The 1619 project, p.44
The 1619 Project, page 44
By the 1980s, arguments against MARTA by local politicians were less overtly racialized, but public sentiment remained unchanged. White racists joked that MARTA, with its heavily Black and entirely urban ridership, stood for “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.”13 David Chesnut, the white chairman of MARTA, insisted in 1987 that suburban opposition to extending the mass transit system beyond the urban core had been “90 percent a racial issue.” Because of that resistance, MARTA became a city-only service that did little to relieve commuter traffic. After Gwinnett County voted the system down again in 1990, a former Republican legislator marveled at the arguments given by opponents. “They will come up with twelve different ways of saying they are not racist in public,” he told a reporter. “But you get them alone, behind a closed door, and you see this old blatant racism that we have had here for quite some time.”14
As these white suburbs seceded from the city and sealed themselves off, they witnessed a tremendous population surge. During the 1980s, roughly 86 percent of Atlanta’s metropolitan growth occurred in the suburban ring, especially along its northern rim—Cobb County to the northwest, Gwinnett County to the northeast, and, between them, a small sliver of Fulton County outside the city limits. Of the ten fastest-growing counties in America during the 1980s, three stood outside Atlanta, and one of them, Cobb, took top honors as the fastest-growing county in the entire nation. By the end of the twentieth century, the suburban counties of Cobb and Gwinnett each had more residents than the city.15 As the suburban population and economy boomed, the lack of metropolitan transportation meant that opportunities there were well beyond many Black Atlantans’ reach. “For an unemployed Atlantan without a car,” a New York Times editorial noted in 1988, “jobs in Cobb and Gwinnett counties might as well be in China.” But that, of course, was precisely the point.16
Even when the suburbs became more racially diverse, they still remained opposed to MARTA. In 2019, Gwinnett County voted MARTA down for a third time. Proponents had hoped that changes in the county’s racial composition, which was becoming less white, might make a difference. But the initiative still failed by an eight-point margin. Officials discovered that some nonwhite suburbanites shared the isolationist instincts of earlier white suburbanites. And even though the overt anti-Black racism that had shaped the suburban boom had subsided, new generations of residents there remained constrained by the built environment that panic had etched into the landscape, and they, too, conformed to its limitations. Some of them openly echoed the earlier arguments. One white property manager in her late fifties told a reporter that she had voted against mass transit because it was used by immigrants, whom she called “illegals.” “Why should we pay for it?” she asked. “Why subsidize people who can’t manage their money and save up a dime to buy a car?”17
In the end, Atlanta’s traffic is at a standstill because its attitude about transit is at a standstill, too. Decades after its interstates were set down with an eye to segregation and its rapid transit system was stunted by white flight, the city—like so many other cities across America—remains stalled in the past.
July 17, 1984
The Reverend Jesse Jackson gives a historic speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, where he describes the need for a “Rainbow Coalition,” and insists “we must come together.” Jackson, the first Black man to mount a viable campaign for president, wins two primaries before losing the Democratic nomination to Walter Mondale.
Rainbows Aren’t Real, Are They?
Kiese Laymon
My older sister, Rae, makes me write five hundred words every night before I go to bed. Tonight, I want to write five gazillion because of this speech by a Black man with big beautiful eyeballs and a big beautiful voice named Jesse Jackson.
While we were working on the Barnett house tonight, Rae kept saying that Jesse’s speech was going to do for us what Ronald Reagan’s speech did for white folks at the Neshoba County Fair four years ago. Ronald Reagan came to the fair and said some words about “states’ rights.” Those words made a lot of white folks at the fair happy. Those words made Rae, Mama, Granny, and our whole church so scared we had to leave. When we got in the van, Rae told me that Ronald Reagan came to Mississippi to offer white folks an all-you-can-eat buffet of Black suffering.
I asked Rae if white folks left full. She sucked her teeth and told me to let her metaphors ride.
Dafinas, who worked on the house with us this summer, stayed to watch the speech, too. Dafinas is from Oaxaca, Mexico, and his grandmother was just stolen by police in a raid. I don’t know if Rae and Dafinas go together, but they look at each other’s hands like they do.
All of us watched Jesse Jackson say the names of people I never heard of at school. He talked about Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. He talked about Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, and Rabbi Abraham Heschel. He talked about Hispanic Americans, Arab Americans, African Americans. He talked about lesbian and gay Americans having something called equal protection under the law. He talked about powerful coalitions made of rainbows.
When we walked out of the Barnett house, a house we were building, in a white neighborhood where none of us would ever be allowed to live, I watched Dafinas and Rae hug for eight seconds.
On the way home, I asked Rae why she seemed so sad. “Rainbows, they pretty, but they ain’t real,” she said. “The only thing real down here sometimes feels like suffering. And love.”
I told Rae that I liked her more than apple Now and Laters. But if believing in rainbows makes us love better, then rainbows can be just as real as work. And love. And if we really believed, we might be able to bring Dafinas’s granny back. And one day, instead of building houses for white folks, in neighborhoods we could never even visit if we weren’t working there, we could maybe build beautiful houses with gardens where all our grannies could sit on porches, and safely tell all those good lies that sound true.
“I never seen a black-and-brown rainbow,” Rae said.
“Me either,” I said.
“But I’ll always believe in us.”
“I’ll be sad when you go to college,” I told her. “But mostly, I’ll be fine, because I can’t stop believing that rainbows are real. How are we ever gonna be free if we only believe the things they tell us are possible?”
“We’re not,” Rae said, as we got out of the car. “We’re just not.”
May 13, 1985
Philadelphia police end a standoff with MOVE, a Black liberation group, by dropping a bomb on the rowhouse where members live. MOVE was founded the previous decade by John Africa, born Vincent Leaphart, a Korean War veteran and animal rights activist. The group’s members took the surname Africa and agreed to live communally, practice strict vegetarianism, and resist various forms of modern life. The 1985 bombing kills eleven of them, including five children, and, because the fire department lets the resulting fire burn, destroys sixty-one houses and leaves 250 people homeless in the Black neighborhood of Cobbs Creek.
A Surname to Honor Their Mother
Gregory Pardlo
What is it about this group—which never numbered more than a few dozen—that inspired the U.S. government, at all three levels, to spend hundreds of thousands of man hours, and millions of dollars, working toward its destruction?
—Richard Kent Evans
Homeschoolers, raw vegan zero-wasters,
social-justice warriors, they moved against puppy mills
and flophouses, against zoos and the avarice that fuels
the System. Responding to a noise complaint in ’76,
police quieted the Africas of MOVE with clubs, nightsticks.
The infant Life Africa was crushed under an officer’s boot.
He’d been delivered at home, and the commonwealth would
neither certify the birth of Life after death, nor the tears
of a mother named Africa. MOVE kept moving each time,
like a river, their movement was dammed by police, an agency
shamed for its failure to contain them. In ’78, a riot-geared wall
encircled the creaky Victorian, MOVE’s headquarters, while canvas
hoses fed into cellar windows where the Africas held strong,
and forced them to swim for safety.
Deluge upon deluge. Water, bullets. An officer shot from behind
in the melee sparked no investigation. Instead, the city erased
the old house as if it were a bit of graffiti, and announced—a social
execution—MOVE were now cop-killers.
Those Africas not given life
sentences repaired here to this tidy block of mother-loved
homes on a street named to honor the Osage Nation. Here,
where MOVE took its last stand, and let the living stray
indoors and out, the compound was a hive the city clawed at
and swatted, passions fermenting like compost.
John Africa, in the end, “Body F,” sixth of eleven bags of charred
remains sent to the morgue, had wrapped MOVE in the manifesto
they megaphoned all hours (“you can’t describe something profane
without using profanity”). Their polemics drowned out the music of ice cream trucks.
Until Mother’s Day of ’85. Police went door to door
to door instructing moms to pack their families into overnight bags.
Without so much as their arms could carry, they left behind Bibles
and tax records, record collections and Commodore 64s. They left bowling
trophies, wedding knives, and archives of Jet magazine, family albums
and photos propped on credenzas and on top of their Magnavox TVs.
They left wall-hung pictures of King, Kennedy, and Jesus when, stopping
to gossip and speculate, they filled the street that’d been cleared as if
for a block party. In twenty-four hours, they’d watch the city deliver its gift.
The commissioner’s recipe for eviction: M16s, Uzi submachine guns,
sniper rifles, tear gas, approximately ten thousand rounds of .50-caliber
bullets, more than five hundred officers, 640,000 gallons of water, and one state police
helicopter to drop two pounds of mining explosives combined with two pounds of C-4
on the MOVE family compound’s roof.
As flames rose like orchids in a vase, the canvas hoses parched
and let an infernal peace engulf the neighborhood. By sunrise, whole
blocks lay open like egg cartons, buildings reduced to their earth-
works, sirens sounded their jubilee to match the mothers’ wailing.
Timbers in rubble like mulch piles smoldered as smoke left shadows
espaliered on walls, and twined staircases aimed at the unblemished sky.
Michael A. McCoy
Chris Williams with his children, Harley and Hunter, in Silver Spring, Maryland, 2020
“That’s what we mean when we say America is exceptional. Not that our nation has been flawless from the start, but that we have shown the capacity to change and make life better for those who follow.” So said President Barack Obama in his farewell address in January 2017, just days before Donald Trump took office. And yet, many Americans did not see a “more perfect Union” coming.1 After all, Trump had been endorsed by a leading Ku Klux Klan newspaper and one of the organization’s former leaders, David Duke.2 He was advised by white nationalists like Steve Bannon. He made a political name for himself questioning Obama’s citizenship.3 Trump campaigned on making America “great again” after the first Black president. He framed Latino immigrants as rapists.4 For many Americans, Trump was not forging a path forward to “make life better.” Instead he represented a racist past they believed the nation had left behind, and his victory a reversal of the gradual racial progress they had been told was the American story.
Obama, himself an avatar of that progress, knew he had to explain this in his address. “Yes, our progress has been uneven,” he said. “For every two steps forward, it often feels we take one step back. But the long sweep of America has been defined by forward motion, a constant widening of our founding creed to embrace all and not just some.”5
Obama was embracing a national mythology in which America was marching forward and righting past wrongs, an epic, righteous journey that had led to his own election eight years earlier. This mantra of steady incremental change has long been a part of the American creed. Politicians of all races and parties convey it constantly. I once believed it. Sure, the country may have begun in slavery, but it fought a war to end it. It passed three new amendments to the Constitution to end slavery and give citizenship to those formerly enslaved, and to grant the men among them the right to vote. And though, in the decades that followed, those rights were violently denied, eventually the nation’s institutions acted to ensure them. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. A decade later, Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. President Johnson appointed the former NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967. Into the 1970s and ’80s, the Black middle class started emerging and became more visible in culture, media, and politics. There were figures like Ed Bradley, who became the first Black White House television correspondent in 1976, and Harold Washington, who became the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983 and inspired Obama’s generation. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton appointed what was at the time the most diverse cabinet in history. At the end of the twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first, Black women and especially men were visible in politics, sports, entertainment, and mass media—people like Michael Jordan, Carol Moseley Braun, Jesse Jackson, Whitney Houston, Tiger Woods, Denzel Washington, Jay-Z, Spike Lee, Robin Roberts, Halle Berry, and Bryant Gumbel. By 2003, media moguls Oprah Winfrey and Robert L. Johnson had become billionaires. All the success stories of these individuals ostensibly demonstrated the forward march of the Black community.
With Barack Obama arriving on the stage of American history, community representation transmuted into national embodiment. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” Obama said during his breakout keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.6 Four years later, when Obama was elected president, he had come to embody racial progress and the arc of American history itself. Obama did not make American history when he won the U.S. presidency on November 4, 2008. He became American history—an American history popularly written as the story of incremental and steady racial progress.
“HISTORIC WIN,” blared the headline of The Philadelphia Inquirer the day after his election in 2008. “Change has come to America.”7 Nearly 70 percent of Americans agreed that his election would improve race relations in the country.8 To some, it was a watershed moment. “ ‘In answer to the question, Is America past racism against black people,’ I say the answer is yes,” Columbia University linguist John McWhorter wrote in Forbes weeks after Obama’s election. “Our proper concern is not whether racism still exists, but whether it remains a serious problem. The election of Obama proved, as nothing else could have, that it no longer does.”9
But when seen as the defining narrative of American history, this vision of our past as a march of racial progress is ahistorical, mythical, and incomplete. Even as those civil rights victories of the 1950s and ’60s were transpiring in the courts and streets, the unemployment rates of Black Americans were rising. These persistently poor socioeconomic conditions—not to mention police violence—led to urban rebellions in 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967—a year when Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “That dream that I had that day [in 1963] has, at many points, turned into a nightmare.”10
In 1968, in response to these rebellions, President Johnson and, repeatedly, presidential candidate Richard Nixon called for “law and order.” During a post–civil rights period of supposed progress, American society also became obsessed with a destructive fear of Black criminality. The call for law and order gave way to the War on Drugs beginning in the 1970s, and to mass incarceration in the 1980s and ’90s. Meanwhile, police violence persisted and new forms of voter suppression became so sophisticated that they contributed to Republican presidential victories in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.11 In 2009, the first Black president came into office during the Great Recession, which produced the widest racial wealth gap between Black and white Americans since the government began recording such data.12
When the long sweep of American history is cast as a constant widening of equity and justice, it overlooks this parallel constant widening of inequity and injustice. The two forces have existed in tandem, dueling throughout our history. The Northern states gradually emancipated enslaved Black people in the early United States—a step forward for justice—but at the same time these states gradually or immediately stripped freed Black people of their civil or voting rights—a step forward for injustice. In 1807, importation of Africans was prohibited by Congress—a step forward for nonviolence—but this led to a consequent boom in the violent and disruptive domestic trade of enslaved people and the “breeding” and spreading of the enslaved population—a step forward for brutal violence. In 1865, Congress abolished chattel slavery—stepping toward justice—but this immediately led to a series of racist “Black Codes” in Southern states that bound and regulated the movements of freed peoples and shifted the nation toward injustice. In the late 1860s, Radical Republican congressmen abolished these Black Codes, reconstructed Southern states, and extended civil and voting rights to Black men—another step forward for equity—but in another step toward inequity, lynchings and Jim Crow reconstructed white supremacy and rescinded some civil and voting rights by the 1890s.
