America's Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy

by Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar

Overview

The remarkable story of how African Americans transformed Atlanta, the former heart of the Confederacy, into today’s Black mecca  
  
Atlanta is home to some of America’s most prominent Black politicians, artists, businesses, and HBCUs. Yet, in 1861, Atlanta was a final contender to be the capital of the Confederacy. Sixty years later, long after the Civil War, it was the Ku Klux Klan’s sacred “Imperial City.” 
 
America’s Black Capital chronicles how a center of Black excellence emerged amid virulent expressions of white nationalism, as African Americans pushed back against Confederate ideology to create an extraordinary locus of achievement. What drove them, historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar shows, was the belief that Black uplift would be best advanced by forging Black institutions. America’s Black Capital is an inspiring story of Black achievement against all odds, with effects that reached far beyond Georgia, shaping the nation’s popular culture, public policy, and politics. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541601994
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	229,249
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar is professor of history and founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music at the University of Connecticut. He earned his PhD in US history from Indiana University Bloomington and his BA in history from Morehouse College in Atlanta. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut.

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/11/2023

Historian Ogbar (Hip Hop Revolution) presents an illuminating and thought-provoking history of Atlanta from the 19th century to the present. Focusing on how, in spite of suppression by Georgia’s white nationalists and neo-Confederates, the city became a mecca for African Americans, Ogbar contends that this result was achieved through a commitment to “Afro-self-determinism” (“the belief that black people would be best served by creating institutions for, by, and in the best interests of black people”) and a rejection of desegregation, integration, and interracial cooperation as goals. Ogbar leads the reader through several eras, including the end of slavery, post-Reconstruction, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century, and provides a harrowing description of the 1906 Atlanta Racial Massacre. Throughout, he traces the efforts, initially on the outskirts of the city, of Black residents to build Black institutions. By the 1970s, Atlanta was home to Black universities and schools, Black businesses, Black suburbs, and Black political strength (in 1973, the city was the first in the South to elect a Black mayor). By the 21st century, Atlanta flourished as a center of Black life. Ogbar’s meticulous account is both an eye-opening reassessment of the origins of African American political power and a significant contribution to American history. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

An illuminating and thought-provoking history of Atlanta from the 19th century to the present…Ogbar’s meticulous account is both an eye-opening reassessment of the origins of African American political power and a significant contribution to American history.”
 —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A revealing history that points to a Black Atlanta destined to be an ever more important economic and political center.”
 —Kirkus

“Elegantly written and exhaustively researched, America’s Black Capital is a brilliant chronicle of both Atlanta, the Southern city, and Atlanta, the metaphor for a segment of the American experience. Here is a saga of race, aspiration, war, ambition, and the tide of history told through the story of a single metropolis. Jeffrey Ogbar has produced a book that is every bit as vital and essential as the place he writes about.”
 —Jelani Cobb, coeditor of The Matter of Black Lives

“Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar’s America’s Black Capital is a towering achievement. It powerfully captures the dynamism of Black politics in Atlanta—in great depth and sheer brilliance. This remarkable book is an inspiring work of history in which Black people take center stage as the key architects of their own destiny.”
 —Keisha N. Blain, coeditor of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls and award-winning author of Until I Am Free

“Jeffrey Ogbar has crafted a first-rate work of historical consciousness-raising. America’s Black Capital is a stirring testament to the generations of Black Atlantans who, from the ashes of the Confederacy, raised a bastion of Black political power and cultural excellence. A tremendous feat.”
 —Peniel Joseph, author of The Third Reconstruction

“Spectacular! America’s Black Capital is a landmark in Black history. Jeffrey Ogbar provides an expert excavation of how Atlanta came to be seen as the ‘Black Mecca,’ including a deftly drawn origin story for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A dazzling book.”
 —Gerald Horne, author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776

From the Publisher

2023-09-08
A chronicle of Atlanta’s rise as the foremost city in Black America.

It should come as no surprise that Black Atlanta turned the 2020 election in favor of not just Joe Biden but also two Democratic senators in a putatively red state. It came as a surprise all the same, writes University of Connecticut historian Ogbar, that the turnout was so stunning given so many efforts to impede the Black vote. Black residents of Atlanta, he writes, “cast more votes than black people in any other metro area in the United States.” That’s just one surprise in a narrative that takes Atlanta from the most important city of the Confederacy outside Richmond, to the so-called citadel of the KKK, to the first southern metropolis to elect a Black mayor. There are countless reasons for Atlanta’s success as a city of global importance. For one thing, there are more Black institutions of higher learning in Atlanta than anywhere else in the U.S., and a solid Black middle class expanded from city center to suburbs long ago. The author traces the rise and persistence of white nationalism against this background of Black accomplishment. Up to the present, the white vote has largely gone to reactionaries, illustrating another of Ogbar’s central points: “Whatever success that black people achieved in the city, they achieved in spite of the city’s racist policies, not because white people (power brokers, city officials, or random white civilians) had aided them.” Even if the year that the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain was unveiled was the same year that Ebony magazine called Atlanta “the Black Mecca,” Black Atlantans have long come together in the ongoing project to overcome white resistance.

A revealing history that points to a Black Atlanta destined to be an ever more important economic and political center.

Kirkus Reviews