Atlanta Was Ours. And Then It Altered.

My very own family’s story is entangled in that record: My grandfather, Marque Leslie Jackson, was Martin Luther King Jr.’s health practitioner (he the moment took out King’s tonsils) and he typically threw himself into the activist fray, picketing segregated division merchants like Rich’s. Meanwhile, my grandmother’s brother, R.E. Thomas, Jr. (we identified as him Uncle Edwin) was an lawyer who worked to desegregate Atlanta’s community golf programs in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Courtroom. Later, he and his spouse, Mamie, helped activists from the Pupil Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, supplying them with food items, funds and a location to stay. My mother, who grew up with Maynard Jackson (no relation) was a lobbyist for the Ga NAACP in the ’80s, the place she worked beneath Bond and served get anti-Klan laws passed in the Georgia Legislature. I keep in mind her getting demise threats.

They in no way created a huge deal of any of it, it was some thing casually dropped into discussions and then, we moved on. These ended up just information of lifetime, almost nothing more, very little much less.

There is a dark side to all this Black privilege. The force to excel, to continually surmount, can be much too significant a burden to bear. Some mates, the scions of Atlanta’s Black elite, fell down and didn’t get up, carried out in by medicines, suicide, despair. Usually, there wasn’t a lot of generational prosperity to pass down, many thanks to a legacy of redlining and discrimination.

And then there is this: Atlanta is — was — incredibly a lot a “who’s your people” form of city.

Privilege, Black privilege, wasn’t specifically a monolith. The Aged Guard, from whence my folks sprang, had been the goods of generations of amalgamation, light-skinned Black people who received a leg up with on the racial ladder with a blend of industriousness and a effectively-placed white slave-proudly owning relative or 3 who (occasionally) bequeathed independence, land, and if you were lucky, an training, too.

Guarding the gates of the Aged Guard ended up doyennes fixated on shade and hair texture and loved ones lineage, passing down that feeling of superiority from era to generation.

So. There was the Previous Guard of suitable, middle-course gatekeepers like my maternal grandmother, Ruth, “club women” whose mission was to “uplift the race” — while holding the keys to the Black bourgie kingdom in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Believe the Links, the Woman Close friends, Jack and Jill, the Boule, the Guardsmen, all bastions of Black excellence and Black exclusion. But the ’60s and ’70s introduced in the New Guard of Black bourgie-ness, folks who could possibly be of a darker hue, people who perhaps didn’t have a white slave-owning great-wonderful-grandfather who was apparently Okay with proudly owning Black folks, but who perhaps experienced sufficient of a conscience to feel that proudly owning your have blood was just maybe kinda messed up, and so they gave their Black little ones a small a little something.

The New Guard may well be a tiny darker, they may not have that white-adjacent-ness, but they experienced income. They’re the types who got rich thanks to grit and professional medical university or a design company that designed a boatload of ducats or a definitely genius way of planning a funeral house with generate-by means of viewing. (Sure, that seriously occurred.) And that intended they experienced revenue — heaps and tons of it — and that brought a certain power that even the shade-struck doyennes of the Previous Guard could not deny.

Not everybody was hip to — or happy about — this major cultural revolution. Atlanta, soon after all, was a main strategic town for the Confederacy all through the Civil War, and some Atlantans had been nonetheless fighting that fight. My mother and father, major proponents of grabbing the best schooling revenue could buy, enrolled me at the Westminster Universities on the Northwest facet of town. Specially, Westminster, with its accouterments of privilege (luxe dorms, rolling lawns, Olympic-dimensions swimming pool) was situated in Buckhead, house of Previous Funds and Outdated Southern families. (That would be the same community, continue to the whitest in the town, that in 2022 is hoping mightily to secede from the rest of Atlanta.)