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My family’s story is entangled in that historical past: My grandfather, Marque Leslie Jackson, was Martin Luther King Jr.’s physician (he as soon as took out King’s tonsils) and he typically threw himself into the activist fray, picketing segregated department shops like Wealthy’s. In the meantime, my grandmother’s brother, R.E. Thomas, Jr. (we known as him Uncle Edwin) was an lawyer who labored to desegregate Atlanta’s public golf programs in a case that went all the way in which to the Supreme Courtroom. Later, he and his spouse, Mamie, helped activists from the Pupil Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, offering them with meals, cash and a spot to remain. My mother, who grew up with Maynard Jackson (no relation) was a lobbyist for the Georgia NAACP within the ’80s, the place she labored underneath Bond and helped get anti-Klan laws handed within the Georgia Legislature. I bear in mind her getting dying threats.
They by no means made a giant deal of any of it, it was one thing casually dropped into conversations after which, we moved on. These have been simply info of life, nothing extra, nothing much less.
There’s a darkish facet to all this Black privilege. The strain to excel, to continuously surmount, could be too heavy a burden to bear. Some pals, the scions of Atlanta’s Black elite, fell down and didn’t stand up, performed in by medicine, suicide, despair. Typically, there wasn’t a whole lot of generational wealth to go down, due to a legacy of redlining and discrimination.
After which there’s this: Atlanta is — was — very a lot a “who’s your folks” type of city.
Privilege, Black privilege, wasn’t precisely a monolith. The Outdated Guard, from whence my of us sprang, have been the merchandise of generations of amalgamation, light-skinned Black of us who acquired a leg up with on the racial ladder with a mix of industriousness and a well-placed white slave-owning relative or three who (sometimes) bequeathed freedom, land, and in case you have been fortunate, an training, too.
Guarding the gates of the Outdated Guard have been doyennes fixated on shade and hair texture and household lineage, passing down that sense of superiority from technology to technology.
So. There was the Outdated Guard of correct, middle-class gatekeepers like my maternal grandmother, Ruth, “membership girls” whose mission was to “uplift the race” — whereas holding the keys to the Black bourgie kingdom within the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Suppose the Hyperlinks, the Woman Associates, Jack and Jill, the Boule, the Guardsmen, all bastions of Black excellence and Black exclusion. However the ’60s and ’70s introduced within the New Guard of Black bourgie-ness, of us who is likely to be of a darker hue, of us who possibly didn’t have a white slave-owning great-great-grandfather who was apparently OK with proudly owning Black of us, however who possibly had sufficient of a conscience to assume that proudly owning your individual blood was simply possibly kinda tousled, and they also gave their Black youngsters a bit one thing.
The New Guard is likely to be a bit darker, they won’t have that white-adjacent-ness, however that they had cash. They’re those who acquired wealthy due to grit and medical college or a development firm that made a boatload of ducats or a very genius approach of designing a funeral residence with drive-through viewing. (Sure, that basically occurred.) And that meant that they had cash — heaps and plenty of it — and that introduced a sure energy that even the color-struck doyennes of the Outdated Guard couldn’t deny.
Not everybody was hip to — or completely happy about — this massive cultural revolution. Atlanta, in any case, was a significant strategic metropolis for the Confederacy in the course of the Civil Conflict, and a few Atlantans have been nonetheless combating that combat. My dad and mom, massive proponents of grabbing the very best training cash might purchase, enrolled me on the Westminster Faculties on the Northwest facet of city. Particularly, Westminster, with its accouterments of privilege (luxe dorms, rolling lawns, Olympic-size swimming pool) was situated in Buckhead, residence of Outdated Cash and Outdated Southern households. (That might be the identical neighborhood, nonetheless the whitest within the metropolis, that in 2022 is attempting mightily to secede from the remainder of Atlanta.)
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