerted increasing political power, raising their share of the city's vote to a peak of 39% in 1885.

While violence-minded groups like the Proud Boys spearheaded the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, Trump's attempted overturn of the Georgia results relied mostly on lawyers and fanciful legal theories, better recalling the advent of that era known as Jim Crow. A racially authoritarian version of electoral democracy emerged over the 1880s and '90s, as white wealthy Georgians wielded their control of the state legislature and City Hall to tilt the entire political system decidedly in their favor.  

From then until the middle of the 20th century, very few Atlantans or other Georgians voted at all. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and all-white primaries kept the electorate tiny, rarely as high as 20% of all eligible voters, white or Black. Political campaigns featured explicit race-baiting and a virulent anti-statism exemplified by Eugene Talmadge, the "wild man from Sugar Creek" who insisted that a "good" government was a "poor government" and who staunchly opposed the New Deal.  

So long as the state capital remained under the sway of one-party "rustic rule," as political scientist V.O. Key put it, ballot-stuffing remained a well-known practice into the early 1960s, as Jimmy Carter learned in his first political campaign.  The ease with which many Georgians believe Trump's allegations of electoral fraud rests on persisting memories of these earlier, confirmed experiences with it.

At the same time, the boldness and resolve of Fani Willis' case builds on the achievements of those who overthrew Jim Crow in Georgia, many of them hailing from Atlanta. A longstanding locus of Black colleges such as Spellman and universities such as Atlanta and Clark, this city came to house a substantial and proud Black middle class. Nourished by some New Deal policies and enabled by local housing advocacy, even if constrained by federal and local backing of racial segregation, Atlanta's Black middle class turned the city into a crucible for a vibrant civil rights movement at the local, state, and national level, helping usher in governments that were more democratic.  

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While the contributions of many Black Atlantans, especially the leader of the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr., are well-known, less familiar but also important were their white Atlanta-based allies, who helped tip the balance toward Georgia's democratization. In this process, an emergent environmental movement proved especially important. Not only did it become an additional driver for more expansive and public-minded government — to provide parks and protect against pollution — it also opened opportunities for aspiring Black politicians to win over whites, in the early 1970s still a majority of voters. 

In their first winning campaigns, both Andrew Young (who became, in 1972, the first African-American since Reconstruction elected to Congress from Georgia) and Maynard Jackson (who became, in 1973, the first Black mayor of a major city in the South) did well in many white neighborhoods, thanks to strategic and persistent outreach to white-dominated movements against freeway-building and for the establishment of a Chattahoochee River park.  

If Jackson and Young paved the way for Fani Willis, her willingness to take on a case of this magnitude responds to more recent turns in the political history of this city and state. From the 1970s, a new conservatism arose within a business community aggravated by stronger environmental and other federal regulations. At the same time, white evangelicals turned increasingly political, riled by government actions on abortion and women's rights and decrying what they saw as cultural decay. A still-dominant Democratic Party that had turned biracial and more government-friendly cast about for ways to keep conservative whites on board. One such avenue was to pass new laws targeting crime and perceived immorality. So it was that in 1979, Democrats pushed through Georgia's own RICO act, to aid prosecutors going after drug, gambling and pornography rackets.

But Democrats could not forestall what became known as the "Great White Shift" in Southern politics: In the 1980s and '90s, whites who had formerly voted and identified with the Democratic Party turned Republican. An Atlanta-area congressman named Newt Gingrich led the way, figuring out how to draw the votes of rural as well as suburban whites. He did so by going silent on the environmental causes he had earlier supported as a member of a nascent Georgia Conservancy. Reducing government just to the "welfare" state, he now vigorously campaigned against it, claiming it stood in the way of market-driven technological and social progress. Over the next decades, that proved a winning strategy for Georgia Republicans. 

The Republican Party first took over the state capital during the early 2000s, uniting those constituencies that the Democrats had struggled to retain. The results of the 2020 election, however, show that their support can no longer guarantee statewide wins, even for Republican presidential candidates. Those state leaders whom Trump and his team pressed to "find 11,780 votes," Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, are the beneficiaries of a Republicanism that for two decades had dominated statewide elections. The Trump request placed them in a political bind.  

They had responded to recent electoral challenges from Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state representative who nearly won the governorship in 2018, and her group Fair Fight, through measures such as shedding thousands from voter rolls and reducing ballot drop-box access. So their own political reputations were riding on the integrity of the 2022 elections, which Trump, glibly requesting thousands more votes, dismissed outright.   

An Atlanta-area judge and jury will now deliberate the legality of the Trump effort. But just as the makings of this Fulton County confrontation have been long in coming, so Atlanta-centered contests over the fabric and fate of our democracy won't quickly abate, whatever the verdict. More likely they will intensify over the coming years and elections ahead, with not just Atlanta's but the nation's political future at stake.