Black Excellence : Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism / Danielle Wiggins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wiggins, Danielle, author.

Series:

Politics and Culture in Modern America.

Politics and Culture in Modern America

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Liberalism.

Liberalism--History.

African American mayors.

Atlanta (Ga.)--Politics and government.

Atlanta (Ga.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (321 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2025]

Summary:

A provocative new history of modern black liberalism Black Excellence offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post-civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition. In the 1970s and '80s, cities across the country elected black mayors for the first time. Just as these officials gained political power, however, their cities felt the full brunt of white flight and deindustrialization. Tasked with governing cities in crisis, black political leaders responded in seemingly conservative ways to the social problems that austerity worsened. Nowhere was this response more evident than in Atlanta. In the nation's preeminent black urban regime, black leaders such as mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young employed the power of policing and the private sector to discipline black Atlantans, hoping they would equip vulnerable communities with the tools to manage the volatility of the era. Danielle Wiggins shows that these punitive responses to the problems of crime, family instability, and unemployment were informed by black liberalism's disciplinary impulse: an enduring tendency to reform behaviors believed to threaten black survival in a white supremacist nation. Forged in response to the violence of Jim Crow, the disciplinary impulse relied upon notions of pathology and its inverse, black excellence. Wiggins identifies several black liberal efforts to cultivate excellent black communities, families, and workers in the post-civil rights era, including community policing, corporate-sponsored family initiatives, and black entrepreneurship. In embracing disciplinary strategies, however, black liberals often focused on behavior at the expense of addressing structural inequality. Consequently, their approaches dovetailed with those of the "New" Democrats, whose post-Great Society social policies were informed by urban black liberals. Black Excellence reveals thus how urban black liberals not only reshaped black politics but, as Democrats, also helped build the neoliberal Democratic Party.

Contents:

Cover

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction. The Politics of Black Excellence

Chapter 1. Black Liberalism's Disciplinary Impulse from Uplift to Politics

Chapter 2. Crime and the Crisis of Community in Maynard Jackson's Atlanta

Chapter 3. The Underclass and the Crisis of the Black Family in Reagan's America

Chapter 4. Unemployment and the Crisis of Black Human Capital in Andrew Young's Atlanta

Chapter 5. Jesse Jackson, the Democratic Leadership Council, and the Black New Democrats of Atlanta

Epilogue. Black Liberalism as Counterinsurgency

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781512827859

1512827851

OCLC:

1514975864