Atlanta: The Cesspool of the South
When I was a student at Georgia Tech in the mid-1960s, Atlanta was a clean, safe and vibrant city. Then along came a well-intended, but horribly misguided, war: the war on poverty. After my wife and I married in 1966, we often visited an area of town known as Buckhead, which is still metropolitan Atlanta’s premier shopping and restaurant district. Despite its many attractions, we soon began shying away from Buckhead. Like the rest of Atlanta, predominately white Buckhead became increasingly unsafe.
Under the enlightened leadership of white Democrat mayors of the 1960s through 1974—William B. Hartsfield, Ivan Allen and Sam Massell—the South’s leading city eagerly joined the civil rights movement, so much so that it became known as the “City Too Busy to Hate,” a flattering tag line that would soon become inoperative.
As the years unfolded, Atlanta was slowly transformed to a dirty and unsafe eyesore marked by urban blight, vagrants defecating on public sidewalks, boarded-up houses, vacant lots, abandoned buildings, rat-infested public housing, gang graffiti, home invasions, drive-by shootings, carjackings, child sex trafficking, inexcusably sorry public schools, generational poverty and, of course, the inevitable offshoot of such wretched living conditions: chronic despair endured 24/7/365 by innocent black people who live in Atlanta’s inner city, a crime infested urban war zone unfit for human habitation.
Like the rest of metro Atlanta, the Buckhead district is being overwhelmed by an escalating wave of violent crime committed mostly by young black men. More on that farther down, but before continuing to read, please watch Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue about the black-on-white murder and mayhem that has residents of Buckhead afraid to leave their home. As you watch the segment, keep in mind that what you’ll see is happening to varying degrees in every Democrat-run city in America.
Atlanta’s shocking decline coincides almost perfectly with the war on poverty, landmark legislation passed into law in 1964 with the noble intent of leveling the playing field for black citizens after decades of oppression under Jim Crow. Almost overnight, the racial makeup of Atlanta flipped, as impoverished blacks from rural areas moved to Georgia’s capitol city to take advantage of subsidized government housing and other anti-poverty programs.
Until 1974, Atlanta never had a black mayor; since then, it has never had another white mayor. Over the last 47 years, the city’s mayoral office has been occupied by a succession of progressive black Democrats: Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, Bill Campbell, Shirley Franklin, Kaseem Reed and current mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms. I’ve lived in the Atlanta area during all of those administrations, and my most vivid memory of them is how the race card was used to ensure that no white candidate, especially a Republican, would ever again be elected mayor.
A cold slap in the face to Dr. King’s dream of racial harmony, black mayoral candidates in Atlanta made an art form of terrifying black voters with the scurrilous charge that white Republicans are little more than modern day Klansmen dressed in business suits instead of white sheets. One of the most shameful examples of this indefensible practice occurred in 2006.
With then-mayor Shirley Franklin at their side and ominous background music, John Lewis and Andrew Young, two of the greatest icons of the civil rights movement, trashed the spirit of everything they fought for by lending their voices to a despicable radio ad warning black voters “your very lives will be threatened” if Republicans are elected. Throwing gasoline on the lingering embers of racial resentment has been a staple of Democratic Party election politics dating to the time when the racial makeup of America’s cities turned from predominately white to predominately minority.
So what have elected black Democrats done to improve the lives of the desperately poor minority voters who help elect them? The answer is, next to nothing. According to Bob Woodson, a former executive of the National Urban League, 70% of the $22 trillion in anti-poverty funding never reached the impoverished black people it was intended to help. Instead, the lion’s share was siphoned off by Democrat governors, mayors, county managers and school superintendents to further entrench their political empires. Once in office, they created bloated, inefficient and wasteful bureaucracies that devoured massive sums of anti-poverty funding in ways that did virtually nothing to improve the plight of people in the inner city. Despite six decades of stratospheric social spending, urban America is in worse shape than ever.
By nearly every measure, Democrat administration of anti-poverty funding has been catastrophic for urban Americans, with the disintegration of the black family as Exhibit A. When the war on poverty was enacted, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among African Americans was 25%. A half-century later, that rate has skyrocketed to 77%, clear evidence that the war on poverty backfired in an unimaginably tragic way that would leave generations of young black women addicted to the demeaning lifestyle of government dependency, and generations of young black men saddled with functional illiteracy and arrested psychological development.
As millions of out-of-wedlock babies were born in ghetto neighborhoods, America continued massive spending on new and existing social welfare programs to help lift the black underclass. Nearly all of those programs were administered by blue state and blue city Democrats, with disastrous consequences, especially for young black males.
Having been robbed of a realistic chance for a decent education by the inexcusably substandard public schools in Democrat-run cities, generations of angry young black men unable to read or write defaulted to a life of crime, with many destined to end up dead or in prison before turning 20. While urban kids who want to learn have no choice but to attend the horrendous public schools in the inner city, many of America’s most prominent Democrats send their own children to top-performing private academies.
Dating to the time the war on poverty began, urban Americans have lived in squalor, with each election bringing a new round of empty promises from the party that that relies on welfare addiction and race-arson politics to win elections. When urban voters grumble, they’re told to be patient, that better days are just around the corner, the same line they’ve been fed for the last half century. While the black underclass faces a daily struggle just to survive, the Democrats they helped elect live in new homes, drive new cars, dine at upscale restaurants and vacation at luxury resorts.
With the Democratic Party now ramping up critical race theory in a cynical attempt to con the black electorate to believe that “white supremacy” is responsible for everything that’s wrong in the African American community, black on white animosity will only get worse in Atlanta and every other blue city in America, just as Democrats planned it.
The Cesspool of the South is not the only big blue city that has stabbed the black underclass in the back. Fed-up with decades of being lied to, four reformed ex-cons in Chicago aired their grievances against Democrats in an explosive 4-min. video made while Obama was still in office. If you never watch another video, please watch this one and share it far and wide.
For more about how high profile Democrats incite black against white racial hatred, read John Eidson’s Blue State Conservative article “The Obamas: America’s First Couple of Race Arson”
©John Edison. All rights reserved.
This is the most racist piece of shit ever. You got to be about 80. So that would explain your self hate.
Please explain how this column is racist. Is telling the truth racist? Are you a racist for calling the author a racist?
Do you have any logical fact based comments to share with us?
Do you even live in Atlanta?
This article provides the fact that minorities, especially blacks, have suffered under the policies of the Democrat Party.
Prove the author wrong, if you can.
Absolutely agree. Those folks want to make it great again, yet all those decades of neglect of those “Black folks” constant ripping away at the larger City and synergy forming mini-cities that further neglect and segregate. Too late now, move to Johns Creek or further out as diversity continues to permeate further from the City center.
Be apart of the solution and not more of the real problem.
Troll. It’s the truth.
I moved out of Fulton County in 2019, Sandy Springs, thank God! I’m a native Georgian, So, I’m watching from N GA what these communists have done and are doing. I’m so sad to see how my home state has gone down the tubes and how the people are suffering. Even though our Governor and Attorney General are white, they are cut from the same cloth, they HATE the citizens of Georgia! So, it’s not just a race thing, so don’t make it “waycist”.
How is it racist…
The first paragraph gives it away.
In summation..
Atlanta was once a glorious white southern city… blah blah blah
Now black people live there, so now I’m scared, and it’s all their fault.
My only question is.. how does that fear feel???
We’ve dealt with fearing your culture for 400 years, and you’ve dealt with it since the mid 60’s..
Must be terrifying…
The author never said Atlanta was a “white city.” But he showed how Atlanta went from being safe and prosperous to deadly and poor.
These sentiments were created by the Rev. William J. H. Boetcker, who lectured around the United States about industrial relations at the turn of the twentieth century.
You cannot bring prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further brotherhood of men by inciting class hatred.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Dr. Rich Swier
Atlanta: The Cesspool of the South
June 23, 2021/in Commentary, Elections, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues /by John Eidson
When I was a student at Georgia Tech in the mid-1960s, Atlanta was a clean, safe and vibrant city. Then along came a well-intended, but horribly misguided, war: the war on poverty. After my wife and I married in 1966, we often visited an area of town known as Buckhead, which is still metropolitan Atlanta’s premier shopping and restaurant district. Despite its many attractions, we soon began shying away from Buckhead. Like the rest of Atlanta, predominately white Buckhead became increasingly unsafe.
Under the enlightened leadership of white Democrat mayors of the 1960s through 1974—William B. Hartsfield, Ivan Allen and Sam Massell—the South’s leading city eagerly joined the civil rights movement, so much so that it became known as the “City Too Busy to Hate,” a flattering tag line that would soon become inoperative.
As the years unfolded, Atlanta was slowly transformed to a dirty and unsafe eyesore marked by urban blight, vagrants defecating on public sidewalks, boarded-up houses, vacant lots, abandoned buildings, rat-infested public housing, gang graffiti, home invasions, drive-by shootings, carjackings, child sex trafficking, inexcusably sorry public schools, generational poverty and, of course, the inevitable offshoot of such wretched living conditions: chronic despair endured 24/7/365 by innocent black people who live in Atlanta’s inner city, a crime infested urban war zone unfit for human habitation.
Like the rest of metro Atlanta, the Buckhead district is being overwhelmed by an escalating wave of violent crime committed mostly by young black men. More on that farther down, but before continuing to read, please watch Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue about the black-on-white murder and mayhem that has residents of Buckhead afraid to leave their home. As you watch the segment, keep in mind that what you’ll see is happening to varying degrees in every Democrat-run city in America.
Atlanta’s shocking decline coincides almost perfectly with the war on poverty, landmark legislation passed into law in 1964 with the noble intent of leveling the playing field for black citizens after decades of oppression under Jim Crow. Almost overnight, the racial makeup of Atlanta flipped, as impoverished blacks from rural areas moved to Georgia’s capitol city to take advantage of subsidized government housing and other anti-poverty programs.
Until 1974, Atlanta never had a black mayor; since then, it has never had another white mayor. Over the last 47 years, the city’s mayoral office has been occupied by a succession of progressive black Democrats: Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, Bill Campbell, Shirley Franklin, Kaseem Reed and current mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms. I’ve lived in the Atlanta area during all of those administrations, and my most vivid memory of them is how the race card was used to ensure that no white candidate, especially a Republican, would ever again be elected mayor.
A cold slap in the face to Dr. King’s dream of racial harmony, black mayoral candidates in Atlanta made an art form of terrifying black voters with the scurrilous charge that white Republicans are little more than modern day Klansmen dressed in business suits instead of white sheets. One of the most shameful examples of this indefensible practice occurred in 2006.
With then-mayor Shirley Franklin at their side and ominous background music, John Lewis and Andrew Young, two of the greatest icons of the civil rights movement, trashed the spirit of everything they fought for by lending their voices to a despicable radio ad warning black voters “your very lives will be threatened” if Republicans are elected. Throwing gasoline on the lingering embers of racial resentment has been a staple of Democratic Party election politics dating to the time when the racial makeup of America’s cities turned from predominately white to predominately minority.
So what have elected black Democrats done to improve the lives of the desperately poor minority voters who help elect them? The answer is, next to nothing. According to Bob Woodson, a former executive of the National Urban League, 70% of the $22 trillion in anti-poverty funding never reached the impoverished black people it was intended to help. Instead, the lion’s share was siphoned off by Democrat governors, mayors, county managers and school superintendents to further entrench their political empires. Once in office, they created bloated, inefficient and wasteful bureaucracies that devoured massive sums of anti-poverty funding in ways that did virtually nothing to improve the plight of people in the inner city. Despite six decades of stratospheric social spending, urban America is in worse shape than ever.
By nearly every measure, Democrat administration of anti-poverty funding has been catastrophic for urban Americans, with the disintegration of the black family as Exhibit A. When the war on poverty was enacted, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among African Americans was 25%. A half-century later, that rate has skyrocketed to 77%, clear evidence that the war on poverty backfired in an unimaginably tragic way that would leave generations of young black women addicted to the demeaning lifestyle of government dependency, and generations of young black men saddled with functional illiteracy and arrested psychological development.
As millions of out-of-wedlock babies were born in ghetto neighborhoods, America continued massive spending on new and existing social welfare programs to help lift the black underclass. Nearly all of those programs were administered by blue state and blue city Democrats, with disastrous consequences, especially for young black males.
Having been robbed of a realistic chance for a decent education by the inexcusably substandard public schools in Democrat-run cities, generations of angry young black men unable to read or write defaulted to a life of crime, with many destined to end up dead or in prison before turning 20. While urban kids who want to learn have no choice but to attend the horrendous public schools in the inner city, many of America’s most prominent Democrats send their own children to top-performing private academies.
Dating to the time the war on poverty began, urban Americans have lived in squalor, with each election bringing a new round of empty promises from the party that that relies on welfare addiction and race-arson politics to win elections. When urban voters grumble, they’re told to be patient, that better days are just around the corner, the same line they’ve been fed for the last half century. While the black underclass faces a daily struggle just to survive, the Democrats they helped elect live in new homes, drive new cars, dine at upscale restaurants and vacation at luxury resorts.
With the Democratic Party now ramping up critical race theory in a cynical attempt to con the black electorate to believe that “white supremacy” is responsible for everything that’s wrong in the African American community, black on white animosity will only get worse in Atlanta and every other blue city in America, just as Democrats planned it.
The Cesspool of the South is not the only big blue city that has stabbed the black underclass in the back. Fed-up with decades of being lied to, four reformed ex-cons in Chicago aired their grievances against Democrats in an explosive 4-min. video made while Obama was still in office. If you never watch another video, please watch this one and share it far and wide.
For more about how high profile Democrats incite black against white racial hatred, read John Eidson’s Blue State Conservative article “The Obamas: America’s First Couple of Race Arson”
©John Edison. All rights reserved.
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REPLIES
Nunof Busines
Nunof Businessays:
June 23, 2021 at 10:23 AM
This is the most racist piece of shit ever. You got to be about 80. So that would explain your self hate.
Reply
Dr. Rich Swier
Dr. Rich Swiersays:
June 23, 2021 at 10:30 AM
Please explain how this column is racist. Is telling the truth racist? Are you a racist for calling the author a racist?
Do you have any logical fact based comments to share with us?
Do you even live in Atlanta?
This article provides the fact that minorities, especially blacks, have suffered under the policies of the Democrat Party.
Prove the author wrong, if you can.
Reply
Wow
Wowsays:
June 23, 2021 at 11:16 AM
How is it racist…
The first paragraph gives it away.
In summation..
Atlanta was once a glorious white southern city… blah blah blah
Now black people live there, so now I’m scared, and it’s all their fault.
My only question is.. how does that fear feel???
We’ve dealt with fearing your culture for 400 years, and you’ve dealt with it since the mid 60’s..
Must be terrifying…
Reply
Dr. Rich Swier
Dr. Rich Swiersays:
June 23, 2021 at 11:30 AM
The author never said Atlanta was a “white city.” But he showed how Atlanta went from being safe and prosperous to deadly and poor.
These sentiments were created by the Rev. William J. H. Boetcker, who lectured around the United States about industrial relations at the turn of the twentieth century.
You cannot bring prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further brotherhood of men by inciting class hatred.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Reply
Blkpique45
Blkpique45says:
June 23, 2021 at 2:35 PM
Yes, this is a very bias piece of garbage.
He is only writing from his perspective and no comparison made of how an election was stolen by a white Republican. How a President and law makers continue to foster hate and division. This article has no fact finding but that which has been repeated. Yes, this is the city of the civil rights movement and just like the generation of Whites in that era. In 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. Although a large group of diversity from foreign and domestic. There was an echo of hate spewed by the sons and grandson of White descendents. A group consistently calling those who protested against police brutality and those lives who lost their lives everything but the child of God. The perpetuation of fear and stereotypes which continues to create division amongst all races. The fact that this writer stated to watch Tucker Carlson for any truth findings is surreal. Tucker Carlson operates from a position of fear which promotes his ideals about people of color. I encourage the writer and Carlson to remove yourselves from your posh communities and go out and have dialogue with people of color. Position yourselves to learn about how people of color. I don’t mean from a political point of view which hinges on your own ideology. But that which puts you in an uncomfortable setting which is growth and acceptance. This allows you to gather facts and fully process and recognize their human nature. It does not isolate and create false theories about people of color beliefs which are baseless. Provide information where you did your research and why you think Whites are not responsible for all the mayhem in this country.
You’re welcome to move to Africa anytime if you hate whites so much. Why should we fawn over you while you hate our guys? Get over yourself you stupid fucking loser.
Everyone on the planet is racist but black people think everything white people do is based on race and it’s just not true. Everything black do is about race. Who cares what happened 400 years ago? Get over it. If all the people in this country – white and black – would focus on more important things like kids who don’t have enough food to eat instead of worrying about Confederate monuments. Someone’s great-grandfather fought for Georgia and his family and they are a part of history and they should stay. You weren’t alive 400 years ago. Stop complaining about it and fix what’s wrong in THIS TIME. There’s nothing wrong with protesting for what you believe in but you don’t see white people burning down businesses and looting and shooting each other in the streets of Atlanta do you???? No you sure don’t? I’m white and I work in East Point and you never hear about the constant black on black crime that goes on 24/7 around here. I wonder why that is??? Any comments?? I bet Dr. Swier has a few. Great article by the way.