Atlanta Reconstructed

In mass murder as well as in war, the great darkness of death can often inspire a sentimentality that distorts our perception of the intricate human struggles that preceded and will prevail beyond the body count. Such is the case of Atlanta, a city in which the grand ideals of democracy and the mid­night oil necessaa Joury to achieve them have come together in ways which relate to the Civil Rights Movement in much the same way that Reconstruction relates to the Civ­il War. Yet the miscegenated identity of its political history, its culture, its alliances and antipathies are shrouded by the pain and terror felt locally and nationally each time the body of an adolescent black man is pulled freshly dead or in some stage of decomposition from a river or other hiding place.

But the texture of terror is not im­mediately experienced in Atlanta. What one first notices after traveling the interminable distance through the ugly Hartsfield Airport — the world’s largest­ — is the spring air and the brightness of the sun. Then there are pine trees that seem primitive and gargantuan bottle brushes, slopes that give the city a roller coaster effect, many churches made of wood or stone, and more than a few fronted by Grecian columns, and finally the new of­fice buildings and hotels and entertain­ments for conventioneers and locals that spread out from the center of town to impinge upon what classical American structures were left unharmed by the as­sault of Sherman’s troops and the march of modern age. There is a terror there, how­ever, and it brutally counterpoints the city’s typically Southern relaxation, elo­quence, humor, and fatalistic sullenness. It is expressed in the somber understatement of a fine preacher quietly describing Satan, or it stutters the rhythm of speech like a loose fan belt. It is sometimes wrapped in a mystified outrage or dressed up like a grim Christmas tree with statistics of ar­rests, leads, time lags between disap­pearance and discoveries. Nothing, how­ever, has led to a significant arrest or a solution to any of the killings.

= 1 =
THE HERITAGE OF RECONSTRUCTION

Atlanta is a city far more complex and far more segregated and given to bloody battles above and below the surface than most accounts allow us to see. The city proper consists of two counties, Fulton and DeKalb, and except for pine-filled woods and slopes, it is predominantly flat, with the nearest mountain range 400 miles away and the ocean 300 miles away. Over the last 10 years, 102,000 white people have moved out of the city proper, while 27,000 black people have moved in, making the population of 450,000 65 per cent black and leaving white Atlantans two thirds removed from political control.

The fossils of classic segregation exist in streets that change names beyond certain points because, in the old days, whites didn’t want to live on streets with the same names as those where Negroes lived. Many neighborhood schools were built for black children following the desegregation ruling of 1954. Present segregation works, as it does in the North, by neighborhood. Most of the black population now lives in the south, southeast, and southwest ends of Atlanta, while most of the whites live in the north end, with midtown the most integrated. At the turn of the century, the well-to-do Negroes had lived on the south­east side of town, at the outskirts. Slowly they moved west, unavoidably leaving the poor behind. Presently, the more am­bitious black business people are taking their trade to Campbellton Road, the main street of the Southwest area, where the upwardly mobile Negroes have been buying houses as a result of white flight to the north and the suburbs (an interesting historical twist in that whites on the run from black political control now turn, as runaway slaves once did, to the north, albeit a local one).

The Atlanta University Center, because it has long provided the black braintrust of the city and the South as well, is largely responsible for making Atlanta so dif­ferent from every other city in the South. Examples of those associated with that braintrust are: James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Benjamin Mays, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Atlanta Univer­sity, which was founded literally in a box­car in 1867 — 18 years before Georgia Tech — was the first of the city’s five black colleges, the others being Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown, and Clark (there are also the Interdenominational Theolog­ical Center and the Atlanta University Summer School, both cooperatives). The black colleges, in conjunction with the black churches, businesses, and social clubs, not only produced a developing intellectual and economic elite that inspired many Negroes to move to Atlanta, but also built a network of social organizations de­signed to address the problems of reloca­tion and community development. As At­lanta University’s Dr. Edyth L. Ross wrote in the December 1976 issue of the college’s review of race and culture, Phylon: “These organizations, varying in social structure from relatively amorphous social movements to highly formal voluntary associa­tions, constitute a legacy which looms large in the structure of social welfare today.”

Ross goes on to point out that the or­ganizations expanded upon the settlement houses created as adjustment centers for European immigrants; these were full community efforts designed to provide ev­erything from care for the aged to recrea­tion for teenagers and homes for colored girls, from medical care and housing improvement to remedial reading and legal assistance. As early as 1873, 100 years before Maynard Jackson took office, a black church ran three health centers so successful that the death rate among those it served was one-third less than that of the white population. It was this tradition of educational advance and social change that enabled the city’s Negro community to continue the work of Reconstruction up through the election of Maynard Jackson. The colleges, churches, and businesses provided the city with theorists, re­searchers, organizers, sponsors, and, even­tually, politicians who would parlay their growing strength in votes to a power posi­tion in the middle of city negotiations, not on the outskirts.

The long march from the first phase of Reconstruction to its present man­ifestation has not come without enmities, for though Maynard Jackson’s adminis­tration is predominantly black, Atlanta’s economic power is almost completely white, with each side convinced that the opposition will only gain greater ground or maintain its strength at the other’s ex­pense. As an architect from an old Atlanta Jewish family says, “The financial strength is in the white community and it is being clutched more tightly than ever before because of the black political power. I think there needs to be a sharing of the financial power. But the mayor’s in­terpretation of joint ventures has soured much of the white community because it sees the mayor’s city government as serv­ing a black constituency above all else. And the mayor’s list of power positions in city government is quite considerable. The ma­jority of the city council, the commissioner of public safety, the police chief, the presi­dent of the Atlanta Chamber of Com­merce, and the chairman of the Fulton County Commission are all black. I don’t care what the color of somebody is, but I do care about what they consider their consti­tuency to be.”

Yet except for its understandable suspi­cion of white people, that black consti­tuency is far from monolithic and is given to considerable infighting, most of it based on color, class, and what part of the coun­try one is from. It has also thrown its share of punches at Maynard Jackson and his staff, at his appointments and his firings. As with most light-skinned Negroes in positions of power, when Jackson does something the black community likes, the entire group takes credit for it; when mis­takes or unpopular decisions come down, he is seen as a “high yellow” selling out blacks or working for whites. Writer Toni Cade will tell you that success in the city can depend on whether or not you’re light-­skinned and are part of the middle-class Morehouse-Spelman crowd to which Jackson and many of his appointees belong. Since Negroes from rural Georgia and just about every other place in the country now migrate to Atlanta seeking better lives, just as they did right after the Civil War, a television executive will tell you that though he is successful, it took him almost four years to get local Negroes to see him as something other than part of a wave of black carpetbaggers come to take jobs away from the city’s black, brown, beige, and bone sons and daughters. One of the mayor’s appointees charged that jealousy is behind it all, that most of the native black Atlantans don’t have enough drive and ambition to achieve success or prominence. Jackson’s job then, is to balance his credibility in both racial groups while continuing the traditional involvement of Atlanta’s black middle class with the greater black community. The two strata have al­ways been close, because racism made it difficult, if not impossible, for a Negro to achieve a significant position outside the black community if he or she happened not to be an entertainer. Consequently, the city’s black leaders in business, medicine, education, and religion achieved their prominence through the trade, the pa­tients, the students, and the congregations provided by the bulk of the city’s Negroes.

Because of Maynard Jackson’s de­termination to better Atlanta, his adminis­tration has had to live up to its progressive heritage at the same time that it has been forced to scuffle with the riddles of black political power and the aforementioned white money, the complications of race and class and the ills of poverty and crime that exist as appendages which bruise and wound a growing city that is still, for all the media talk of cosmopolitanism, an urban country town quite schizophrenic in its mix of eloquent sophistication and mumbl­ing naivete. As Janet Douglass, executive director of the Community Relations Commission and the Committee on the Status of Women says, “Sharing power never comes without pain.” That pain, as well as a complex kind of pride, is felt on both sides, black and white. For certain whites, the pain results from Jackson’s playing a kind of political hardball Ne­groes have never played in Atlanta; for lower-income Negroes the pain is con­nected to expectations that impose upon Jackson’s leadership a messianic mantle that fits like a yoke; and for still others, both black and white, there is a pride in the fact that Atlanta has long been an oasis of relative political enlightenment sur­rounded by the redneck mandates of the rest of the state.

= 2 =
VARIETIES OF PATERNALISM

The versions of that political history are quite different if one is talking with an older white Atlantan as opposed to almost any black person who worked to break down segregation during the Civil Rights Movement. Those older whites will point with pride to William B. Hartsfield, the city’s mayor from 1937 to 1960. As de­scribed by local white historian Franklin Garrett, Hartsfield was a man “who could be a hairshirt at times because of his quick temper but he could also be quite man­nerable and genial. He discovered the charm of reading as a child and, though the son of a tinsmith and a man who came up the hard way, he got his law degree by reading law on his own. He wanted the city to become part of the aviation industry, which is why our airport is named after him. His desire was to see the city develop the standing it had as a transportation center which dates back to its significance as the most important railroad center in the Southeast with four major railroads by 1860, when Atlanta became the manufac­turing hub of the Confederacy and turned out railroad ties and steel plates for the navy. He created the term, ‘Atlanta, the city too busy to hate,’ and realized that, with the Primus King Decision of 1946, which ruled that blacks couldn’t be barred from local and general primaries, he could build a coalition since the city was 50-50 black and white, and had an educated claas of blacks with which you could deal without a lot of loud rabble-rousing.”

Hartsfield’s coalition of upper-class whites and middle-and lower-class Ne­groes was formed to stave off the politics of redneck whites. This was a considerable achievement: on September 8, 1948, dur­ing the period when Hartsfield was integrating Atlanta’s police force, Herman Talmadge gave his acceptance speech as governor of Georgia with Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Sam Green on the podium. Soon afterwards, Talmadge attacked the Atlanta Negro Voters League, of which Maynard Jackson’s grandfather was a leader, and boasted that he’d keep prima­ries as white as possible. When asked if the black police would be allowed to arrest white people, Hartsfield is quoted as saying, “When somebody’s breaking in your house and you yell, ‘Police,’ you don’t care what color he is, all you want is for him to get that man out of your house.” But these same policemen had put on their uniforms at the black Butler Street YMCA because they weren’t permitted to change in the station house.

Many black people saw Hartsfield as a benevolent dictator whose paternalistic politics used the black vote only to determine contests between white can­didates. The same is said of his successor, Ivan Allen, a wealthy merchant prince who was mayor from 1961 to 1969. Lonnie King, one of the organizers of the de­segregation protests during the Civil Rights era, says of Allen: “He was a pater­nalistic man whom some white people would say had noblesse oblige. Black folks know better, however. The best example is the Peyton Road wall which Allen had put up in the southwest when black people were getting ready to take advantage of other housing opportunities. It was a sym­bol that meant, ‘Black people stop here. These homes aren’t for you.’ But Allen later took down the wall and went through a strange metamorphosis which led him to testify in Washington in support of the Civil Rights Bills of 1964 and 1965. He did it, by the way, against the advice of his affluent black supporters who had weaseled into a corner of the power structure. You know how some slaves look out for the master. But I think Allen saw beyond what they were telling him and realized the image of racism would, finally, do damage to the business interests of the city and discourage investors from coming to a town that might be constantly shaken by racial confrontation, which could mess up conventions, property, and profit.”

Economics are pivotal, as usual. White businessman George Goodwin says, “In the late ’40s, I wrote for the Atlanta Jour­nal that the property tax digest was just up to what it was in 1860, when slaves were considered property. What is now Atlan­ta’s First National Bank was started in 1865 and it was 10 years before it had $1 million on deposit and 1917 before it had $10 million. In 1929, mergers led to $100 million for a few days before the Great Crash. It was the late ’30s before it got back to $100 million. After World War II, the pent-up buying power began and didn’t really take off until the 1960s, which produced the array of office buildings you see in the city now. Though we were hit by the ’70s depression, Atlanta is now a trans­portation center, wholesale center, retail center, financial and insurance center. In recent years, it’s become a convention center, probably the third-largest in the coun­try. This provides jobs in hotels and serv­ices for visitors. The rest of the South may not be aware of it, but Atlanta knows we lost that Civil War. Sherman burned At­lanta because if he hadn’t, it would have gone back to functioning in the same way for that time which it does now.”

Following Allen was Sam Massell, a real estate man who was Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor. Jews had been coming to Atlanta since before the Civil War and had often done well, but the city was hardly free of anti-Semitism, which was most brutally exhibited in the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, who had been convicted of raping and murdering a young Christian woman on circumstantial evidence supplied by a black janitor. Atlanta Jews often sup­ported progressive causes, but many blacks recall that Jewish merchants were no quicker to desegregate than anybody else in Atlanta’s white power structure. Rich’s, the city’s largest department store, opened its lunchroom to blacks only when faced with the embarrassment of having to put Martin Luther King, Jr. in jail in his own too-busy-to-hate home town. To this day, there are clubs in Atlanta that Jews can’t join and more than a few are bitter about it, just as some ruefully recall the bombing of a synagogue during the Civil Rights era.

Massell’s appeals to the black com­munity had been instrumental in his vic­tory over an apparently more conservative opponent, Rodney King, who also lacked the New South image preferred by many affluent white voters. The flaps involved his brother, Howard, who had been ac­cused by nightclub owners of traveling around in a police car to gather campaign funds with the promise that the city would become wide open if Massell were elected. Sam Massell claimed his brother’s ap­proaches were misinterpreted, only to watch him leave town for Miami after an­other scandal involving people with sup­posed connections to organized crime. Un­der Massell, the new police chief was John Inman. By 1973, Atlanta police led the nation in per capita police killings, with 29 civilians slain — 27 black, 12 under the age of 14.

= 3 =
MAYNARD JACKSON’S NEW DESIGN

Maynard Jackson entered politics in 1968 by running against Herman Talmadge for U.S. senator. Jackson lost, but carried Atlanta by 6000 votes, and in 1969 was elected the city’s first Negro vice­-mayor. Although expected to run again for vice-mayor in 1973, he instead took on Massell and defeated him handily. Soon after he took office on January 7, 1974, Reconstruction returned to Atlanta. Prior to Jackson, the City Council was both administrative and legislative. In effect, the department heads ran the city, which gave it what George Goodwin calls a “weak mayor form.” Jackson made all the committee heads responsible to him, which resulted in a “strong mayor form.” This didn’t sit well with entrenched whites, who no longer had the power to distribute jobs and money on the basis of friendship and familial connections. It also gave the mayor a more complicated job and made him less accessible to individual visits from businesses and others who had been accustomed to visiting the Mayor’s office. Even so, there are those who feel that Jackson is far less effective one-on-one than when addressing masses of people, that the very distance itself is more comfortable to him.

Jackson’s confrontation came with Chief Inman. Under Inman’s predecessor, Herbert Jenkins, there had been a chosen few black officers, most of whom were disgruntled because they rarely got promotions almost entirely by briefly assigning his favorite whites to acting of temporary positions and then, when time came to promote, pushing those whites into the slots, claiming that they had more experience than black officers who had been on the force longer.

Jackson initially moved to replace Inman with a white man named Clint Chasen. Inman confronted Chasen, eventually calling the SWAT squad into Chasen’s office with guns drawn. Chasen decided that there were better jobs available in the world and Inman took his case to the Supreme Court, claiming that he had an eight-year appointment through the former mayor and could not be fired, demoted, or replaced. The resentful legal staff which Jackson was saddled is thought to have sold him out by botching the case. But Inman was unpopular with the District Attorney’s Office, and a case in which Inman was obliquely involved set the stage for another approach. Inman had been living on the estate of pesticide tycoon Billy Orkin, who attempted to get a police officer to kill the husband of a woman he was dating. The officer went to the district attorney’s office and an out-of-state policeman was brought in for an undercover investigation which led to the jailing of Orkin. Inman wasn’t specifically implicated in the conspiracy, but a lot of questions were raised about how and why Orkin came to believe he could get an Atlanta police officer to commit the murder.

Jackson’s new city design included a commissioner of public safety, charged with administering the police and fire departments as well as civil defense. Reginald Eaves, a Bostonian who had gone to Morehouse with Jackson and participated in his campaign, was appointed to that slot even though he had no experience in police work. The white press in Atlanta, which immediately proved itself hostile to Jackson’s designs, statements, and policies, dubbed the position “Super Chief.” Inman was assigned to an office in a roach-infested basement and later left.

Eaves gained attention on his first work day by demoting 37 white policemen, and he busted 14 more by the end of the week. Soon he became a villain in the white press and a hero in the black community. Even after it was revealed that Eaves’s secretary had a heroin conviction in New York and that one of his relatives had gotten a CETA job, his popularity in the black com­munity was undiminished, primarily be­cause he announced that he would person­ally charge with murder any police officer who killed without reasonable cause. Po­lice homicides ceased. Over a two-year pe­riod, Eaves got press by going on police raids, rigged to allow him to kick in doors and collar criminals for the cameras, much as J. Edgar Hoover had done in his day.

“Reggie,” says another Jackson appointee, “took off in that job. Where he had kind of stood in Maynard’s shadow before, he developed into an incredible speaker and was suddenly everywhere — at churches, picnics, socials, and everything in the community you could imagine. He was single, so the bitches liked him, and he took a hard line on crime, like Maynard did. He defined criminals as parasites within the community and let it be known he would give no quarter to a lawbreaker, regardless of color. He transferred cops with bad brutality records into jobs like guarding airplane runways and fire sta­tions and made strong efforts to get the community to see the police as public ser­vants, not trigger-happy parts of an occu­pying force. Quiet as it’s kept, he was using the office to run for mayor and Maynard didn’t know it. Then the shit hit the fan.”

In the fall of 1977, Eaves was accused by officers within the department of sup­plying the answers to the civil service ex­amination for the police force to black men he wanted to hire. Jackson was forced to call for an investigation that was handled by two private lawyers, one black, one white. The 300-page report proved that certain cops had memorized the tests beforehand since they gave the same se­quence of answers when retested even though the questions were reordered. Eaves took a lie detector test that proved inconclusive. When the results were made public, 300 black people were gathered on the steps of city hall. For the cameras they asserted their belief in Eaves’s innocence, but privately they said things like, “So what if he cheated? White folks have al­ways been cheating.” Some white liberals argued that there was no other way to balance the force.

Jackson had long taken the position that affirmative action was only a response to racist hiring practice, that it was neither a means of forcing the unqualified into jobs nor a form of reverse racism. But at the same time he was burdened with what those close to him consider his greatest weakness: an almost aristocratic sense of loyalty. Some kind of showdown was in­evitable. Eaves was speaking in churches and at rallies, opening his statements with phrases like, “Though my skin is dark and my lips are thick,” implying, some that if he was removed it would have more to do with in-group color prejudice than a mis­handling of authority. Cannon fodder from the University Center was hot to trot in support of Eaves and the press was making much of Jackson’s deliberations. Eaves finally agreed behind closed doors to ten­der his resignation, promising it on a certain day, then another, then yet another. Jackson started getting angry at demands from the street that Eaves not be fired. “Maynard started saying,” quotes one aide, “‘I hired him and he carried out my policies, not his. Now these people want to act like I didn’t have anything to do with bettering the police force.'” Finally, in the middle of the night, the resignation was delivered to Jackson’s chief of staff, Gerri Elder. On the same night, much later, Eaves called Elder and said he’d changed his mind and would send his bodyguards to get it back. Elder, in a panic, called Jack­son, who blew up and ordered her not to return anything, then sent his own body­guard for the resignation.

The next day, in a cold, formal tone and in front of witnesses, Jackson called Eaves and told him his comment to the press was to be no comment and that he was to maintain a low profile. Eaves agreed, but in a matter of hours he was speaking to the press on television. “Maynard went through the roof,” reports an appointee, “and called a press conference immediate­ly at which he announced that Commissioner Eaves had been suspended. From that moment on, it was over because, you know Maynard’s sister married a Nigerian, and he said, ‘Even if my sister pickets me in Yoruba, Reggie Eaves is gone!'”

Jackson responded to continuing ten­sion in the black community by appointing Lee Brown to replace Eaves and George Napper to take the slot vacated by Inman. Both were black and had doctorates in criminology. The resentment cooled.

Then there were the murders.

= 4 =
EVERY MOTHER’S CHILD

I arrived in Atlanta the Friday before Reagan was shot and Timothy Hill’s body was pulled from the Chattahoochee River. I checked in at the Hotel Georgian Terrace, a grand old midtown place with stone columns out front, plenty of marble in the lobby, and each of its first-floor wings given over to the hybrids only modernization, can produce. To the left of the entrance is a 24-hour German deli and to the right, the bar, which has high ceilings and many potted plants, a few pinball and electronic space games, and a sound system that blurts out disco tunes at what seems the highest possible volume. After touring the city with newswoman Alexis Scott Reeves, I returned at early evening to find the lobby filled with black homosexual couples. Throughout the week, I was to find that the hotel was an evening meeting place not only for homosexuals but for certain integrated couples of whatever persuasion and that the midtown area had become the hub of the city’s homosexual world. I also found out that Atlanta is the homosexual capital of the Deep South. Organized crime control the city’s homosexual bathhouses, discos, and gay bars, and as a result, the Atlanta Police Depart­ment’s tough Organized Crime Division bumps heads with homosexuals as it moves to keep the mob from getting a toehold. The black female community, which some say outnumbers black men as much as nine to one, is hostile to both homosexuals and integrated heterosexual couple.

The next day I went on the search party for the then-missing children, which met at Ralph Abernathy’s West Hunter Street Baptist Church, now a stone-columned structure on Gordon Street next door to the Wren’s Nest, the home of Joel Chandler Harris, which was long controlled by a group of old white ladies who made it a segregated historical site until the 1960s. The search parties, of course, accept all comers, some of whom I was surprised to see that Saturday morning.

A light spring wind had set in, flipping Caucasian hair and that loose enough among the Negroes to move to so easy a touch. Green ribbons were in motion, tied to arms and the broom handles used for searching through bushes, or pinned to the fronts of coats, shirts, and blouses. The fancy patterns in which some of the rib­bons were tied marked how long the searches had been going on, although per­sonal style is never very far behind the establishment of insignias and symbols. Yet it seemed at first like a picnic gather­ing or preparation for an Easter egg hunt. This impression lasted only as long as it took to notice the search dogs and the ambience of sorrowful expectations cast­ing an ambivalent mood in its wake, a mood that made the laughter and the jokes of those searchers who had become famil­iar with each other through the 25 weekends seem as much reactions to strain as expressions of humor or camaraderie.

The ironic flip-flops of history were also evident, for here were white men dressed in army surplus, sometimes driving panel trucks and sometimes possessing classic red necks, who had brought their dogs to work in combination with black men, women, and children to find the bodies of dead black children, not capture runaway slaves. Also ironic was the fact that more of the white girls wore what used to be con­sidered exclusively black, even militant, hairdos as well as the gerri curl look favored by many of today’s black men and women. Acknowledging the scavengers who gather around tragedies, a representa­tive of the church’s United Youth Adult Conference announced to the volunteers as they gathered in the cold gymnasium be­hind West Hunter Baptist, “We are here only to find the lost children and hope to God we find them alive. If you have any other reason than that, please don’t go. We don’t want anybody trying to convert any­body to be a Democrat, a Republican, a Black Nationalist, a Ku Klux Klan, or anything else.”

The word for the day was going house­-to-house within the lower and lower­-middle-class black community to find out if anyone had been the most recent of the missing children, Timothy Hill and Joseph Bell, who had disappeared a few blocks from each other. Canvassers armed with photographs of the two boys boarded  buses to work in areas of roughly 10 blocks. ­No one in the strip we covered, on and off a main thoroughfare called Simpson Street, had seen any of the children, but all communicated the dismay, the sorrow, the rage, and the wounded hope of those who had felt so much optimism since Jackson’s election. The reports that Jackson, who had battled down a huge waistline, was gaining it back on ice cream binges in the wake of the crisis, were then understandable. The murders constituted a growing weight that promised to sink the administration’s achievements.

In fact, the computer technology and the the task force directed by the relatively new commissioner of public safety, Lee Brown, seemed to increase the burden rather than ease the populace. Whenever anyone was asked if he or she thought the ­police were working as hard as they could, the response was disillusionment. “I hate to say so, but I really don’t think so. No, not with all this time has passed. Seem like they would have come up with something by now. They got all the best equipment and plenty of money. No, sir, they can’t be doing much as they can do.”

That sentiment was expressed often that week, usually by people at the lower end of the economic ladder and those for whom literacy wasn’t important or didn’t have much to do with their daily lives. They were the black people who gathered most of their information and opinions from television and conversation. The up-shot was that the television cop shows had created in them unrealistic expectations of the police. Unlike the television-show vil­lain who announces himself at the start of the hour and is captured within 10 minutes of the next hour, the criminal or group working outside the established crime world is very difficult to capture, especially if he has even average intelligence, which is something most criminals don’t possess. When a criminal or criminals work outside the underworld network, the effectiveness of bribes and rewards is limited. With $100,000 being offered, Atlantans can be sure the crimi­nals of the city are on the lookout for the killers, as is everyone else who could use that kind of money. The lower-echelon criminal world is particularly concerned, according to Julian Bond, because the heavy presence of police during this period has greatly reduced the rapes, robberies, and car thefts that make Atlanta a typical urban center.

Atlanta is experiencing the paradoxes of success in the modern age and no one seems ready, the police any more than  anybody else. Jackson’s push for conventions, international investment, and the image of a cultured town — complete with dance troupes, jazz musicians, community theatre, and free city-wide festivals — has attracted representatives of every one of the Fortune’s 500 to the city. It has also at­tracted Northern-style crime. Vern Smith of Newsweek, though observing that black-on-white crime can make headlines while black-on-black crime is rarely reported in the white press, adds that street crime in general is far less pervasive than what he saw when assigned to Detroit. “The crime Atlanta may have to worry about is drug traffic,” observes Julian Bond, “because changes in vacationing patterns and the frequency of internation­al visitors to the Southeast make for big profits in tourism and a lot of popping in and out of the airport. With any conven­tion centers come vice, and there is now so much pressure on Miami dope smuggling that gangsters take advantage of the many little airports in Georgia that exist for private planes and quick jaunts by businessmen.” Both black and white point out that the popularity of cocaine as an upper-middle-class drug results in grand profits for gangsters. Those who believe that the murders may involve the killing off of rival couriers in a dope war explain that in that world a $100,000 reward means very little.

During the first press tour of the task force office the question of homosexual killers was raised again and again. Com­missioner Brown would only answer that there was no evidence of homosexual connections though the investigation wasn’t ruling out any possibilities. Local tele­vision, however, reported that, according to task force sources, two or three of the victims were thought or known to be guilty of petty theft or burglary, 10 of drug violations, and 10 of homosexual prostitution. A teacher interviewed on the show cor­roborated that at least three of the chil­dren were known to travel with adult homosexuals, and that the boy found the day Reagan was shot, Timothy Hill, had often been seen in their company. (This was also attested to by one of the cleaning women in the Hotel Georgian Terrace, who knew the boy and lived in the same neigh­borhood). An FBI source I interviewed agreed that homosexual prostitution could be connected to some of the cases. He went on to say that the local police weren’t experienced or sophisticated enough to handle this kind of big-city crime and were no further along than they were four or five months ago, adding that he knew federal agents who believed the obvious serial murders could be solved within two or three weeks. He observed that the initial belief that the killings were racially motivated may have cost many leads if, say there is a black judas goat involved, which seems more probable by the day, and that the black community’s ingrained distrust of police black or white had hampered the investigation. In all fairness, however, neither big city police forces nor the F.B.J. always apprehend highly publicized killers or fugitives immediately, if at all. In San Francisco, the Zodiac Killer was never cap­tured; the Boston Strangler remained at large for years, and the Weather Under­ground surrendered on its own schedule.

Since 1979, county prosecutor Hinson McAuliffe, in conjunction with Lieutenant F. L. Townley’s organized crime unit, has closed down or run out of town 80 porno­graphic bookstores, 12 X-rated theatres, and all bathhouses, and are now moving on homosexual street prostitution. This has been a difficult and dangerous process. When Townley’s unit began pressuring vice operations run by Tony Romano from Cleveland, he was subjected to death threats, a dead horse’s head was put in his daughter’s car, Xs were painted on his home’s doors and windows, and a detec­tive’s car was blown up. Townley, a white man who has been on the force for 20 years, disparages charges of inefficiency that old Eaves supporters and other impatient citizens have leveled at Brown. “I think he’s going to be the salvation of this city. He’s a man’s man; he’s not afraid of any­thing, you can’t buy him, and I feel more comfortable and have more confidence in him than anybody I’ve worked under in this department. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have left here when those threats started. My wife and daughter were telling me to quit, officers in my unit were fright­ened for me, and Lee Brown stepped in, personally made sure my family was pro­tected and backed me until we got Tony Romano, his wife, Virginia, and his son, Greg, several years in prison. They got it for prostitution escort services, bath­houses, bookmaking, pandering by com­pulsion, and communicating gambling in­formation.”

Townley couldn’t corroborate the rumors that bitter white officers who had left the department after problems with black administrators were attempting to botch the investigation by leaking per­tinent information they received from friends still on the force. He did say the leaking of plans for investigating organized crime was a problem within the depart­ment and there were other examples of corruption. He cited the recent arrests of a Fulton County officer for running a whore house, and an Atlanta officer found driving three stolen expensive cars when a $500,000 car-theft ring was-bro . n,e sponse to the homosexual murder theories, Townley reported that a house of homo­sexual child prostitution had been smashed a few weeks earlier but the 40 boys were all white. Townley added that boy prostitution wasn’t the problem it is in the North but that informants were close to the network in the black community, though no substantial leads had yet turned up. He concluded simply: “We know that whatever happens in the North eventually comes to Atlanta. The kind of money and resources these killings have brought in are almost what we need on a regular basis. If I had six more people in my unit, I could rotate them and be twice as effective, and we’re not doing a bad job as it is. It’s just we’re overworked as hell.”

However frustrated the police may be, the strain is obviously felt more deeply in the black community, with responses that range from habitual paranoia to irrational condemnation. The reduction in normal amiability is signaled by the questioning stares that arise when adult strangers enter black neighborhoods. The young restlessly resent the lack of mobility necessitated by the crisis; one parent, reporting a growing callousness in the children, repealed this comment by his 12-year-old son: “They found another one today. Bet they won’t get me.” The murders have taken on an obsessive quality for the mothers of the victims and for those who join search parties every weekend. But there’s still no excuse for the black sentimentalists who complain that city officials take a business-as-usual attitude once they’ve publicly decried the horror of it all, as if the officials would have had any other choice were the dead children white-or as if the critics themselves have stopped the business of their own lives in the face of the present murders.

= 5 =
A CRISIS OF IMAGE

Those who criticize Jackson’s concern that the killings mar the image of Atlanta his administration has worked so hard to create do not appreciate the nature of social and economic change in this society. They will dismiss local media claims about great improvements in public education with reports that the schools are terrible and frequently graduate illiterates, not realizing that improvement is impossible unless the tax base is increased, which means coaxing runaway whites back to the city. Blacks complain with considerable justice that a poverty level twice that of the na­tion, 23 per cent, belies the image of a growing international metropolis. But the plight of Atlanta’s poor doesn’t move those affluent whites who believe their home town is now perceived as a black city, and who lend their voices, to periodic rumbl­ings about incorporating greater Atlanta’s other 13 counties to bring about a resurgence of white political control.

“The entire population of all the counties is over two million and majority white,” says Dr. Richard Long of Atlanta University. “But what black folk don’t un­derstand is that Jackson, even in face of certain bad and embarrassing appointments, didn’t have to do what he did; he could have made some gestures like the improvement of police relations and gone on to placate the whites with money. His greatest achievement was the airport, which he demanded be a joint venture with both black and white contractors involved. Whites had never noticed when their competitors were white but they definitely did when they were black for the first time. Jackson also got 40 per cent of the concessions — the shops, the duty-free busi­nesses, and so on-for black en­trepreneurs. This made the whites even madder. But black business here is, like every place else in the world, a joke. The myth of a successful black city does haz­ardous things to those Negroes who think they’ve been left out of the pot of gold. If there is a pot of gold, it’s tin painted over. Almost every black in this city is on somebody else’s payroll. But you know how susceptible blacks are to the myth of alchemy and always have been. At the same lime, there is this image of an inter­national city which Jackson has pushed very hard for by getting direct flights to and from London into the airport’s schedule, foreign consulates to open offices here, and so on. This isn’t liked much by the whites in or out of the press. They say he’s the only mayor who has a foreign policy. Obviously, they’ve never heard of Ed Koch.”

Though embattled and accused of ar­rogant sanctimoniousness by his de­tractors, criticized by his own staff for standing by bad appointees on sinking ships until the water reaches his nose, and convinced that his greatest victory was over the police department, Maynard Jackson’s place in history will have most to do with what his supporters call “the poli­tics of inclusion rather than exclusion.” In the great tradition of Atlanta University Center and the many historic figures it has produced, he has not only striven for a contemporary vision of the full community efforts that date back to 1873 but has brought Negroes into positions of authority, involvement, and decision making that have not existed in the South since the first phase of Reconstruction and were nowhere near as comprehensive even then.

Eugene Duffy, Jackson’s youngest ap­pointee, says, “Maynard got them to bring that airport in under budget and early. The federal government can’t do that with a Trident missile or a shuttle. He’s marched with the striking garbage workers and has made sure that the black community gets exactly the same public services as the white people. He also plays hardball these white boys aren’t used to from a black man. For instance, when Arrow Shirts wanted to move its factory outside Atlanta and sell the land to the Transit Authority for the subway route, Maynard knew it would cost the city 800 jobs and dwindle the tax base further. He called them and let them know if they tried to leave, he would inform the Transit Au­thority they would be denied a demolition permit. Arrow agreed to relocate inside Atlanta. Black folks don’t appreciate that kind of stuff, unfortunately, because most don’t know what high power politics is. Maynard does, though.”