Atlanta in the Great Migration as a Beacon of Destination
While Black populations in cities across the South declined during the Great Migration as Black laborers fled a Southern life marked by significant racial oppression, Atlanta’s Black population remained stable and even grew during this period because of a developed sense of Black community through Auburn Avenue and the resistance of racial tension in household labor.**
With some exceptions, the southern states in the United States saw significant decrease in Black populations between 1910 and 1940, shown by the above graph. Despite this, Atlanta’s Black population grew 16.7%: the most growth out of any southern city during this period of decline.
Auburn Avenue
The Atlanta History Center has an oral history interview series entitled Living Atlanta which interviewed a number of Black Atlanta residents that lived in the city during this period being investigated. One of these interviews involved C.C. Hart, a Black male plumber that claims to have moved to Atlanta around 1925, and his domestic partner Phoebe. The Hart residence cited a special district in Atlanta for the reason that African Americans coalesced together in the city: Auburn Avenue. This street held numerous Black-owned businesses that were willing to sell, hire, and give loans/credit to African Americans in Atlanta. C.C. would say that Auburn Avenue was where “anything you wanted, you could get it on Auburn Avenue among your people.”1
Most notably, Auburn avenue was where African Americans could “get finance to build their homes and borrow money to build a home that you couldn’t borrow anywhere else in the country among colored people,” according to the Harts. Key differences like these made Atlanta different amongst other cities in the South that were hemohraging Black laborers at extreme rates, but also the developed sense of identity that came through Auburn Avenue. Towards the end of this period being examined, African Americans began rallying around the street known as Auburn Avenue because of its avenues of opportunity which eventually employed “college trained Negroes” to establish the Black middle class.2
Phoebe Hart also brought up the presence of colleges like Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, and Spelman College. These higher education facilities allowed, to Ms. Hart, “more training, the better equipment for life, better jobs, working and having more of the things you want as well as the things you need.” As previously mentioned, Auburn Avenue employed educated Black professionals in their trades and arts to work in Atlanta where other cities would not. This economic center for Black identity in Atlanta allowed for immense opportunity.
The story of Atlanta’s survival through the Great Migration cannot be spelled without the presence of Auburn Avenue.
Racial Tension with Black Labor
It is important to note that Atlanta was not a beacon of racial equality and pales in comparison to the growth of cities in the north, which is something omitted from the dataset shown above. Racial tension in Atlanta can be found primarily against household laborers and extended to their husbands. From just a preliminary glance at the dataset and through a simplistic lens, Atlanta would appear to be the “City Too Busy to Hate,” a term coined by Mayor of Atlanta William B. Hartsfield to describe the city’s future as “not the exclusive property of any one race or group” so as to push all races to “roll up our sleeves and get on with the building of a metropolis in which people find better uses for bricks than flinging them at one another.”3 This story is incomplete.
On October 13, 1911, Atlanta Police Commissioner George E. Johnson accused Black female household laborers of stealing food from their place of employment working in the households of White families in Atlanta. Johnson connected this problem to vagrancy, saying: “What’s the use of a negro working when his wife or some other woman will carry off enough food to keep him fat?”4
Beyond racially insensitive, the police commissioner’s remarks embodied a hostile racial environment against Black household labor that gripped the city with distrust in the city that was supposed to be too busy to hate. Even the mental gymnastics necessary to blame a working woman for a supposed deadbeat husband brings the question: why did White Atlanta focus here?
Atlanta’s diversification seemed less like a melting pot and more like a tossed salad that, when involved interactions of different races like Black household laborers in a White household, created tension in the city. The interaction, long documented in Tera Hunter’s “Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage Household Labor in New South Atlanta,” became the frontline cat-and-mouse game between labroers and White masters during a racial battlefront in Atlanta.5 Black female laborers would employ tactics like quitting, living in their own homes instead of in-house, and using subtle resistance like arriving late or leaving without notice, which permitted “small and fleeting victories for individuals to accumulate into bigger results as domestics throughout Atlanta and the urban South repeated these actions over and over again.”6
Reading Hunter’s argument of Black female resistance with the racial identity created through Auburn Avenue makes clear that Black populations in Atlanta were different compared to other cities where life was marked by an unending dominance of racial oppression: Atlanta had fostered an identity of resistance which made it attractive as a destination, not a temporary re-location, for Black populations.
- C.C. Hart and Phoebe Hart, interview by E. Bernard West, July 18, 1979, interview 1, recording, Atlanta History Center, Living History. ↩︎
- Walter R. Chivers, “The Auburn Avenue Of Today,” Atlanta Daily World, September 1, 1940. ↩︎
- “Too Busy to Hate,” Atlanta Inquirier, February 4, 1961. ↩︎
- “More Hunger Needed; Less ‘Toting’ By Cooks,” Atlanta Georgian and News, October 13, 1911. ↩︎
- Tera W. Hunter, “Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage Household Labor in New South Atlanta,” Household Labor 34, no. 2 (June 1993): 205-220. ↩︎
- Hunter, 210-211. ↩︎