Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis

Description:

Race and the Greening of Atlanta turns an environmental lens on Atlanta's ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city's variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of "the environment." Arising out of Atlanta's Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism's undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South.

Placing these two movements on the same historical page, Christopher C. Sellers spotlights those environmental inequities, ideals, and provocations that catalyzed their divergent political projects. He then follows the intermittent, sometimes vital alliances they struck as civil rights activists tackled poverty, as a new environmental state arose, and as Black politicians began winning elections. Into the 1980s, as a wealth-concentrating style of capitalism returned to the city and Atlanta became a national "poster child" for sprawl, the seedbeds spread both for a national environmental justice movement and for an influential new style of antistatism. Sellers contends that this new conservativism, sweeping the South with an antienvironmentalism and budding white nationalism that echoed the region's Jim Crow past, once again challenged the democracy Atlantans had achieved.

Brief description: JAMES C. GIESEN is a historian specializing in the environmental and agricultural history of the United States South. His book Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South was awarded the Deep South Book Prize and the Francis B. Simkins Award, and his articles have won awards from the Agricultural History Society and the Southern Historical Association. Giesen has been named a Gulmon Eminent Scholar by the College of Arts and Sciences at Mississippi State University as well as a John Grisham Master Teacher, the university's highest teaching honor. He is also a fellow and former president of the Agricultural History Society.

Review Quotes:

Race and the Greening of Atlanta meshes environmental history with social and political history in creative and compelling ways. Sellers' ambitious periodization and decision to extend his study deep into recent history gives the book staying power in a discipline constantly playing catch-up with the present.