America’s Black Capital

Atlanta is widely considered to be America’s Black Mecca. It has a higher concentration of black millionaires, black-owned businesses, and HBCUs than any other city in the United States. African Americans are overrepresented in every strata of Atlanta’s governance. In 2020, more black voters in the Atlanta area cast ballots than those in any other state’s metro, evincing a political power that flipped a once deeply red state blue. However, 150 years ago, Atlanta was a contender to be the capital of the Confederacy and harbored some of the most virulent white nationalism our country has ever seen. In chronicling the ascent of this iconic hub of Black excellence, America’s Black Capital offers a riveting account of the push and pull between Black progress and racist backlash that has always been at the core of America’s past. Historian Jeffrey Ogbar shows how in Atlanta African Americans built a city in which they could flourish. In the decades after the Civil War, Confederate ideology continued to linger in Georgia’s capital, as city landmarks were renamed in honor of the Lost Cause, former Confederates were elected to political office, and white supremacist violence surged in the city. In response to relentless waves of racist retrenchment, African Americans pushed back, creating an extraordinary locus of achievement in a center of neo-Confederate white nationalism. What drove them, America’s Black Capital shows, is the belief that black uplift would be best advanced by the creation and support of black institutions, an ideology that pre-dated Black Power by almost a century. Spanning from the Civil War to the present, America’s Black Capital is an inspiring story of Black achievement against all odds–one that reveals both the persistence of the Confederacy and the remarkable legacy of Black resistance in the United States–