Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis by Christopher C. Sellers (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis by Christopher C. Sellers
• Andrew Gutkowski

Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis. By Christopher C. Sellers. Environmental History and the American South. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 428. Paper, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4408-9; cloth, $114.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4407-2.)

In recent years, Atlanta has emerged as a key battleground in the fate of American democracy. In the 2020 presidential election, the city proved decisive in tilting Georgia to the Democrats and consequently became the focus of voting fraud conspiracies in the election’s aftermath. Fulton County has also issued a historic indictment of Donald J. Trump for attempting to overturn Georgia’s election results. In Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis, Christopher C. Sellers provides important context for understanding this moment, demonstrating how Atlanta first became a laboratory for democratizing movements. Throughout the twentieth century, environmental and civil rights activists undermined racial authoritarian rule in Georgia and democratized the city. Sellers emphasizes that both movements, often seen as adversaries, were intertwined. Both provided a fulcrum for dismantling Jim Crow and launching a new cadre of Black civil rights leaders such as Maynard Jackson Jr. and John Lewis into positions of political leadership, simultaneously appealing to concerns over civil rights and environmental issues.

Before the 1960s, Sellers argues, Atlanta was shackled by a system of “rustic rule” (p. 4). This regime not only disenfranchised Black citizens but also severely curtailed the voting power and governing authority of cities, concentrated wealth in the hands of a rural elite, and enabled industry to resist unionization and freely exploit Georgia’s air and waterways. An influx of federal assistance and New Deal programs, however, catalyzed the rise of both a white and a Black middle class along the city’s suburban arc. Throughout the 1960s, both groups challenged racial authoritarianism from different vantage points, with the city’s civil rights leaders pressing for greater Black representation in metropolitan planning and housing opportunities for Black citizens, while a mostly white environmental movement advocated for nature preserves and pollution control measures. Historians have generally treated these as separate social movements with intractable differences in ideology, structure, and racial composition. Although each group articulated a different understanding of the “environment,” Sellers emphasizes how they both promoted a new [End Page 650] vision of citizenship—access to public parks, green space, and clean air and water—that collided with the minimalist government favored by Georgia’s racist authoritarians.

In telling this story, Sellers also uncovers a tradition of environmental activism often overlooked in histories of the twentieth-century South. After the 1960s, conservation groups like the Georgia Conservancy began to advocate for a new environmentalist state that would preserve Georgia’s natural resources and regulate the disposal of industrial wastes. Environment-friendly politicians like Jimmy Carter harnessed these movements, launching a wave of new environmental protections, beginning the creation of a state park system, and expanding Black representation in state and municipal politics. Sellers’s work also powerfully underscores the centrality of environmental issues in reshaping southern politics in the post–civil rights era. Beginning in the 1980s, Atlanta’s Black civil rights leaders appropriated the language of environmental justice, while neoconservatives learned to reframe environmentalism as a form of government overreach. This transformation paralleled broader geographic and economic shifts within Atlanta’s metropolitan landscape. Sellers also illustrates how subsequent globalization and deregulation ushered a return to “a ‘cleavage capitalism’” in the city, as sprawl further isolated residents into suburban enclaves homogenized in terms of both race and class (p. 4). Affluent white suburbanites became accustomed to having their own assortment of private environmental amenities and grew hostile to environmental regulation. Following a model trailblazed by Newt Gingrich, Georgia Republicans capitalized on this transformation by dropping their support for environmental protections and reframing environmentalism as a movement hostile to consumer values. In this regard, Sellers helps explain much about our current political moment—not just Atlanta’s decisive role in national politics, but...