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Kevin M. Kruse is professor of history at Princeton University. He is the author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America and the coauthor of Fault Lines: A History of America since 1974.

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"In his study of Atlanta over the last 60 years, Kevin Kruse convincingly describes the critical connections between race, Sun Belt suburbanization, the rise of the new Republican majority. White Flight is a powerful and compelling book that should be read by anyone interested in modern American politics and post-World War II urban history."--Dan Carter, University of South Carolina

"White Flight is a myth-shattering book. Focusing on the city that prided itself as 'too busy to hate,' Kevin Kruse reveals the everyday ways that middle-class whites in Atlanta resisted civil rights, withdrew from the public sphere, and in the process fashioned a new, grassroots, suburban-based conservatism. This important book has national implications for our thinking about the links between race, suburbanization, and the rise of the New Right."--Thomas J. Sugrue, Kahn Professor of History and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis

"This is an imaginative work that ably treats an important subject. Kruse gets beyond and beneath Atlanta's image as a place of racial moderation, the national center of the civil rights movement, and a seedbed of black political power to reveal other simultaneous, important currents at work."--Clifford Kuhn, Georgia State University

"Kevin Kruse recasts our understanding of the conservative resistance to the civil rights movement. Shifting the spotlight from racial extremists to ordinary white urban dwellers, he shows that "white flight" to the suburbs was among the most powerful social movements of our time. That movement not only reconfigured the urban landscape, it also transformed political ideology, laying the groundwork for the rise of the New Right and undermining the commitment of white Americans to the common good. No one can read this book and come away believing that the politics of suburbia are colorblind."--Jacquelyn Hall, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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White Flight

Atlanta and the Making of Modern ConservatismBy Kevin M. Kruse

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2005 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13386-7

Introduction

IN THE STORIES spun by its supporters, Atlanta had accomplished the unthinkable. Their city was moving forward, they boasted, not just in its bank accounts and business ledgers, but in the ways the races were learning to live and even thrive together. While the rest of the South spent the postwar decades resisting desegregation with a defiant and often ugly program of "massive resistance," Atlanta faced the challenges of the civil rights era with maturity and moderation. During these decades, the city had emerged as a shining example for the New South, a place where economic progress and racial progressivism went hand in hand. This was, to be sure, not an empty boast. By the end of the 1950s these supporters could point with pride to a litany of sites that the city had desegregated, from public spaces like the buses, airport, libraries, and golf courses to countless private neighborhoods in between. When Atlanta successfully desegregated its public schools in 1961, even national observers paused to marvel at all the city had accomplished. The city found countless admirers across the country, from the press to the president of the United States, but it was ultimately its own Mayor William Hartsfield who coined the lasting motto. "Atlanta," he bragged to anyone in earshot, "is the City Too Busy to Hate."

Just a year later, this image came crashing down. The trouble surfaced in an unlikely place, a quiet, middle-class subdivision of brick ranch houses and loblolly pines called Peyton Forest. And the trouble started in an unlikely way, as city construction crews built a pair of roadblocks on Peyton and Harlan Roads. The barriers seemed to have no significance. They were simply wooden beams which had been painted black and white, bolted to steel I-beams, and sunk into the pavement. But their significance lay in their location. As all Atlantans understood, the roadblocks stood at the precise fault line between black and white sections of the city. Over the previous two decades, black Atlantans had escaped the overcrowded inner city and purchased more and more homes in neighborhoods to the west; during the same period, white Atlantans to the south had grown increasingly alarmed as those areas "went colored." The roadblocks were meant to keep these two communities apart and at peace, but they had the opposite effect. Indeed, the barricades immediately attracted intense national and even international attention. Civil rights activists surrounded the racial "buffer zone" with picket lines, while wire photos carried the images across the globe, sparking an unprecedented public relations nightmare. "We Want No Warsaw Ghetto," read one picket. Another denounced "Atlanta's Image: A Berlin Wall." Civil rights organizations announced they would launch a boycott against area merchants unless the barriers were removed, and two lawsuits were immediately filed in local courts. Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., who had recently replaced Hartsfield in office, had expected some backlash but was stunned by its intensity. From retirement, his predecessor offered a bit of belated advice: "Never make a mistake they can take a picture of."

As the national press denounced the "Atlanta Wall," local whites embraced the roadblocks as their salvation. The day after the crews sealed off their streets, residents wrapped the barricades in Christmas paper and ribbon; beneath the words "Road Closed," someone added, "Thank the Lord!" Meanwhile, a powerful organization of white homeowners, the Southwest Citizens Association, sought to explain white residents' perspective. President Virgil Copeland, a Lockheed employee, told reporters that the barricades were simply a response to the "vicious, block-busting tactics being used by Negro realtors." Carlton Owens, an engineer at Atlantic Steel and a member of Southwest Citizens' board of directors, noted that several residents had said they were going to "sell and get out" if something concrete were not done "to stabilize the situation." "The barricades were erected for that purpose," Copeland added, "and we think they will do it. All we want to do is to keep our homes." Barbara Ryckeley, an officer with Southwest Citizens, pointed out that not just Peyton Forest but all of white Atlanta was "endangered" by black expansion. "If the whites could just win once," she explained, "they would have some hope for holding out. I think the whole city of Atlanta is at stake. You realize that every time Negroes replace whites about eighty-five percent of the whites move out of the city?"

As much as they embraced the "Peyton Wall," these whites worried it would not be enough. Two weeks later, their fears came true. Sources reported that blacks were closing deals on three homes on Lynhurst Drive, immediately west of the Peyton Forest neighborhood. According to alarmist press coverage, the sales represented a deliberate attempt to break through the roadblocks-a "flank attack" on the all-white neighborhood. "If those barricades hadn't been put up," an unnamed "Negro leader" was quoted as saying, "I don't think Lynhurst would have been bothered." As white residents expressed outrage, black real-estate agents claimed the story had been concocted by Southwest Citizens. Soon, this war of words escalated into a pitched battle. Late one Friday night in February, "parties unknown" descended on the Harlan Road barricade, pulled the I-beams out of the ground, sawed the timbers in half, and tossed the scraps into a nearby creek. The next morning, stunned residents grabbed saws and hand tools, chopped down nearby brush and trees, dragged the debris into the street and added a few dozen heavy stones for good measure. That night, the raiders returned and set fire to the new barricade. Once firefighters subdued the blaze, Mayor Allen announced that the city would rebuild the barricades, deploring the fact that "any group has seen fit to take the law into their own hands." Early Monday morning, construction crews sunk new beams into the scorched asphalt, attaching steel rails this time to prevent further fires. Just to make sure, small groups of robed Klansmen stood guard at the barricades on Monday and Tuesday night. Patrolling the street, they held aloft signs: "Whites Have Rights, Too."

In spite of the movement to insure its permanence, the "Peyton Wall" was short-lived. Local courts quickly ruled against the roadblocks and the mayor, relieved to find a way out of the public relations nightmare, had them immediately removed. But as the barricades were destroyed, so was whites' confidence in the neighborhood. In less than a month, most homes in Peyton Forest-including that of Virgil Copeland, the head of the homeowners' resistance movement-were listed for sale with black real-estate agents. "When the barricades came down, everything collapsed," he told a reporter. "It's all over out there for us." Indeed, by the end of July 1963 all but fifteen white families had sold their homes to black buyers and abandoned the neighborhood. They were not simply fleeing Peyton Forest, Copeland pointed out, but the city itself. "We are trying to find some area outside the city limits where we can buy homes and get away from the problem" of desegregation, he noted. "Everybody I know is definitely leaving the city of Atlanta."

The "Peyton Wall" incident, as famous as it was fleeting, was only the most public eruption of the much larger phenomenon of white flight. That year alone, the...