Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta
Autor Thomas Aielloen Limba Engleză Hardback – dec 2025
Atlanta had been courting and landing professional sports teams in football, basketball, and baseball since the end of 1968. An influential state politician, Leroy Johnson, Georgia’s first Black state senator since Reconstruction, was determined to help Ali return after his exile. The state had no boxing commission to prevent Ali from fighting there, so Johnson made it his mission for Ali to make a comeback in Georgia. Ali’s opponent would be Jerry Quarry, the top heavyweight contender and, more important, a white man who had spoken out against Ali’s objection to the war.
In Return of the King, Thomas Aiello examines the history of Muhammad Ali, Leroy Johnson, and the city of Atlanta, while highlighting an important fight of Ali’s that changed the trajectory of his career. Although the fight between Ali and Quarry lasted only three rounds, those nine minutes changed boxing forever and were crucial to both the growth of Atlanta and the rebirth of Ali’s boxing career.
Preț: 211.53 lei
Nou
Puncte Express: 317
Preț estimativ în valută:
37.43€ • 43.89$ • 32.87£
37.43€ • 43.89$ • 32.87£
Carte disponibilă
Livrare economică 10-24 ianuarie 26
Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76
Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496244185
ISBN-10: 1496244184
Pagini: 352
Ilustrații: 19 photographs, 13 illustrations, 3 tables, index
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.69 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496244184
Pagini: 352
Ilustrații: 19 photographs, 13 illustrations, 3 tables, index
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.69 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Thomas Aiello is a professor of history and Africana studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey and Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947–1979.
Extras
1. CLASS, RACE, AND THE RISE OF LEROY JOHNSON IN ATLANTA
1895–1968
Atlanta’s Black middle class had made itself a dominant part of the
city’s community since the last decades of the nineteenth century, an
entrepreneurial group that had cast down its bucket since the days of
Booker Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech in the city during
the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. The political relationship that they
developed with influential whites continued until 1908, when the state
instituted its white primary. Political influence, however, wasn’t the
only kind of influence. By 1911 the city had roughly two thousand Black
businesses. At the close of the nineteenth century the Black elite was
largely composed of entrepreneurs who sold products and services to
white customers, but change was afoot. Just as in northern markets
responding to the early birth pangs of the Great Migration, an influx of
rural Black migrants into Atlanta turned many whites away from Black
service industries, leading to an erosion of the old hierarchical order and
its replacement with a new entrepreneurial class that built a business
infrastructure reliant instead on Black customers. Among Black business
owners in the 1890s, for example, only pharmacists, grocers, and
undertakers served a predominantly Black clientele. Those early members
of the Black elite lived in a city, unlike nearby Augusta and Savannah,
that never really had a substantial antebellum free population, and so
came principally, as August Meier explains, “from the mostly mulatto
house-servant group.” The core institutions of that original aristocracy
were the First Congregational Church, Atlanta University, and a variety
of exclusive social clubs.
The shift that created the new leadership class largely came from entrepreneurs
in the finance, insurance, and real estate industries. Alonzo
Herndon famously arrived in Atlanta in poverty but founded the Atlanta
Life Insurance Company in 1905. Hemon Perry arrived from Texas in
a similar state in 1908, but in 1911 he was able to create Standard Life
Insurance, which in turn developed a variety of subsidiaries, including
Citizens Trust Bank in 1921. Though Standard Life folded in the late
1920s, Citizens Trust would grow to become one of the most influential
and profitable Black banks in the country, just as Atlanta Life grew in
the insurance industry, becoming the largest Black life insurance company
in America. The new economic order had arrived. While much
of Atlanta’s Black business and cultural life still centered on Auburn
Avenue, many of those new power brokers moved to Atlanta’s West
Side residential areas.
The business elite was joined by the presidents of the city’s Black
colleges, a group of doctors and lawyers, and some college professors
to create a dominant core of influence peddlers, almost none of them
coming from the original nineteenth-century Black upper class. The older
families, then, were left to either marry into the new money or migrate
to other cities, which most of them ultimately did, creating what Meier
has called “a considerable elite circulation in Atlanta.” Still, while the
new money made for a larger Black upper class and a spread of wealth
to more entrepreneurs, the expansion of Black wealth also came with
a growing income disparity, as the bulk of poor rural migrants coming
to Atlanta did not have the good fortune of Herndon and Perry and
never made it to the nicer neighborhoods of the West Side. As Virginia
Hein explains, “There were two Atlantas within the city and two black
Atlantas within the black community itself.” One of those Black Atlantas
enjoyed wealth and the power to negotiate with white leaders; the other,
in the words of Anne Rivers Siddons, suffered “inadequate housing, poor
municipal services, idleness, dirt, decay, overcrowding, poor playground
facilities or none at all, and poverty—always, endlessly, too little money.”
That Black elite’s first real electoral success came in the 1920s, when
the Black voting bloc helped defeat a series of bond referenda. Leaders
then leveraged that power to get the city’s board of education to build
its first Black high school. When postwar legal victories, like the elimination
of the state’s white primary in Chapman v. King (1946), helped
expand Black political power more broadly, Black influence in Atlanta
only increased. Throughout the 1950s Black voters in Atlanta appeared
at the polls in greater percentages than whites and continued to grow in
number, until in 1962, the year of Leroy Johnson’s state senate election,
34 percent of the total electorate was Black, with roughly 52,000 registered
Black voters. The percentage of Black registrants remained lower
through the early 1960s than the percentage of the total Black population
in the city, but the Black voting bloc stood in lockstep behind candidates
whereas whites remained split between racial conservatives and racial
moderates. Two distinct voting blocs, then, ultimately emerged: one
that included middle-and upper-class whites and the vast majority of
Black voters, and another that included working-class whites and parts
of the middle class. In the 1961 mayoral election, for example, Ivan Allen
defeated opponent Lester Maddox by a relatively wide margin, even
though Maddox narrowly edged Allen among white voters. Black votes
swung that election and had the power to swing any city contest, making
Black political power a vital part of white political thinking. It was
something that white politicians in other Deep South cities didn’t have
to contend with, at least not to the same degree; but in return, whites in
the city got the ability to contrast Atlanta with more violent civil rights
sites like Montgomery, Little Rock, and New Orleans. Georgia’s capital
city was “the city too busy to hate”—a term coined by mayor William
Hartsfield in the year after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision and
popularized by the local Chamber of Commerce—courting
northern business development and venture capital to promote itself as a thriving
representative of the Sunbelt.
The slogan was part of a long-standing attempt to improve the city’s
image. In 1925 Atlanta’s Chamber of Commerce began a “Forward
Atlanta” campaign to increase new business infrastructure in the city.
The group invested three-quarters of a million dollars in the effort, and
it bore significant fruit, as the population of the city grew 35 percent
in the decade and hundreds of businesses and thousands of jobs came
to Atlanta as a result. While those jobs largely went to whites, Black
enterprises also thrived. By 1956 Fortune magazine had named Auburn
Avenue the “richest Negro street in the world,” and Atlanta Life Insurance
and Citizens Trust Bank were two of the most prosperous Black
companies in the country.
There were, however, limitations on Black economic and physical
mobility. Atlanta’s first segregation ordinance appeared in 1913 and was
followed by a variety of zoning ordinances that created separate spaces
for Black residency, even after the Supreme Court declared racial zoning
unconstitutional in 1924. More common, beginning in 1917, was the city’s
use of highway construction to remove Black residents from downtown
areas and bind them into certain sections, a practice that continued well
into the 1960s. After a new influx of Black migrants after World War
II, residential segregation practices in the city, and even the bombing
of Black homes, led the Urban League to create the Atlanta Housing
Council in an attempt to leverage Black political power to create more
physical space for Black residents, but those efforts met with further
highway construction projects and even physical barriers. In 1962, as
Johnson was winning his first term in the state senate, the notorious
Peyton Road “Wall” was erected after a Black doctor attempted to purchase
a house in Atlanta’s Peyton Forest subdivision. In response, the all-white
board of aldermen approved the barricading of two roads, which
stopped north-south travel into a cluster of white neighborhoods. The
Atlanta Negro Voters League and other Black leadership organizations
protested the move, and the barricades were ultimately removed on the
order of the Fulton County Superior Court, but the incident gave lie to
the assumption that white racial moderation was somehow akin to racial
advocacy—that Atlanta was indeed “too busy to hate.” The reality, from
any moderate white perspective, was that racial moderation required
segregation and necessitated placating racist whites just as much as
placating middle-and upper-class Black residents, leaving the bulk of
the city’s Black population out of the equation entirely.
That equation, however, yielded results for everyone else. After the
Lockheed Corporation, an aerospace company, built a factory in suburban
Marietta after World War II, other companies followed, expanding
the regional economy in the 1950s. In the 1960s Atlanta’s population
grew by thirty thousand residents every year; its economy added an
average of twenty-three thousand jobs annually. From 1945 to 1960
almost three thousand new corporations or branch offices of existing
corporations came to Atlanta. Skyscrapers rose; Six Flags and Atlanta
Stadium were built; the airport expanded. Atlanta became the financial
hub of the South. It was the home of Delta, Southern Bell, and Coca-
Cola. That growth, in turn, prompted the development of the tourism,
convention, and entertainment industries, creating a diverse economy
that white business and civic leaders didn’t want interrupted by civil
rights struggles and racial agitation.
In the late 1950s, as Georgia’s government was plotting a strategy to
avoid school desegregation, even floating a plan to shut down the state’s
schools, Mayor Hartsfield and Atlanta pushed back. His defense of education,
and his suggestion that Atlanta voters should have their say on
whether schools in the city should be desegregated, was supported by a
glut of white ministers, professionals, and parent-teacher
associations. Though that plan was not an endorsement of integrated schools, and
the only reason such discussions were taking place was because of the
work of Black activists pushing for such changes, white leaders again
worked with their Black counterparts to ensure that investment in Atlanta
would not stop because of overt statewide racism. A “Save Our Schools”
movement was created in 1959, largely by white parents. Both Black and
white leaders pushed for a biracial commission to help determine the
best route for desegregation. White Atlantans hadn’t become egalitarians,
of course, but they wanted schools, outside investment, and the
reputation that came with them. The state legislature responded in 1960
by holding hearings on school desegregation—a glorified way to delay
any actual decision on the prospect.
The legislature was representative of more than just Atlanta and was
far less worried about its national reputation than city leaders. White
residents who had absconded to the suburbs and no longer had the
same vested interest in the city’s growth were similarly skeptical of the
merits of integration. “We’ll see, as time goes on, how wrong they are,”
wrote one suburban editor of white Atlanta leadership’s insistence that
desegregation would encourage business relocation and private venture
capital to move into the city. “It will have nothing whatever to do with
location of plants or growth of business. You can mark these words well.”
It was a sentiment that would prove to be wrong, but it also demonstrated
the broader opinion of white Georgia beyond Atlanta’s power brokers.
Still, in August 1961 Black students desegregated four formerly white
high schools in Atlanta, and John Kennedy responded by citing the city
as exemplary of how Southern communities should respond to court
rulings. “Look closely,” he suggested, “at what Atlanta has done.” For the
New York Times Atlanta was the “new and shining example” of interracial
cooperation. Predominantly white magazines across the country echoed
the sentiment. Predominantly Black magazines declared Atlanta as a
new Black mecca. Ebony admitted that much of the “highly publicized
racial harmony” was “a fabrication encouraged by the Chamber of Commerce,”
but the magazine hyped the “Black mecca” nonetheless. “Some
say it’s the place where black dreams are most likely to come true, that
in Atlanta black folks have more, live better, accomplish more and deal
with whites more effectively than they do anywhere else in the South—or
North.” As was its common strategy, Ebony focused on the city’s talented
tenth, noting Black political, civic, and economic influence, the trappings
of success that could be seen in Atlanta’s shiny new skyline and on the
playing fields of its new pro sports teams. Leroy Johnson was part of the
hype, publicly claiming that there was “no other city in the nation where
a Negro has more opportunity to achieve his ambitions.”
All, however, was not as it seemed. Citing school desegregation efforts
and the sit-ins that followed, and the outwardly peaceful dispatch with
which they were dealt, Julian Bond said that “this city’s fathers are not
losing their expertise in explaining away Atlanta’s racial divisions.” The
bulk of the Black population in Atlanta was poor, and “it is poorly educated,”
Bond argued. He noted that a portion of the statistics that bore out
that poverty arose from the rural migrant population flooding into the city.
But the other part came from segregated schools run by a school board
“whose loyalties lay in financial Atlanta, and not in improving the minds
of young black men and women.” Keeping the peace, in other words,
was doing functional harm to the ability of Black Atlantans to get ahead
educationally and financially. “Something strange and appalling has
happened in Atlanta,” Martin Luther King, Jr., explained. “While boasting
of its civic virtue, Atlanta has allowed itself to fall behind almost every
major southern city in progress toward desegregation.” Despite the high-profile
high-school integration, the bulk of Atlanta’s schools remained
decidedly segregated a decade after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision.
The city’s actual desegregation didn’t take place until the second half
of the sixties, following the Supreme Court’s Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc.
v. United States (1964) decision, which ruled that the federal government
could enjoin a motel from discriminating on the basis of race, fully
enabling Title 2 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If the government could
enjoin the Heart of Atlanta Motel from discriminating, it could enjoin
all of the other whites-only businesses in the city. Only when the writing
was on the wall and a real threat of government intervention existed did
the city too busy to hate follow through with city-wide desegregation.
The Supreme Court also issued a ruling on Atlanta’s segregated schools
that year, but though Calhoun v. Latimer (1964) had been initiated by
the naacp’s Legal Defense Fund, local Black leaders failed to follow
through on the ruling’s dictates for fear of alienating white leaders and
stymieing progress on other fronts.
Nothing approximating comprehensive school desegregation in Atlanta
happened until 1973, years after Ali and the crowds he drew had left
the city. At that point the local naacp, led by onetime Leroy Johnson
ally Lonnie King, negotiated with white elites to appoint a Black school
superintendent and install other Black administrators while the integration
of actual students was de-emphasized, leaving the vast majority of
the city’s schools at least 90 percent single-race. In response, a group of
Black parents filed suit, claiming that the supposed settlement had been
negotiated without the consent of the Black working class.
It was a suit at the heart of the class disconnect existing within Black
Atlanta. As Julian Bond, another occasional working ally of Johnson,
explained of the Black community, Atlanta was “the best place in the
United States if you’re middle-class and have a college degree, but if
you’re poor, it’s just like Birmingham, Jackson or any other place.” Though
popular perception cited the educated middle-class status of Black leaders
in the city and their negotiation with white leaders about the nature
and outcomes of civil rights for its seeming racial equality, Tomiko
Brown-Nagin has explained that “the reliance on biracial negotiation
further excluded working class and poor black families from discourses
about the future.” That negotiation actually benefited white leaders, as
it neutered civil rights protest efforts by creating a semblance of racial
harmony. Atlanta was, in the words of Adolph Reed, “the archetype of
the hegemony of development elites in local politics.”
But it also benefited Black leaders, as they were able to pursue goals
that benefited middle and upper-class Black interests. That they did so
while failing to “pursue reforms that might have ensured the well-being
of African-Americans as a whole” was a reality that was either willful or
the result of willful self-deception. “The would-be black middle-class
reformers, like the system of segregation that they opposed, were racially
essentialist. They conflated the legal manifestation of white supremacy,”
Brown-Nagin explains, “with the actual socio-economic conditions in
which those constructed as ‘colored,’ or ‘raced,’ lived.” Even when some
Black leaders supported more radical strategies, compromise always
won out.
Those leaders boasted that almost 30 percent of Atlanta’s municipal
workforce in the 1960s was Black and the middle class of the race
was constantly expanding. But Black residents in socioeconomically
depressed neighborhoods like Dixie Hills and Vine City saw none of
that supposed success. Race relations in Atlanta, James Baldwin noted,
were “manipulated by the mayor and a fairly strong Negro middle class,”
which “works mainly in areas of compromise and concession and has
very little effect on the bulk of the Negro population.” More than half of
Atlanta’s African-American population had stopped attending school
before the ninth grade. In 1965 Black residents constituted 45 percent
of the city population, though Black neighborhoods only made up 22
percent of residential land. The Black unemployment rate was double
that of whites. The majority of Black Atlantans were caged by economic
and geographic limitations that kept them in a state of stasis, even as
the broader city economy continued to boom. When Martin Luther
King, Jr., toured Vine City in early 1966, he found the conditions there
“appalling. I had no idea people were living in Atlanta, Georgia, in
such conditions.” He described the neighborhood as worse than the
Chicago slums. “This is a shame on the community.” King suggested a
rent strike to the residents, but, with nowhere else to go, they felt that
kind of action to be unsafe.
Meanwhile, neighborhoods like Summerhill and Peoplestown had
been stymied by freeway construction directed through the areas. Urban
renewal programs through the first half of the 1960s led to the demolition
of twenty-one thousand housing units in low-income areas,
displacing roughly sixty-seven thousand people, most of them Black.
Things only devolved when the city built Atlanta Stadium in 1965, forcing
out more than twelve thousand Summerhill residents. Those displaced
were promised new homes through the Model Cities program, but the
closest approximation that the government provided were temporary
mobile homes.
1895–1968
Atlanta’s Black middle class had made itself a dominant part of the
city’s community since the last decades of the nineteenth century, an
entrepreneurial group that had cast down its bucket since the days of
Booker Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech in the city during
the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. The political relationship that they
developed with influential whites continued until 1908, when the state
instituted its white primary. Political influence, however, wasn’t the
only kind of influence. By 1911 the city had roughly two thousand Black
businesses. At the close of the nineteenth century the Black elite was
largely composed of entrepreneurs who sold products and services to
white customers, but change was afoot. Just as in northern markets
responding to the early birth pangs of the Great Migration, an influx of
rural Black migrants into Atlanta turned many whites away from Black
service industries, leading to an erosion of the old hierarchical order and
its replacement with a new entrepreneurial class that built a business
infrastructure reliant instead on Black customers. Among Black business
owners in the 1890s, for example, only pharmacists, grocers, and
undertakers served a predominantly Black clientele. Those early members
of the Black elite lived in a city, unlike nearby Augusta and Savannah,
that never really had a substantial antebellum free population, and so
came principally, as August Meier explains, “from the mostly mulatto
house-servant group.” The core institutions of that original aristocracy
were the First Congregational Church, Atlanta University, and a variety
of exclusive social clubs.
The shift that created the new leadership class largely came from entrepreneurs
in the finance, insurance, and real estate industries. Alonzo
Herndon famously arrived in Atlanta in poverty but founded the Atlanta
Life Insurance Company in 1905. Hemon Perry arrived from Texas in
a similar state in 1908, but in 1911 he was able to create Standard Life
Insurance, which in turn developed a variety of subsidiaries, including
Citizens Trust Bank in 1921. Though Standard Life folded in the late
1920s, Citizens Trust would grow to become one of the most influential
and profitable Black banks in the country, just as Atlanta Life grew in
the insurance industry, becoming the largest Black life insurance company
in America. The new economic order had arrived. While much
of Atlanta’s Black business and cultural life still centered on Auburn
Avenue, many of those new power brokers moved to Atlanta’s West
Side residential areas.
The business elite was joined by the presidents of the city’s Black
colleges, a group of doctors and lawyers, and some college professors
to create a dominant core of influence peddlers, almost none of them
coming from the original nineteenth-century Black upper class. The older
families, then, were left to either marry into the new money or migrate
to other cities, which most of them ultimately did, creating what Meier
has called “a considerable elite circulation in Atlanta.” Still, while the
new money made for a larger Black upper class and a spread of wealth
to more entrepreneurs, the expansion of Black wealth also came with
a growing income disparity, as the bulk of poor rural migrants coming
to Atlanta did not have the good fortune of Herndon and Perry and
never made it to the nicer neighborhoods of the West Side. As Virginia
Hein explains, “There were two Atlantas within the city and two black
Atlantas within the black community itself.” One of those Black Atlantas
enjoyed wealth and the power to negotiate with white leaders; the other,
in the words of Anne Rivers Siddons, suffered “inadequate housing, poor
municipal services, idleness, dirt, decay, overcrowding, poor playground
facilities or none at all, and poverty—always, endlessly, too little money.”
That Black elite’s first real electoral success came in the 1920s, when
the Black voting bloc helped defeat a series of bond referenda. Leaders
then leveraged that power to get the city’s board of education to build
its first Black high school. When postwar legal victories, like the elimination
of the state’s white primary in Chapman v. King (1946), helped
expand Black political power more broadly, Black influence in Atlanta
only increased. Throughout the 1950s Black voters in Atlanta appeared
at the polls in greater percentages than whites and continued to grow in
number, until in 1962, the year of Leroy Johnson’s state senate election,
34 percent of the total electorate was Black, with roughly 52,000 registered
Black voters. The percentage of Black registrants remained lower
through the early 1960s than the percentage of the total Black population
in the city, but the Black voting bloc stood in lockstep behind candidates
whereas whites remained split between racial conservatives and racial
moderates. Two distinct voting blocs, then, ultimately emerged: one
that included middle-and upper-class whites and the vast majority of
Black voters, and another that included working-class whites and parts
of the middle class. In the 1961 mayoral election, for example, Ivan Allen
defeated opponent Lester Maddox by a relatively wide margin, even
though Maddox narrowly edged Allen among white voters. Black votes
swung that election and had the power to swing any city contest, making
Black political power a vital part of white political thinking. It was
something that white politicians in other Deep South cities didn’t have
to contend with, at least not to the same degree; but in return, whites in
the city got the ability to contrast Atlanta with more violent civil rights
sites like Montgomery, Little Rock, and New Orleans. Georgia’s capital
city was “the city too busy to hate”—a term coined by mayor William
Hartsfield in the year after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision and
popularized by the local Chamber of Commerce—courting
northern business development and venture capital to promote itself as a thriving
representative of the Sunbelt.
The slogan was part of a long-standing attempt to improve the city’s
image. In 1925 Atlanta’s Chamber of Commerce began a “Forward
Atlanta” campaign to increase new business infrastructure in the city.
The group invested three-quarters of a million dollars in the effort, and
it bore significant fruit, as the population of the city grew 35 percent
in the decade and hundreds of businesses and thousands of jobs came
to Atlanta as a result. While those jobs largely went to whites, Black
enterprises also thrived. By 1956 Fortune magazine had named Auburn
Avenue the “richest Negro street in the world,” and Atlanta Life Insurance
and Citizens Trust Bank were two of the most prosperous Black
companies in the country.
There were, however, limitations on Black economic and physical
mobility. Atlanta’s first segregation ordinance appeared in 1913 and was
followed by a variety of zoning ordinances that created separate spaces
for Black residency, even after the Supreme Court declared racial zoning
unconstitutional in 1924. More common, beginning in 1917, was the city’s
use of highway construction to remove Black residents from downtown
areas and bind them into certain sections, a practice that continued well
into the 1960s. After a new influx of Black migrants after World War
II, residential segregation practices in the city, and even the bombing
of Black homes, led the Urban League to create the Atlanta Housing
Council in an attempt to leverage Black political power to create more
physical space for Black residents, but those efforts met with further
highway construction projects and even physical barriers. In 1962, as
Johnson was winning his first term in the state senate, the notorious
Peyton Road “Wall” was erected after a Black doctor attempted to purchase
a house in Atlanta’s Peyton Forest subdivision. In response, the all-white
board of aldermen approved the barricading of two roads, which
stopped north-south travel into a cluster of white neighborhoods. The
Atlanta Negro Voters League and other Black leadership organizations
protested the move, and the barricades were ultimately removed on the
order of the Fulton County Superior Court, but the incident gave lie to
the assumption that white racial moderation was somehow akin to racial
advocacy—that Atlanta was indeed “too busy to hate.” The reality, from
any moderate white perspective, was that racial moderation required
segregation and necessitated placating racist whites just as much as
placating middle-and upper-class Black residents, leaving the bulk of
the city’s Black population out of the equation entirely.
That equation, however, yielded results for everyone else. After the
Lockheed Corporation, an aerospace company, built a factory in suburban
Marietta after World War II, other companies followed, expanding
the regional economy in the 1950s. In the 1960s Atlanta’s population
grew by thirty thousand residents every year; its economy added an
average of twenty-three thousand jobs annually. From 1945 to 1960
almost three thousand new corporations or branch offices of existing
corporations came to Atlanta. Skyscrapers rose; Six Flags and Atlanta
Stadium were built; the airport expanded. Atlanta became the financial
hub of the South. It was the home of Delta, Southern Bell, and Coca-
Cola. That growth, in turn, prompted the development of the tourism,
convention, and entertainment industries, creating a diverse economy
that white business and civic leaders didn’t want interrupted by civil
rights struggles and racial agitation.
In the late 1950s, as Georgia’s government was plotting a strategy to
avoid school desegregation, even floating a plan to shut down the state’s
schools, Mayor Hartsfield and Atlanta pushed back. His defense of education,
and his suggestion that Atlanta voters should have their say on
whether schools in the city should be desegregated, was supported by a
glut of white ministers, professionals, and parent-teacher
associations. Though that plan was not an endorsement of integrated schools, and
the only reason such discussions were taking place was because of the
work of Black activists pushing for such changes, white leaders again
worked with their Black counterparts to ensure that investment in Atlanta
would not stop because of overt statewide racism. A “Save Our Schools”
movement was created in 1959, largely by white parents. Both Black and
white leaders pushed for a biracial commission to help determine the
best route for desegregation. White Atlantans hadn’t become egalitarians,
of course, but they wanted schools, outside investment, and the
reputation that came with them. The state legislature responded in 1960
by holding hearings on school desegregation—a glorified way to delay
any actual decision on the prospect.
The legislature was representative of more than just Atlanta and was
far less worried about its national reputation than city leaders. White
residents who had absconded to the suburbs and no longer had the
same vested interest in the city’s growth were similarly skeptical of the
merits of integration. “We’ll see, as time goes on, how wrong they are,”
wrote one suburban editor of white Atlanta leadership’s insistence that
desegregation would encourage business relocation and private venture
capital to move into the city. “It will have nothing whatever to do with
location of plants or growth of business. You can mark these words well.”
It was a sentiment that would prove to be wrong, but it also demonstrated
the broader opinion of white Georgia beyond Atlanta’s power brokers.
Still, in August 1961 Black students desegregated four formerly white
high schools in Atlanta, and John Kennedy responded by citing the city
as exemplary of how Southern communities should respond to court
rulings. “Look closely,” he suggested, “at what Atlanta has done.” For the
New York Times Atlanta was the “new and shining example” of interracial
cooperation. Predominantly white magazines across the country echoed
the sentiment. Predominantly Black magazines declared Atlanta as a
new Black mecca. Ebony admitted that much of the “highly publicized
racial harmony” was “a fabrication encouraged by the Chamber of Commerce,”
but the magazine hyped the “Black mecca” nonetheless. “Some
say it’s the place where black dreams are most likely to come true, that
in Atlanta black folks have more, live better, accomplish more and deal
with whites more effectively than they do anywhere else in the South—or
North.” As was its common strategy, Ebony focused on the city’s talented
tenth, noting Black political, civic, and economic influence, the trappings
of success that could be seen in Atlanta’s shiny new skyline and on the
playing fields of its new pro sports teams. Leroy Johnson was part of the
hype, publicly claiming that there was “no other city in the nation where
a Negro has more opportunity to achieve his ambitions.”
All, however, was not as it seemed. Citing school desegregation efforts
and the sit-ins that followed, and the outwardly peaceful dispatch with
which they were dealt, Julian Bond said that “this city’s fathers are not
losing their expertise in explaining away Atlanta’s racial divisions.” The
bulk of the Black population in Atlanta was poor, and “it is poorly educated,”
Bond argued. He noted that a portion of the statistics that bore out
that poverty arose from the rural migrant population flooding into the city.
But the other part came from segregated schools run by a school board
“whose loyalties lay in financial Atlanta, and not in improving the minds
of young black men and women.” Keeping the peace, in other words,
was doing functional harm to the ability of Black Atlantans to get ahead
educationally and financially. “Something strange and appalling has
happened in Atlanta,” Martin Luther King, Jr., explained. “While boasting
of its civic virtue, Atlanta has allowed itself to fall behind almost every
major southern city in progress toward desegregation.” Despite the high-profile
high-school integration, the bulk of Atlanta’s schools remained
decidedly segregated a decade after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision.
The city’s actual desegregation didn’t take place until the second half
of the sixties, following the Supreme Court’s Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc.
v. United States (1964) decision, which ruled that the federal government
could enjoin a motel from discriminating on the basis of race, fully
enabling Title 2 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If the government could
enjoin the Heart of Atlanta Motel from discriminating, it could enjoin
all of the other whites-only businesses in the city. Only when the writing
was on the wall and a real threat of government intervention existed did
the city too busy to hate follow through with city-wide desegregation.
The Supreme Court also issued a ruling on Atlanta’s segregated schools
that year, but though Calhoun v. Latimer (1964) had been initiated by
the naacp’s Legal Defense Fund, local Black leaders failed to follow
through on the ruling’s dictates for fear of alienating white leaders and
stymieing progress on other fronts.
Nothing approximating comprehensive school desegregation in Atlanta
happened until 1973, years after Ali and the crowds he drew had left
the city. At that point the local naacp, led by onetime Leroy Johnson
ally Lonnie King, negotiated with white elites to appoint a Black school
superintendent and install other Black administrators while the integration
of actual students was de-emphasized, leaving the vast majority of
the city’s schools at least 90 percent single-race. In response, a group of
Black parents filed suit, claiming that the supposed settlement had been
negotiated without the consent of the Black working class.
It was a suit at the heart of the class disconnect existing within Black
Atlanta. As Julian Bond, another occasional working ally of Johnson,
explained of the Black community, Atlanta was “the best place in the
United States if you’re middle-class and have a college degree, but if
you’re poor, it’s just like Birmingham, Jackson or any other place.” Though
popular perception cited the educated middle-class status of Black leaders
in the city and their negotiation with white leaders about the nature
and outcomes of civil rights for its seeming racial equality, Tomiko
Brown-Nagin has explained that “the reliance on biracial negotiation
further excluded working class and poor black families from discourses
about the future.” That negotiation actually benefited white leaders, as
it neutered civil rights protest efforts by creating a semblance of racial
harmony. Atlanta was, in the words of Adolph Reed, “the archetype of
the hegemony of development elites in local politics.”
But it also benefited Black leaders, as they were able to pursue goals
that benefited middle and upper-class Black interests. That they did so
while failing to “pursue reforms that might have ensured the well-being
of African-Americans as a whole” was a reality that was either willful or
the result of willful self-deception. “The would-be black middle-class
reformers, like the system of segregation that they opposed, were racially
essentialist. They conflated the legal manifestation of white supremacy,”
Brown-Nagin explains, “with the actual socio-economic conditions in
which those constructed as ‘colored,’ or ‘raced,’ lived.” Even when some
Black leaders supported more radical strategies, compromise always
won out.
Those leaders boasted that almost 30 percent of Atlanta’s municipal
workforce in the 1960s was Black and the middle class of the race
was constantly expanding. But Black residents in socioeconomically
depressed neighborhoods like Dixie Hills and Vine City saw none of
that supposed success. Race relations in Atlanta, James Baldwin noted,
were “manipulated by the mayor and a fairly strong Negro middle class,”
which “works mainly in areas of compromise and concession and has
very little effect on the bulk of the Negro population.” More than half of
Atlanta’s African-American population had stopped attending school
before the ninth grade. In 1965 Black residents constituted 45 percent
of the city population, though Black neighborhoods only made up 22
percent of residential land. The Black unemployment rate was double
that of whites. The majority of Black Atlantans were caged by economic
and geographic limitations that kept them in a state of stasis, even as
the broader city economy continued to boom. When Martin Luther
King, Jr., toured Vine City in early 1966, he found the conditions there
“appalling. I had no idea people were living in Atlanta, Georgia, in
such conditions.” He described the neighborhood as worse than the
Chicago slums. “This is a shame on the community.” King suggested a
rent strike to the residents, but, with nowhere else to go, they felt that
kind of action to be unsafe.
Meanwhile, neighborhoods like Summerhill and Peoplestown had
been stymied by freeway construction directed through the areas. Urban
renewal programs through the first half of the 1960s led to the demolition
of twenty-one thousand housing units in low-income areas,
displacing roughly sixty-seven thousand people, most of them Black.
Things only devolved when the city built Atlanta Stadium in 1965, forcing
out more than twelve thousand Summerhill residents. Those displaced
were promised new homes through the Model Cities program, but the
closest approximation that the government provided were temporary
mobile homes.
Cuprins
Prologue
1. Class, Race, and the Rise of Leroy Johnson in Atlanta, 1895-1968
2. Black Power, Black Sport, and the Fall of Muhammad Ali, 1942-1968
3. Growing Pains, 1969
4. The Politics of Race (and Boxing), January to July, 1970
5. The Politics of Boxing (and Race), August-September, 1970
6. Return of the King, October 1970
7. After October, 1970-1996
Bibliography
1. Class, Race, and the Rise of Leroy Johnson in Atlanta, 1895-1968
2. Black Power, Black Sport, and the Fall of Muhammad Ali, 1942-1968
3. Growing Pains, 1969
4. The Politics of Race (and Boxing), January to July, 1970
5. The Politics of Boxing (and Race), August-September, 1970
6. Return of the King, October 1970
7. After October, 1970-1996
Bibliography
Recenzii
“[Aiello's] captivating and deeply researched account seamlessly weaves together the politics of race and sports. This is a knockout.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Aiello's decision to focus on a specific fight is interesting and makes for a compelling story. . . . Even diehard Ali fans will learn something from this book.”—Stephanie Howes, Booklist
“Aiello's decision to focus on a specific fight is interesting and makes for a compelling story. . . . Even diehard Ali fans will learn something from this book.”—Stephanie Howes, Booklist
“Return of the King is a compelling social history, a story that moves nimbly and lands its punches with power. Thomas Aiello has written an important and original work exploring Muhammad Ali’s comeback and the making of modern Atlanta.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life and Ali: A Life
“You don’t need to be a boxing fan to love Thomas Aiello’s powerful and evocative portrayal of how Black Atlanta enabled Muhammad Ali’s career-defining comeback.”—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
“Return of the King is essential reading for anyone interested in Muhammad Ali and boxing as transcendent figure and institution respectively. Aiello frames his treatment of the 1970 fight between Jerry Quarry and Ali, in the racial politics of Atlanta, the state of Georgia, and the nation. After reading this book no one can ever see Atlanta as ‘the city too busy to hate.’ This study is sports history at its best and reveals that when properly contextualized and theorized the discipline is invaluable to a clearer and more accurate understanding of the past.”—Jeffrey T. Sammons, author of Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society
“Both local and national in scope, Return of the King is a fascinating account of the Ali-Quarry fight. It offers a fresh look at the political culture of Atlanta through the prism of Leroy Johnson’s story and a closer focus on one of the most underappreciated periods of Ali’s career. This is an early contender for the best sports history books of 2025.”—Clayton Trutor, author of Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports
“Thomas Aiello’s book is an exciting and detailed account of Muhammad Ali’s return to the ring after three and a half years in exile, with a special focus on how Atlanta, with its sophisticated Black politicians like State Senator Leroy Johnson, was able to overcome racist opposition to present the bout against white hope Jerry Quarry in the heart of the Deep South.”—Lewis A. Erenberg, author of The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali and George Foreman on the Global Stage
“Contrary to the beloved figure he would become years later, the Muhammad Ali of 1970 was a man under siege. Stripped of the heavyweight championship and exiled from the ring for 3½ years for evading the draft during the Vietnam War, he was hated by a large segment of white America for his perceived uppity attitude and his affiliation with the Black separatist Nation of Islam. Improbably, Atlanta stepped forward to provide him with a venue to launch his comeback in an event that would prove pivotal both for Ali and the city itself. In his thoroughly researched book, Return of the King, Thomas Aiello offers up an erudite study of that long ago encounter that is a welcome addition to the Ali canon.”—Mark Kram Jr., author of Smokin’ Joe: The Life of Joe Frazier
“In Return of the King Thomas Aiello deftly reconstructs Muhammad Ali’s boxing comeback after being exiled for refusing to serve in the United States military at the height of the Vietnam War. Aiello offers a compelling narrative that reveals why Ali's return could only have occurred in Atlanta, the Black mecca of the American South. This is the origin story of Ali’s second act: when the self-proclaimed King of the World found redemption in the ring, emerging as a triumphant symbol of Black Power.”—Johnny Smith, coauthor of Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X
“Thomas Aiello rivetingly chronicles the powerful convergence of culture and politics, time and place, for cultural icon Muhammad Ali and Black powerbroker Leroy Johnson during a decisive moment in Atlanta. Anyone interested in exploring the possibilities and limitations of Black Power politics will admire Return of the King.”—Winston A. Grady-Willis, author of Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960–1977
Descriere
Thomas Aiello examines the history of Muhammad Ali, Georgia state senator Leroy Johnson, and the city of Atlanta, highlighting an important fight of Ali’s that changed the trajectory of his career and of the city.