“Save Auburn Avenue for Our Black Heritage”: Debating Development in Post–Civil Rights Atlanta

Abstract

This article investigates debates concerning the redevelopment of Atlanta’s historic Black business district, “Sweet” Auburn Avenue, in the 1980s. It argues that the revitalization debates suggest two ways of conceptualizing the post–civil rights era; first, as an era of limits in which shifts in the global economy and the national political landscape narrowed the scope of what liberal Black politicians and civic activists believed what politically possible, and second, as an era of anxiety in which political and economic crises fostered nostalgia about the Black past and uncertainty about the future of Black Americans. Focusing on the divisions that emerged among Black Atlantans over the creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic Site and the construction of the Auburn Avenue Research Library, the article analyzes how the political-economic constraints and anxieties of the period informed various visions of redevelopment. In doing so, it reveals how the conditions of the post–civil rights era, and the affect produced by them, structured urban Black politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century.