There has never in the history of the United States of America been anything like this five-year-old city. On the southwest outskirts of Atlanta, it is a mostly suburban municipality with a population of some 108,000 in which nine of every 10 of the residents are Black. Of places of its size, it is statistically the Blackest by far.
A hundred or so years after hundreds of thousands of rural Black people began to alter the contours of national politics by migrating toward better jobs and lives in cities, then suburbs, across the country, the existence and the autonomy of South Fulton would seem like a welcome culmination of a long evolution from powerlessness to power.
But the city is tearing itself apart.
Its mayor, khalid kamau — a gay, Christian, socialist, self-described “Black nationalist,” a former film student, flight attendant, bus driver, Black Lives Matter organizer — says that he wants to create a “real-life Wakanda,” a city that’s “Black on purpose.” But he’s brushed up against the incremental, integrationist, typically more moderate politics of Atlanta’s Black elite shared by much of the rest of South Fulton’s local government. And now, he’s accusing the city of hiding public records. He’s attempted to fire the city attorney. He’s reiterated his request to hire a therapist for the city. Read more…
