Official Game Thread: Bucks "at" Hawks: the MLK Day Game!

[lethalweapon3]

Building up… Tumbling down.

 

You’ve heard the one about the Atlanta pastor who drew inspiration while in Nazi Germany?

Michael King, Sr. was among a traveling party of the Baptist World Alliance, touring Wittenberg and other European sites associated with the Protestant Reformation of the early 16^th century. Standing in post-Great War Berlin in 1934, the BWA boldly convened at its quintennial World Congress to defy practices of “racialism” and antisemitism, particularly those becoming prevalent under the direction of the German nation’s newest chancellor. Attending the conference, at least one of the 30 Black ministers in Berlin, Michael, had additional transformative ideas.

Michael learned a lot during his European tour about the writings, influences and legacies of a Protestant reformer, one who stood up to the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church leadership to question its customs and underlying moralities. In just five years, the next BWA World Congress would be held in Michael’s home city of Atlanta, where he would be an organizing chair. Michael would be tasked with assembling, in 1939, possibly the first fully-integrated meeting of leaders in this center of America’s Jim Crow South.

By the time BWA leaders had arrived in Atlanta, Michael King, Sr. bore an all-new first and middle name. The pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church updated his name shortly after his return from Europe. His namesake child, “Little Mike,” would get his name changed, too.

Just five years of age when his father dared to cross the Atlantic and speak truth to power, “Little Mike” had little choice about getting acclimated to this whole “Martin Luther” business. But he was granted some latitude as to whether he’d follow his father, now Martin Luther King, Sr., behind the pulpit.

“This is not to say that he ever spoke to me in terms of being a minister,” the junior MLK would scribe about his father in an essay, “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” as a young adult in 1950, “but that my admiration for him was the great motivating factor. He set forth a noble example that I didn’t mind following.”

From a far more privileged position, Ivan Allen, Jr. didn’t mind following his father’s footsteps either. Son of a state senator, local booster and founder of Atlanta’s Rotary Club, the junior Allen returned from reservist duty in World War II to work for Georgia’s governor in the statehouse, before accepting a plea to take over the family business of office supplies and furniture that his father was making famous.

From his boyhood home, an estate on Peachtree Road a few miles north of Atlanta in the unincorporated community of Buckhead, Allen was raised a segregationist, and he ran as such when entering politics. Still, he failed in gubernatorial races for the crime of being a city-slicker Atlantan, “out of touch” with Georgia “values.”

The Georgia Tech grad and Chamber of Commerce president was evolving, though, in the dawning age of Federally enforced desegregation. Addressing his audience after soundly defeating stauncher segregationist Lester Maddox in the pivotal 1961 election for Mayor of Atlanta, Allen revealed he had drawn inspiration from a recent visit to Germany, too.

“It was in Berlin,” Mayor Allen recalled during his inauguration, as recounted in what would be ironic fashion by Time magazine, “that the tragic and dramatic lesson of what happens to a divided city came home to me, and if I could make you see it as I saw it, you would share with me my feeling that Atlanta must not be a city divided.”

What Mayor Allen observed was the physical and societal imposition of the new, massive Berlin Wall, constructed that year by East Germany and splitting families and livelihoods into separate, unequal, and crudely enforced zones. A businessman through and through, the junior Allen was beginning to see the myriad of ways segregating people by fiat would prove ultimately bad, for commerce. But he had to travel abroad to more deeply grasp the impacts of such decisions applied back home. Including his own decisions as Atlanta’s new mayor.

Another World War II veteran had returned home, having participated in the theater of war at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France on D-Day. Seeking out a peaceful postwar existence by resuming and completing his education, Clinton Warner obtained his master’s degree, then a medical degree. Eventually, he returned from the training in the Midwest to open a private practice as a physician and breast surgeon in Atlanta.

Dr. Warner sought out a pleasant home in the emerging western subdivision of Peyton Forest, south of Gordon Road in Atlanta’s west side and not far from the city’s grand Westview Cemetery, the Southeast U.S.’s largest. Peyton Forest homes were nestled in a tree-shrouded area that was once the site of the Civil War’s Battle of Utoy Creek. There were no more cannons to be fired in this bucolic cul-de-sac. Still, a whole different battle, around Warner, was only beginning.

Dr. Warner, you see, was a graduate of Morehouse College, one of Atlanta’s prominent cluster of Black universities. Black colleges, like Black neighborhoods or Black schools or Black banks and retail businesses, came into being because there were rarely other options for non-White citizens. Not, at least, in the Jim Crow South.

However more progressive Atlanta was being perceived, relative to its Southern peers, White citizens did not “take kindly” to upwardly mobile Black citizens declining to move in with their own “kind.” Warner’s move to his 20-acre lot, Allen would later write in his memoir, “set off a Holocaust among the Whites.”

“Blockbusting” was becoming all the rage in the ruthless real estate industry. Pay Black citizens to mingle in White neighborhoods, then advise White homeowners of the “threat” to their property values, coaxing them to sell and move further out of town at a markdown. Turn around, sell to a Black buyer with limited options, like Dr. Warner, at a markup. Then keep spinning with the scare tactics, the profiteers enjoying perpetual windfalls as grumbling sellers and hamstrung buyers pointed fingers of varying color at one another.

The digits also pointed squarely at City Hall to do something. Allen’s longtime mayoral predecessor, William Hartsfield, always thought there was a compromise around the corner, usually one involving a hard bargain for the Black citizens. There’s no segregation, Hartsfield thought, if we let Black golfers swing on public courses on Mondays and Tuesdays, and they leave us be for the other five days of the week! While cities like New Orleans were already doing this, SCOTUS would not go along with that silly measure.

The 1955 Court order ruling, against Bobby Jones Golf Course and the city, didn’t go over well in Mayor Allen’s Buckhead, the ritzy Fulton County area incorporated into Atlanta just three years prior, or anywhere else in town where segregated co-existence had been the order of the day. As Dr. Warner would later experience firsthand, Black citizens and their families were threatened relentlessly with their livelihoods for daring to desegregate, and it took years before the agitation relented.

Mayor Allen drummed up a compromise, too. He vowed to have the city purchase undeveloped land near Peyton Forest and develop separate, yet somehow equal, residential homes, if Black leaders would agree to keep their citizens out of established White communities. (Hartsfield had tried this ploy with the golf courses, only to run into a city council reminding him they had no budget for them). As that compromise failed, there was no way for Allen to placate the skittish White homeowners who were taking their new cars, and their tax revenues, outside of Atlanta city proper. UNLESS…

“Race Buffer goes up, is Hit in Court,” read the Atlanta Constitution in December 1962. By this time, “Little Mike” had been working his way through the South, organizing peaceful demonstrations against segregated public facilities, and being promptly arrested and convicted for the crimes of organizing and making trouble. Now “MLK, Jr.,” Dr. King was barely two years into his return to Atlanta, co-pastoring Ebenezer, meeting with President Kennedy at the White House shortly after being released from jail in Albany, Georgia.

There was little time in the junior King’s schedule to deal with this “Race Buffer” in his hometown. Actually, there were two buffers, eventually steel I-beam-enforced wooden barriers across two streets south of Gordon Road, blocking access to Peyton Forest. Public swimming pools and parks and eateries were one thing, Allen thought. But these were residential streets, with private homes, where the neighbors wished to associate and do as they saw fit.

Black protestors would arrive to rip up the wooden barricades and toss them in the creek. White allies had them replaced with trees and boulders. Then the trees got burned down, leading to the I-beams Allen ordered, embedded into deep concrete.

True to form, Klansmen arrived to serve as watchmen, bearing signs that declared, “Whites Have Rights, too.” The right to exclude, the right to evade, the right to judge, to discriminate, to threaten, to harm. But what were the underlying moralities of these “rights” being so selectively and unevenly applied?

The courts weren’t as bothered about moralities as they were about legalities. But Atlanta wasn’t short of citizens willing to share with Allen the moral effect of his barricades. While King, Jr. didn’t have the capacity, in terms of time, to tackle this emerging issue head-on, “Daddy King” certainly did.

King, Sr. and a successor to his presidency at the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP, were among local leaders issuing a joint statement calling on Allen to end, “one of Atlanta’s gravest mistakes, and a slap at our national creed of democracy and justice.”  Black journals were more to the point, proliferating depictions of the obstructions isolating Peyton Forest as, “Atlanta’s Berlin Wall.” That struck at the heart of Mayor Allen’s hypocritical action, intended to quell division but instead sowing the seeds of a more “divided city.”

The court system didn’t need to have its heartstrings pulled on the matter. Once a Fulton Superior Court judge deemed the barricades, “unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious,” thereby unconstitutional, Allen had the steel and wooden beams removed within minutes, forgoing any further appeals and challenges.

This particular 72-day affair drawing undue international attention to the city Allen, Jr., MLK, Jr. and Dr. Warner, called home, was over. Their individual roles in the winding road of advancing civil rights at a grander scale would continue. While the legal challenge by the civil rights movement proved successful, compelling the Mayor to continue looking inward at his underlying morality bore dividends.

Allen was already shedding segregationist skin on matters of public affairs. White and Colored signs came down at City Hall. Black policemen, for the first time under Allen’s tenure, could apprehend and detain White suspects. And he was brokering mutual agreements with downtown businesses to allow Black citizens to shop in their establishments.

How much farther, pondered Allen, can citizens extend walls and fences, discerning who can and cannot gain entry, beyond their own property lines? Within these lines, can we continue to use race to assess who is welcome to attend our private schools, or in our commercial establishments? Should government be in the business of enforcing these restrictive behaviors? If so, what are the legal and moral bases for these actions?

At the start of 1963, Allen and his administration were justifying the “right” of a White community to isolate itself from its neighbors, on the basis of race. By the summer, at the behest of President Kennedy, Atlanta’s mayor sat before Congress, delivering testimony. Allen was adding his perspective, uniquely as a White, southern mayor, on the urgent need to pass legislation protecting America’s Black citizens, not on the narrow basis of race, but on the constitutional grounds of interstate commerce.

“I submit that it is not right to allow an American’s citizenship to be changed merely as a matter of convenience,” Allen testified. “We cannot dodge this issue. We cannot look back over our shoulders, or turn the clock back to the 1860s,” an era, Allen could be sure, where many of his colleagues and neighbors considered America to be “Great.”

“Now the elimination of segregation, which is slavery’s stepchild, is a challenge to all of us to make every American free in fact, as well as theory.” Allen did not know, yet, that his testimony was the “One” of a one-two peaceful punch by Atlantans to drive momentum toward the United States passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The “Two,” would land the next month, as Dr. King would stand from the Lincoln Memorial around the corner in Washington, D.C., sharing one haymaker of a Dream he had with the world.

Allen’s expanded alliance with Atlanta’s Black leaders had him in the type of situation as precarious as Dr. Warner faced when moving into Peyton Forest, or Dr. King faced when appearing virtually anywhere while demonstrating in the South. He and family members were subject to slings and arrows, and the pervading threat of more efficiently violent weaponry. Further, well-to-do associates of Allen no longer spoke to him, and ceased doing business with his company.

The rebellion in Georgia extended beyond Allen’s City Hall. It began before his tenure, as stoked fears of desegregation and “race-mixing” in the aftermath of Brown v. Board (1954) drove the establishment of restrictive private academies and academic policies in and around Buckhead, like Westminster and Pace Academy. Down the road in 1963, The Lovett School rejected the applications of several young pupils, including Martin Luther King III, on racial grounds, creating a schism within their affiliated Episcopal Diocese.

For White shoppers disinterested in sharing space with Black ones, there was a new market, literally. Buckhead’s posh Lenox Square (1959), with its concourse featuring Uncle Remus characters, ushered in an era of catering to clientele far from the Atlanta city center. Downtown dollars, retailers, and traditions like the holiday Great Tree, would find their way to the Lenox area, with suburban mall options soon to follow their lead.

America’s largest trolleybus fleet was in Atlanta, as late as 1951, as the rubber-tired vehicles replaced the rail-guided streetcars. The extensive trolley network extended from downtown across most neighborhoods of 1940s Atlanta, including its first ring of pre-annexation suburbs. As desegregation of transit services, and neighborhoods, were becoming the order of the day, it was no coincidence that the electric service was privatized, then shut down completely, by 1963, replaced with diesel-motor buses. Fixed train routes extending beyond downtown to Atlanta residential neighborhoods would not be in operation for another 16 years.

As for the neighborhoods these trolleys once connected, it didn’t matter whether it was public housing, segregated in Atlanta until 1968, or private – wholesale White flight in this and countless other cities were underway. As rapper Chuck D eloquently queried in 1990, “Why, when Black moves in, Jack moves out? Come to stay, Jack moves away?”

Unable to legally resist integration of public places and spaces in urban areas, White citizens withdrew to areas perceived to require less, well, public. Walls and barriers would go up, just not in ways so visible to the naked eye. Gated communities, and cul-de-sacs distanced from existing streets with layouts far more serpentine than Peyton Forest, became the predominant feature of new housing construction.

Atlanta’s ability to expand its borders via annexation, like its growing urban peers, was constrained for decades by Georgia lawmakers sensitive to White exurbia’s pleas. All of ten feet wide along Atlanta’s main river, the former Cobb County “city” of Chattahoochee Plantation was but one example of how bulwarks got “built.”

The two-tone geographic effect within American city limits was stark. By the 1980s in Milwaukee, home to the world champion Bucks that we can only hope will graciously bow in defeat to our Atlanta Hawks today (6 PM Eastern, TNT), the colloquialism among locals of the 16^th Street Viaduct, due to suggested references of continental origin, was as notorious as the adopted acronym non-transit riders in Atlanta had for MARTA, neither of which will be repeated here.

Once settled in their legislatively reinforced zones, great pains are made to engage in “opportunity hoarding,” that is, withdrawing or withholding most everything of decent and beneficial quality, from public school instruction to medical care, to environmental protection, to fresh market foods.

The other activity involves raising the incidence of public policies unduly, be it in matters of surveillance, housing, code enforcement, transportation, policing, imprisonment, “no-tolerance” policies, or, as you’ll hear much about these days, voting rights. Broad-brushing citizens as derelict, perpetual suspects worthy of isolation and heightened scrutiny deodorizes the nature of the policymaking.

How does it all come together in neighborhoods like Peyton Forest, 60 years later? Gordon Road, the east-west thoroughfare reaching from west Atlanta through downtown, was renamed, posthumously, after MLK, Jr.  South of the boulevard, the neighborhood that fought so vehemently against Dr. Warner, and all neighborhoods around it in south and west Atlanta, were predominantly abandoned by the White populace the homes, schools, retail centers and places of worship were built to accommodate.

Among the citizens that have replaced them, just picking up the pieces to restore and sustain the community is fraught with roadblocks, few of their own making. Since 1979, the MARTA rail station has been within a short walking or biking distance. But because of Cobb and metro-area resistance to expansion, decent access to new and better jobs have been thwarted, as the station remains, seemingly in permanence, as the western terminus of the rail line.

The victories gained from the fights over desegregation, and from expanding voting rights and political representation, have been made deliberately bittersweet with each passing year. In 2022, Peyton Forest citizens will turn on the television to be bombarded with allusions to crime, by persons who look like them and their children, being out of control.

The solution, the context-free 30-second ads will blurt out over their heads, is to allow Buckhead, home to the clearly desegregated Lenox Square, to exclusively opt itself out of Atlanta, de-annexing and incorporating its own city to guide its own opportunity-hoarding and citizen-surveilling practices in earnest.

The lesson we have learned, with the direction of local leaders like the juniors King and Allen, is that we know a wall being erected when we see one. The fortresses, security towers and drawbridges don’t have to be visible to recognize it for what it is. The question we should face, as a beloved community, is what are the moralities that underlie their proposed construction?

Over a quarter-century before the Berlin Wall finally fell to global pressure, it took courageous leaders, like Dr. King’s admired namesake, to stand up to the powers that be and declare, “Tear Down This Wall!” But absent a moral basis, it is difficult to bring down barriers solely on practical grounds. Particularly, as Mayor Allen would come to assess, the barriers constructed within our own hearts and minds.

Whether it involves a name we use to self-identify, or a perspective on how we identify our neighbors, it’s never too late in life to make a big change.

 

Let’s Go Hawks!

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

I'll find y'all more resource links later, but for now, here's a personal essay from a Benjamin Mays high school teacher that covers the then-and-now of "Atlanta's Berlin Wall" very well: "A Lesson in Barriers."

https://bittersoutherner.com/southern-perspective/2020/the-peyton-wall-a-lesson-in-barriers

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

As of this morning's latest Boo-Boo Report, both Bogi (sore knee) and Clint (sprained ankle) remain on the outs.

Jrue Holiday sits this one out with a sore ankle. Brook Lopez (back surgery) remains sidelined, while College Park Skyhawks legend Langston Galloway is the only player for either team currently under H&S protocols. Coach Bud returned from his protocol period last week.

 

~lw3

[macdaddy]

Hall of Fame 'game thread' right there.  Thank you !

[shakes]

this feels like a 25 point loss.

[JeffS17]

this feels like a 25 point win.

[JayBirdHawk]

Post of The Year!

Thanks as Always @lethalweapon3 for the history lesson.

[Spud2nique]

Got chills lw3. Thank you.

Go Hawks!

[Plainview1981]

Funny how MLK has a day but Malcolm X does not...

[Spud2nique]

@lethalweapon3 you’re not Jay W are you?  Dude seems unassuming, humble, an environmentalist and family man. 

hmmm… 

[Spud2nique]

1 minute ago, Plainview1981 said:

Funny how MLK has a day but Malcolm X does not...

We didn’t learn as much about X in the early 80’s in grade school either. 

[JayBirdHawk]

3 minutes ago, Plainview1981 said:

Funny how MLK has a day but Malcolm X does not...

 

Just now, Spud2nique said:

We didn’t learn as much about X in the early 80’s in grade school either. 

Why do you think that is?

[Plainview1981]

Just now, JayBirdHawk said:

 

Why do you think that is?

I have a theory, but it belongs in another section.

[lethalweapon3]

Another Peyton Road link from the Georgia Tech liberal arts college, now named after Ivan Allen, the transformed and transformative Atlanta mayor who would be with Coretta Scott King at the time of MLK Jr.'s 1968 assassination.

https://ivanallen.iac.gatech.edu/biography/peyton-road-wall

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

Time magazine coverage of the Peyton Forest affair, from its January 18, 1963 issue.

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,874660,00.html

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

Brian Kaylor, from Word & Way magazine, detailed "How the Reformation (and a Baptist Meeting) Changed MLK's Name"

https://wordandway.org/2017/10/30/how-the-reformation-and-a-baptist-meeting-changed-mlk-s-name/

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

Interviews with the late Dr. Clinton Warner (1924-2012), the Peyton Forest resident who, the same year Atlanta's "Wall" came down, was also a plaintiff in a lawsuit that led to the desegregation of Emory University.

https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/dr-clinton-warner-39

~lw3

[Spud2nique]

I just balled in these bad boys! Happy MLK day everyone.

ps I made a friend, was wearing Pistons shirt and was a baller and then I nailed 7 threes in a row and got his attention a bit, @AHF then and you’ll appreciate this, older white dude about 60 walks by, a baller himself, imagine he played for.. Kentucky lol, he gave me a thumbs up as I nailed a 30 footer flying out of bounce and onto the grass to end it. (I always gotta leave only after burying a 3, then I don’t dribble the ball straight pick up and to my car !

Anyhoo, oh the Pistons dude said he liked Cade a lot, been a Pistons fan since mid 80’s, bad boy days, cool dude, honestly I’m gonna start being a cooler dude @kg01 cuz the Bay Area, I tell ya, they hate the Hawks alone for my trash 🗑 talking  

Go Hawks!

Edited January 17, 2022 by Spud2nique

[TheNorthCydeRises]

4 hours ago, lethalweapon3 said:

“Blockbusting” was becoming all the rage in the ruthless real estate industry. Pay Black citizens to mingle in White neighborhoods, then advise White homeowners of the “threat” to their property values, coaxing them to sell and move further out of town at a markdown. Turn around, sell to a Black buyer with limited options, like Dr. Warner, at a markup. Then keep spinning with the scare tactics, the profiteers enjoying perpetual windfalls as grumbling sellers and hamstrung buyers pointed fingers of varying color at one another.

 

I had never heard of this term until now.  Now I really have to look it up and do major research on it.  I'll start with this video.

Newscast starts at 1:55

 

 

 

There may be 1 minute pauses between news segments

[lethalweapon3]

3 hours ago, Spud2nique said:

@lethalweapon3 you’re not Jay W are you?  Dude seems unassuming, humble, an environmentalist and family man. 

hmmm… 

Jay Williams? Nah, you couldn't get me to hop on one of them Yamaha motorcycles! I'd be like Toonces the Driving Cat on those things!

~lw3