Atlanta takes pride in being unlike any other city in the South. Since the 1970s, the city’s image has been that of an emerging metropolis that is rich in diversity and culture. With the Jim Crow era long gone, the leadership in Atlanta set out to prove to the world that blacks and whites could come together to create a prosperous major city in America.
However, the first week of December revealed a disturbing reality about the “city too busy to hate.” Earlier in the week, the mayoral election received nationwide attention because of its atypical David vs. Goliath undertones. Mary Norwood, the presumed underdog, was vying to become Atlanta’s first white mayor since 1973 by defeating Kasim Reed. Hours after the voting polls finally closed, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution released a map that displayed how Atlantans voted. Norwood received the majority of the votes in the mostly white northern corridor of the city, while Reed garnered most of the votes from the mostly black south side. Both sections of the city voted along racial lines with Reed edging out Norwood by a mere 715 votes.
Several days later, the boundless racism in the city re-emerged at an NFL game. Michael Vick returned to Atlanta for the first time since being convicted on federal dogfighting charges in 2006. At the Georgia Dome, black fans proudly wore Michael Vick jerseys and white fans countered by wearing Matt Ryan jerseys. The racial rift continued once Vick entered the game and he was greeted with a mixture of boos and cheers. A large number of black Falcons fans supported Vick’s return while many whites fans showed their displeasure for his past actions.
The cheers and boos had little to do with the game itself. The fans were expressing some of the same sentiments that voters conveyed days earlier. Forty-one years after the death of Atlanta resident and civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, the city remains divided by class and race. As the first decade of the new millennium ends, Michael Vick, Kasim Reed and Mary Norwood exposed how an American city continues to have a 1965 mentality. –amir shaw
