Kevin M. Kruse, Professor of
History at Princeton University.
I'm here today to talk about the civil
rights movement and the common ground.
We often memorialize the movement
as one that succeeded in breaking
down barriers and bringing Americans
of all races together at last,
but the truth is more complicated than that.
Although the two words are commonly
conflated, in practice “desegregation”
did not mean the same thing as
“integration.” While many whites
grudgingly went along with court-
ordered desegregation across the South,
that didn't mean that they were
themselves willing to share public
spaces with African-Americans.
Consider the case of Atlanta,
which I studied for my first book. Even
in that city, most whites recoiled at
the thought of social contact between
the races, which they commonly disdained as
“interracial intimacy.” Therefore, all across
Atlanta, whenever private neighborhoods
and public spaces desegregated, whites
quickly abandoned them, effectively
re-segregating those same places almost
immediately. As a result of this persistent
pattern of white flight, desegregation
didn't bring about racial integration
in Atlanta, or much of the nation,
but instead of ushered in a
new form of racial division.
Now in my book, White Flight, I track
this phenomenon across a wide variety of
places, from residential neighborhoods to
public schools and private businesses.
But in my short time today I'll just speak
briefly about one of these places where
the common ground was quickly abandoned -
those are the public parks and
recreational spaces of the city.
The municipal golf courses represented
the first major space desegregated
by a federal court order in Atlanta.
This came in November of 1955.
In what would become a recurring
theme of white resistance,
segregationists proposed a drastic
response. Rather than let any
municipal spaces be integrated,
they urged the city to abandon its public
parks and public services altogether.
Private owners, former Governor
Herman Talmadge suggested, could still
legally discriminate and could
thereby keep these places all-white.
Indeed,
Talmadge predicted, the Supreme
Court's ruling in Brown vs.
Board of Education would, quote, “probably
mean the end of most public golf courses,
playgrounds, and things of that type.”
His successor in office,
Governor Marvin Griffin,
agreed.
“I can make the clear declaration that
this state will get out of the park
business before allowing a breakdown of
segregation in the intimacy of the playground,”
he announced. If he had been in charge
of the city's golf courses, Griffin
said, he would have, quote, “plowed them up the next
morning and planted alfalfa and corn.”
However, Governor Griffin was not in charge;
Atlanta's more moderate mayor
Bill Hartsfield was in charge. And he
arranged for the quick and peaceful
desegregation of the city's golf
courses over the Christmas holiday.
But that success didn't mean the
end of white resistance. Far from it.
About seven years later, additional
federal court rulings in 1962 and
1963 called for the rest of Atlanta's
public parks and recreational
services to be desegregated as well.
Again, large numbers of
whites fiercely opposed this.
More than anything,
segregationist whites were outraged that
the city's public pools would be
desegregated in June of 1963. As Police
Chief Herbert Jenkins remembered: “That
summer people talked about integration
of the swimming pools and little else.
Frankly, the police hoped for a rainy
summer. There were more agitators
driving around trying to see how
many Negroes were using our pools
then there were people
actually swimming in them.”
Indeed, on the first day of desegregated
swimming at Piedmont Park, only a few
dozen people actually went into the pool,
while a crowd of 250 whites stood outside
the fences gawking. To cut down on the
number of clashes between white and black
teenagers at the pools, the city employed
high school coaches to manage the pools
that summer and kept a few uniformed cops and
plain clothes detectives on hand as well.
Aside from a few fistfights,
desegregation went calmly.
There were no major incidents.
In truth, things went smoothly
not because whites accepted the decision,
but because they had decided to flee
from these desegregated spaces. For many
whites, integrated pools represented
a level of, quote, “interracial intimacy,”
that they simply could not stomach.
Indeed, the image of black and white children
swimming together in the same pool was so
repugnant to most white southerners that
some segregationist organizations sent
photographers to Atlanta's pools to get
pictures to use in their future propaganda.
One man stood outside the Piedmont
Park pool and handed out leaflets to
everyone entering which read, quote,
“The negro race is a reservoir
of venereal infection.
Will you expose yourself and your
children to this deadly threat?
Keep your children out of the public
pools.” Not surprisingly, white attendance
at the pools plummeted that year.
Even Police Chief Jenkins, who had
prayed for a rainy summer, was alarmed
at the, quote, “noticeable drop” in attendance.
As whites abandoned the pools, they asked the
city to follow suit. And in many ways, Atlanta
did. The next summer, hours of operation were
cut back drastically at most public pools.
The change had been made,
Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. said, to, quote,
“lessen racial tension wherever possible.”
But the city did more than simply
reduce the operating hours of its pools;
it also reduced their size and their
scope. Instead of the old system, in
which these magnificent large pools
served a broad sections of the city,
Atlanta launched a new, quote, “neighborhood pool
policy,” which had smaller, quote, “walk-to” pools
enclosed in individual neighborhoods.
Given the segregated nature of those
neighborhoods, the move was widely seen
as a way around the desegregation order.
For some whites, however, even these changes
in policy we're still not enough.
They demanded an end to public pools
altogether, staging protests and filing
petitions from all parts of the city. In
Candler Park, for instance, 850 whites signed
a petition calling for the closing of their
neighborhood pool, which they said had been,
quote, “a menace to the peace and tranquility of
the community” ever since it desegregated.
When pools such as theirs closed,
segregationists delighted in it.
In 1966, for instance, a tour bus driver
entertained visitors at Grant Park
with a joke about some recent changes
there. “There used to be a swimming pool here,”
he announced, “but when the integrationists
has forced us to let Negroes in, we fixed
them all by filling it in with concrete.
It's a bare pit now.”
According to a reporter, his white
passengers thought this was hilarious.
Unwilling to share public spaces with
African-Americans, white Atlantans
once again looked for a private alternative.
Now in the case of public parks, some
whites hoped to move municipal lands
into private hands. Citing, quote, “social
changes due to the racial situation,”
The Atlanta Council of Civic
Clubs called for the privatization
of the entire city park system.
Community civic clubs, neighborhood
churches, and, quote, “patriotic and historical
organizations” could take ownership of
the parks, they suggested, and thereby
maintain the racial status quo in them.
Ultimately, though, the privatization
of the large city park system
was simply not feasible.
A system of private parks was just too
massive, too expensive an undertaking.
But the creation of private pools was a
realistic alternative to public pools
and soon countless whites rushed to
start construction in their own backyards.
Indeed,
the demand for privates pools was so
sudden and severe that a number of fly-by-
night construction crews cropped up in
the city, fleecing desperate customers.
Eventually Atlanta's legitimate pool
builders had to form a new organization,
the Greater Atlanta Swimming Pool
Association, just to clean up their industry's
reputation and guard against con artists
looking to make a quick
buck from white panic.
Now white flight from the parks,
pools, and golf courses was bitter
because whites had long felt that these
public spaces were, quote, “theirs and theirs
alone.” This stemmed largely from the history
of segregation. To most whites in Atlanta,
such spaces, quote, “belonged” to them as a racial
birthright. But whites’ sense of ownership
of these public spaces was much deeper
than that. As they saw it, whites paid the
vast majority or in some accounts, all
of the municipal taxes. Only whites they
believed had paid for these public spaces.
So only whites should be allowed to use them.
When the city opened these public
spaces to blacks, whites felt that
their belongings, their birthright had
quite literally been stolen from them.
The perception that whites paid more
taxes than blacks was quite common in Atlanta
during the late 1950s and early 1960s. A
typical pamphlet from a segregationist
organization sought to outrage whites
with some wildly inflated numbers:
“Do you know that Atlanta's population
is one-third colored?” They wrote.
“They are paying 5% of the taxes but receive
75% of the tax money for their race.”
Segregationists groups often tapped into
this racial resentment over taxes to rally
angry whites. Many of the segregationist
organizations called themselves “taxpayers’
organizations,” or “taxpayer leagues,”
or “property owners’ associations.”
The meaning of these identities
were clear in the literature
they sent out. One warned, quote,
“We are faced with a problem of encroachment
upon our community by the Negro race.
If our community is lost, then who will
be the loser, except you, the property
owner and the taxpayer. You cannot
sit by and let the situation go.
You must have the intestinal fortitude
to stand up and fight these battles
whenever and wherever you can.”
When public spaces were desegregated,
whites presented themselves as victims
and once again urged white
flight as the response.
"Common use of recreational
facilities supported by taxation
now seems inescapable,” one complained
in 1958. “But the die-hard segregationists
can stay away from contaminated swimming
pools and swim at home in peace.” Because
of their refusal to share these public
spaces with blacks, whites essentially
made their old complaint come true:
Their taxes now were being
used to fund services largely
enjoyed by African-Americans.
Whites refused to acknowledge
that this was a result of their
own racism and their own choices.
Instead they blamed the city for,
quote, “stealing” these public spaces
and “surrendering” them to blacks.
Increasingly resentful of
the course of racial change,
these whites rebelled. In the early 1960s,
when Atlanta’s political and business elites
proposed a new slate of civic improvements,
ordinary whites decided
to finally draw the line.
These new spaces, they reasoned,
would be desegregated as well
and therefore whites would never use them.
So why should whites fund them?
The growing white backlash on issues of
race and public space became clear in
the battles over two bond initiatives in
1962 and 1963. The first bond initiative
called for $80 million for a number of
improvements on schools, streets,
sewers, and other public works, as well as
two proposals for a new civic auditorium
and a new cultural center at Piedmont Park.
Angry over the “loss” of
their old public spaces,
whites refused to pay for two more
spaces that they believe would be
used only by African-Americans.
The mayor had presented the auditorium
as a way for the city to attract national
conventions and hold large events,
but many whites saw it as another space
that would be used exclusively by blacks.
An incredibly racist cartoon
circulated by the Ku Klux Klan,
for instance, depicted a black leader who
was labeled in the cartoon as “Martin Luther
Coon,” addressing an integrated audience
and bragging that the mayor was going to, quote,
“raise the bond taxes and build us a new
auditorium to use for future NAACP meetings.”
Not surprisingly, the bond went down to
a stunning defeat. As the Atlanta Journal
noted, nearly 58,000 people turned out at the
polls, which they said was, quote, “a record number
a far as bond referenda go.”
Basic improvements in schools and
street works lost narrowly but the
plans for an auditorium and cultural
center died in what a stunned
reporter called a “smothering defeat.”
The cultural center proposal, for instance,
was rejected by a margin of almost
two-to-one, with the vast majority of
opposition coming from working-class
and middle-class white neighborhoods.
Whites made their reasons for rejecting
the bond proposals quite clear.
As one man complained, the tax burden
for the projects would rest on, quote,
“90% of the white people” while African-
Americans would get all the benefits.
So it simply wasn't in the
interest of whites to support it.
Others agreed.
“I think this is another step,” one white
man said, “where the taxpayers are tired of
paying hard-earned money for things that
they will not be able to enjoy because
of the prospect of forced integration,
which means that the facilities would
be used almost entirely by Negroes.”
Now that desegregation had come to Atlanta,
he continued, “the white people who pay all
the bills have decided to stick a little
closer together and vote accordingly.”
The mayor tried again
in the next year, 1963, introducing a
second bond referendum pared down to
what he called the “bare essentials.”
Although most of the controversial
aspects from the year before had been
excluded, the racial politics only
became more pronounced. A routine letter
from the mayor to the local NAACP,
for instance, was doctored
to look like the mayor was taking
orders from the civil rights group.
Copies appeared across the city with a
warning at the bottom, quote, “Don't give
the ‘CAPTIVE MAYOR’ of the Minority
Bloc a blank check to use
against voters and taxpayers of
Atlanta,” it warned. “VOTE AGAINST BONDS!”
Allen responded with a massive public relations campaign
and a huge get-out-the-vote effort. Only then
did the bond pass by a very narrow margin.
Even then, analysts were stunned
at the resistance and resentment
in the white community.
“The negative vote came from sections of the
city and county where white segregationist
sentiment traditionally is the strongest,”
a report after the election noted. “And
the vote went heaviest,” they said, “against
projects where integration or benefits for
Negroes might have appeared to be involved -
urban renewal, parks,
libraries, the auditorium.”
But as Atlanta’s story of desegregation
demonstrated over and over again, for many
whites improvements on public spaces and
quote, “benefits for Negroes,” had come to mean
the same thing. As I've argued in my larger
work, and tried to suggest here, it's important
that we remember white flight was about much
more than the physical relocation of whites,
as massive as those numbers were.
It was more than a physical relocation,
a political revolution, one in which
the old understandings of the city as a
place in which its citizens shared public
spaces and shared a general concept of
community was replaced by a new scheme
in which individuals retreated
to private spaces both personally
and politically. White flight, in the end,
was not just a retreat from integrated
public space, but all public space.
And that's a legacy that Atlanta and
much of America still wrestles with today.