Urban Pacification -- The Legacy of the 1996 Olympics

PK Note: Before you read this, take a quick look at this article regarding Billy Payne and his "legacy," and this article on the end of public housing in America. The push to create more "European" cities (white-controlled major cities surrounded by uninhabitable suburbs full of brown and Black people)  in America is underway, but first Black people must be re-located from urban areas to the burbs. The Post-American world is coming: are you prepared?

Our future is that of Paris -- Burning Suburbs full of Black (and Brown) people

The public housing units in Atlanta (which were populated with almost 99% Black people) are almost entirely gone, razed and replaced with mixed-income developments. The former Black inhabitants of these units have been spread throughout metro Atlanta, a bid to export the crime and misery that the city of Atlanta for decades exclusively enjoyed to the once all-white suburbs (where crime and misery was only spoken of when referring to Black-run Atlanta).

This is the legacy of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta -- and nationwide, cities where crime and poverty (Black people) are concentrated in public housing are aping the strategy employed in The City too Busy to Hate to spread the Black Undertow to the suburbs.

It all starts with one of the world's biggest companies, Coca-Cola, and the use of this international conglomerate to pressure the city to change (we call this "Connected Capitalism" -- discussed in great detail in this piece on the Atlanta Public School fiasco at VDare). Back in 1964, Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the the city of Atlanta wanted to throw a party in his honor. But the white business elite balked at this idea. Enter Coca-Cola CEO J. Paul Austin, who along with Mayor Ivan Allen:

...summoned key Atlanta business leaders to the Commerce Club's 18th floor dining room, where Austin told them flatly, "It is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner. We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Company does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Company." Within two hours of the end of the meeting, every ticket to the dinner was sold. (An Easy Burden, Andrew Young, p. 327)

Blackmail. Such a beautiful thing, isn't it?

Not a decade later, once Maynard Jackson had been elected the first Black mayor of the city, the same man who blackmailed the white business community of Atlanta would propose something quite different. Long-time Coca-Cola President Robert Woodruff had donated hundreds of million to the city of Atlanta for the construction of parks, education, and the arts, and now the peddler of sugar water (and one of the leading cause of diabetes) wanted something in return:

From Coca-Cola's headquarters on North Avenue, CEO Paul Austin could look out on Techwood Homes, the nation's first public housing project, long occupied by white tenants, and watch it turning black. Once the transformation was complete, he believed, the crime rate in the neighborhood would triple, endangering his employees. he wanted to relocate the residents to a new facility on the outskirts of town and to fill the 50-acre site with middle-income housing, parks, a shopping mall, and a theater.

Austin approached the mayor with his proposal, and Jackson initially agreed to help him. Once word of the plan became public, however, Jackson instantly backed off, fearing the black community would never forgive him for participating in another episode of "Urban removal." (Atlanta Rising, Rich Allen, p. 180)

Techwood did go 100 % Black; crime got out of control in this area. Paul Austin fears were correct, though he was the same man who had black-mailed Atlanta's white business establishment that Coca-Cola would leave unless they played ball with Black-Run America (BRA).

The concept of "Urban renewal" is quite simply -- remove the Black people who have been concentrated in a certain area (like Techwood, where Coca-Cola CEO Austin correctly observed that crime would increase three-fold) to someplace else. Just get them out of sight, and immediately bulldoze the dilapidated dwellings upon their removal and you'll see an instant decrease in crime.

Besides those Black people who were connected to the Black aristocracy of Atlanta (Mayors Jackson, Andy Young, and Bill Campbell) that was created when they took over the city, your average Black - indeed, the majority of Blacks in Atlanta - are engulfed in the muck of their own nature: the city has some of the highest concentrated Black poverty in America.

Thus, the need of the 1996 Olympics. Chief Executive magazine published this in 1992 concerning the "Urban Blight" that Black people had created in the heart of the city:

Without exception, business leaders hope to share in the financial bonanza that will accompany the Olympic Games. But the black residents of downtown and midtown Atlanta also want a piece of the action, especially those in the Summerhill and Techwood Homes neighborhoods. Their situation concerns Atlanta, if only because the city’s neglected areas could be a source of international shame when the Olympic spotlight shines in 1996.

The main Olympic stadium will be in Summerhill, and Olympic athletes will be housed in a new village on the Georgia Tech campus. The school adjoins both Coca-Cola headquarters and the Tech-wood Homes, the oldest, if not the happiest, U.S. housing project.

Buckhead, Sandy Springs and Chamblee. “Thousands of people new to Atlanta have never been downtown,” the article continued.

“To many of them, especially white suburbanites, downtown looks unfamiliar.”

The job growth in the northern part of the city (strangely, it's the part of Atlanta that will begin the secession movement - just in case the city doesn't go white - starting in 2013) is entirely due to the ingenuity of the white people who live there, and their ability to create self communities that outside investors feel safe in investing capital in.

The "Urban Blight" that seems to pop up wherever Black people are the demographic majority of, isn't conducive to outside investments and sustaining a strong business community is entirely the fault of Black people.

Whites are safe in their suburbs for the same reason Coca-Cola CEO Austin worried about the changing demographics of Techwood -- because Black people are responsible for virtually all the crime in Atlanta.

Cue the 1996 Olympics and the ability to use the games as a way to remove the 'cancer' of "Urban Blight" from the city and disperse it to the suburbs of Atlanta (Clayton County is the prime example of what happens when concentrated Black poverty is imported to a majority white suburb). The New York Times bemoaned the move in the early 1990s (Atlanta's Olympic Park Plan Reveals the Complications of Urban Renewal, Peter Applebome, December 19, 1993), but changed its tune in 1996 when Ken Edelstein wrote these words (A New Mixed-Use Development for Atlanta):

Techwood Homes and Clark Howell Homes were once considered models of a new wave in low-income housing. In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the first units of what would quickly sprawl out into 54 acres of red-brick, garden-style apartment buildings.

In recent years, however, civic leaders have bemoaned the crime, drug dealing and vandalism that crept across the projects. At one point the authority declared 500 of the units unsuitable for habitation.

Business leaders fretted that Techwood and Clark Howell were eyesores nestled between downtown office towers, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the fortress-like headquarters of the Coca-Cola Company. The spotlight shone more harshly on the two projects in the 90's when Olympic organizers built their athletes' village on Techwood's northern boundary and constructed a new Centennial Olympic Park two blocks to the south.

Now, most of the 1,100 units have been razed and nearly all residents have been moved out. Some former tenants have been shifted to private housing and enrolled in a voucher program to supplement their rent.

Business leaders are viewing the new development as an anchor in a still unsteady downtown revival that has followed on the heels of this summer's Games. Centennial Olympic Park, small apartment complexes, a new 1.6-million-square-foot Federal office building, plans for a basketball arena and efforts to establish a new entertainment district have raised hopes that downtown's sterile west side will become a showcase on the doorstep of the city's 2.5 million-square-foot convention facility, the Georgia World Congress Center.

''Any time you clear out a blighted area you're certainly going to improve the areas around it,'' said Gerald L. Bartels, president of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. But the new housing complex also makes the whole area easier to redevelop, Mr. Bartels said, because it creates a better link between downtown and Georgia Tech. AND since it is a mixed-income development, it may help demonstrate that the downtown area is an acceptable place for middle-income people to live, he said.

"Urban Blight" will always follow Black people wherever they go, be it via Section 8 Vouchers or through a migration shifts such as the so-called "Great Migration" of Blacks out of the south which turned Detroit, Chicago, Gary, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Baltimore into -- larger scale versions of Techwood.

Coca-Cola's CEO Austin pressured the white establishment to capitulate to BRA in 1964; then, when he couldn't push the rising concentration of the Black Undertow out of the city (and from the view of his employees in the Coca-Cola highrise overlooking Techwood), the 1996 Olympics was used as a cover for "Urban Pacification." Courtesy of a Georgia State research paper (The Olympic Class: The Politics Behind the 1996Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games), we learn this:

The poor African-American neighborhoods being displaced existed within the core of downtown Atlanta, in close proximity to the Olympic Village where athletes would be housed and other Olympic sites. Additionally, Techwood Homes was near two esteemed Games planners, Coca-Cola and Georgia Tech. The process of the tenant displacement and demolition
of public housing and neighborhoods such as Summerhill lacked in “southern hospitality.”

While the result ultimately removed large concentrations of poverty and crime from the view of visitors to Atlanta, the opportunism that provided the impetus to break up this core of poverty did not actually provide resolve to the residents. Within Techwood Homes and Clark-Howell Homes, the Atlanta Housing Authority demolished these complexes without a mechanism to assist those that were being displaced in finding housing. Furthermore, the poverty concentrations were merely transplanted to the southern suburbs, beyond areas of business or tourism.

Now, you should understand why 70% Black Clayton County (it was 75% white in 1990) would re-elect Victor Hill as sheriff; the "Urban Pacification" of the 1996 Olympics enriched the county with the citizens who were once concentrated in public housing in Atlanta.

The Black Undertow always, always overwhelms.

This is the legacy of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta -- and now, other cities throughout the dying empire known as the United States of America will jettison the concentrated areas of "Urban Blight" within their city limits to the suburbs; utilizing the model set-forth in Atlanta.

The end of the Black Mecca is upon us, though the white citizens of North Fulton County have doubled-down (the creation of incorporated cities like Sandy Springs, Brookhaven, Johns Creek, and Dunwoody) just in case it doesn't happen in 2013.