The Legend of the Black Mecca
Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta
By Maurice J. Hobson
336 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 12 halftones, appends., notes, bibl., index
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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-3535-4
Published: November 2017 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-3536-1
Published: October 2017 -
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5475-1
Published: August 2019
Buy this Book
- Hardcover $29.95
- Paperback $27.95
- E-Book $19.99
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Free E-Exam Copies
Awards & distinctions
2018 GHRAC Award for Excellence, Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council
In telling this history through the prism of the black New South and Atlanta politics, policy, and pop culture, Hobson portrays a striking schism between the black political elite and poor city-dwellers, complicating the long-held view of Atlanta as a mecca for black people.
About the Author
Maurice J. Hobson is associate professor of African American studies at Georgia State University.
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Reviews
“Provides an intriguing look at a group of people who are typically left out of conversations about Atlanta’s past and progress.”--ArtsATL
“Provides a necessary counter to the standard narrative of modern Atlanta.”--Choice
"Hobson mines the trove of Atlanta’s Black cultural scene to capture, in its essence, the profound sense of disaffection with the city’s Black leadership elite expressed in works produced in the 1990s. The book is a timely reminder of what examining the intraracial socioeconomic class divide can reveal for students of African American urban history. Furthermore, the book opens up space for future projects that might address similar themes in other cities, as well as those that embrace the necessary challenge of doing work with an explicitly intersectional frame, which will foreground the ways in which gender and sexuality can serve as analytical frames of equal importance as race and class."--Winston A. Grady-Willis, in Atlanta Studies
“Maurice Hobson keeps it real in this post–civil rights history of black Atlanta. He excavates the political contradictions in the city’s politics by revealing what Atlanta’s hip hop community dubbed the Dirty South. Here’s a history where Outkast and Goodie Mob meet Atlanta’s black mayors. The ironies are deliciously delectable and debatable. Hobson’s history of Atlanta is not simply regional; it is a national story of neoliberal politics at the expense of the poor."--Randal Maurice Jelks, author of Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement
“In this extensive study of the evolution of black Atlanta, Hobson uncovers and closely examines the black Mecca trope and offers a much more nuanced and interesting narrative of Atlanta’s history than the ones we are so accustomed to hearing.”—Derrick P. Alridge, University of Virginia
Multimedia & Links
Watch: Hobson's talk at the Atlanta History Center, recorded by C-SPAN. (2/21/2018, running time 1:24:27)
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