Class Warfare in Black Atlanta: Grassroots Struggles, Power, and Repression under Gentrification

by Augustus Wood

Between 1966 and 2015, the city of Atlanta was transformed. In the late 1960s, Black politicians ascended to the top of the power structure for the first time thanks to newly enfranchised Black working-class voters. Through the early 1970s, the demographics of the city shifted, and the combination of Black empowerment and white flight produced a growing Black working-class majority that increasingly demanded Black Power policies that often clashed with the policies supported by affluent residents. But by the 2010s, Atlanta’s city core had been thoroughly gentrified, and the ability of Black working-class Atlantans to organize and build power had diminished significantly.

Tracing the history of post–civil rights Black Atlanta through rigorous class analysis, Augustus Wood argues that Black and white elites responded to an energized and politicized Black working class by forging a public-private partnership power bloc that included the small but growing Black political leadership, expanding the racial class contradictions in Black Atlanta. This bloc worked to shift state funding away from public services and toward gentrification projects that demolished subsidized housing, and it ramped up police surveillance to deter working-class resistance. Paying close attention to political economy and class while drawing on unexamined archival sources and oral histories of Black working-class Atlantans, especially Black women, Wood reframes our understanding of contemporary Black urban life by highlighting the centrality of the dynamics of intraracial class conflict in urban space.

Genres: American History, Politics, History

360 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 6, 2025

Reviews

[Laith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book covers the last 50 years that made Atlanta as we know it today. Studies the political economy of the changes in the city and centers the people who are affected most by it, the Black working class. I have not come across another book that takes such an all-sided approach in its study of Atlanta history. The author takes the side of the working class, which is a breath of fresh air. Important for anyone trying to make progressive change in Atlanta. There are people before us who have fought hard and lessons can be learned from their struggles. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
I was not a fan of how it’s written for scholars/academics, which especially comes out in the epilogue/“What Is To Be Done?” section. The book would have been more popular if it was less academic, and a book like this should be more popular.

[Charles Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just started reading and it has already become among my favorite texts of socialism, eclipsing Civil War in France. Searing and precise truths that clarify the transnational importance of the on-going class struggles in Atlanta. Wood writes:
“Atlanta’s Andrew Young argued that Black Power meant getting a fair share of capital and that militancy must give way to free enterprise and private wealth”

This text is critical in understanding how and why Atlanta has among the highest income inequalities of any US city, how its Black population became among the most surveilled and incarcerated on earth, and how ultimately the poor, dispossessed, and exploited can achieve liberation.

[Michael Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This does a fantastic job of being both an in depth history of the racial dynamics in black Atlanta while also weaving in the real time economic and political landscape. Wood's understanding of Atlanta as a Westside native is very apparent and the interviews and research done on each of the governor's paints one of the most comprehensive pictures of the class and labor divide that exists within in the city. Even having lived in Atlanta since middle school and been active in political movements, there were bits of Atlanta history that even I was unaware of.

[Jared Palencia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had grown up in the metro Atlanta area from ages 6 to 19, and throughout that entire time period, I witnessed and experienced firsthand the intensity and unpredictability that comes with rapid urbanization and economic growth managed entirely through the hands and grips of capital. Dr. Wood offers an incredibly insightful and exceptional analysis of the transformation of Atlanta from a minor bustling big city in the deep South into an international hub for finance capital and distribution and the process of gentrification, dispossession, and neoliberalization that brutally uprooted and displaced peoples, families, and communities that long existed in Atlanta for the benefit of transforming the city's landscape into one ripe for capital and wealth accumulation and privatization. Dr. Wood extensively analyzes the processes of displacement, gentrification, and neoliberalization through a hardened historical and dialectical materialist analysis to show that Atlanta's transformation was planned, calculated, and a deliberate project by white capital and its black political and economic elite allies in government and business. Definitely a worthwhile read.