Content:

Grassroots Struggles, Power, and Repression Under Gentrification.

Join Pilsen Community Books as they welcome Augustus Wood and Camila Gavin to the store for a discussion of Wood's new book, "Class Warfare in Black Atlanta: Grassroots Struggles, Power, and Repression under Gentrification."

Between 1966 and 2015, the city of Atlanta was transformed. In the late 1960s, Black politicians ascended to the top of the power structure for the first time thanks to newly enfranchised Black working-class voters. Through the early 1970s, the demographics of the city shifted, and the combination of Black empowerment and white flight produced a growing Black working-class majority that increasingly demanded Black Power policies that often clashed with the policies supported by affluent residents.

But by the 2010s, Atlanta’s city core had been thoroughly gentrified, and the ability of Black working-class Atlantans to organize and build power had diminished significantly.

Tracing the history of post–civil rights Black Atlanta through rigorous class analysis, Augustus Wood argues that Black and white elites responded to an energized and politicized Black working class by forging a public-private partnership power bloc that included the small but growing Black political leadership, expanding the racial class contradictions in Black Atlanta. This bloc worked to shift state funding away from public services and toward gentrification projects that demolished subsidized housing, and it ramped up police surveillance to deter working-class resistance.

Paying close attention to political economy and class while drawing on unexamined archival sources and oral histories of Black working-class Atlantans, especially Black women, Wood reframes our understanding of contemporary Black urban life by highlighting the centrality of the dynamics of intraracial class conflict in urban space.

Augustus Wood is assistant professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A scholar of African American History of the Urban South with an interdisciplinary focus on political economy, intra-racial class struggle, working class social movements, and gentrification in modern urban regions, Wood centralizes the role of labor struggles in anti-Black working-class racial oppression and the development of internal neo- colonialism. His other research includes Black Power in Southern Cities, Black Marxism in History, and Black Radicalism in labor social movements.