Look at Atlanta's skyline from a distance or from a plane. There are clearly two separate sets of high-rise buildings, two skylines if you will - one to the south (downtown Atlanta) and one to the north (Buckhead), separated by a canopy of trees and low- to medium-rise buildings. Part of the City of Atlanta since 1952, Buckhead has always had its own separate sense of identity.
Buckhead was established in 1838 by Henry Irby, who purchased about 200 acres from Daniel Johnson for $650 and subsequently established a general store and tavern. The settlement was initially called "Irbyville" until the day Irby shot a large buck deer and mounted the head in a prominent location.
By the late 1800s, Buckhead had become a rural vacation spot for wealthy Atlantans. Buckhead remained dominated by country estates until after World War I, when many of Atlanta's wealthy began building mansions among the area's rolling hills. Despite the stock market crash of 1929, lavish mansions were constructed in Buckhead throughout the Great Depression.
Buckhead's black neighborhoods, including Johnsontown, Piney Grove, Savagetown and Macedonia Park, were razed beginning in the 1940s. Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield tried to annex Buckhead in 1946, but that effort was voted down by residents. The community was finally annexed into the City of Atlanta in 1952. Georgia's current Governor's Mansion was built in Buckhead on West Paces Ferry Road in 1967.
Since at least the 1950s, Buckhead has been known as an area of extreme wealth, with the western and northern neighborhoods being virtually unrivaled in the Southeast. In 2011, Buckhead's western zip code was the second wealthiest zip code in the South (behind Palm Beach) and the second wealthiest zip code east of California and south of Virginia. Due to its wealth, Buckhead is sometimes called the "Beverly Hills of the South."
Since Buckhead isn't an incorporated or formally recognized municipality, it's boundaries are somewhat debatable. The northern border of Buckhead was established in 2005 when adjoining Sandy Springs incorporated as a separate city. The southern boundary of Buckhead is sometimes placed at East and West Wesley Road, or further south at Peachtree Battle Avenue, or further south still at Peachtree Creek, or even all the way down at the Brookwood Interchange of Interstates I-75 and I-85. Anything south of the interstates is almost universally recognized as "Midtown."
I live north of the interstates but south of Peachtree Creek, so depending on your definition of "Buckhead," I'm either in the southernmost portion of the district, or just to the south of Buckhead. Real estate agents call anything between Midtown and Sandy Springs "Buckhead," but I can assure you that no one other than the most starry-eyed realtor would look at my block and call it the "Beverly Hills of the South." Some people call this area "Brookwood" after the interstate junction, but that's confusing as this area already contains recognized "Brookwood" and "Brookwood Hills" neighborhoods, as well as another recently established city, Brookhaven, to the northeast of Buckhead. We're kind of an area searching for an identity.
When I first moved to Atlanta in 1980, Buckhead Village, the commercial area on Peachtree Street near Paces Ferry and Roswell Roads, was the premier party and bar-hopping spot in Atlanta. Most of the establishments had outdoor tables and dining, few had cover charges, food and drinks were relatively inexpensive, and last call wasn't until 4:00 am. At the intersection of West Paces and Peachtree Street alone, there was a bar at each of the four corners, including some of my favorite, go-to places, like Good Ol' Days (southeast corner) and Carlos McGee's (northeast corner). Aunt Charley's was just to the north, and across the street Animal Crackers (later Buckhead Beach) had an actual, full-size Ferris wheel inside. This was the prime, Grade-A singles meet-up district - at least for young, white people - and when I was in my mid-20s, Buckhead's allure of sex and alcohol was irresistible. A 1987 article in Atlanta magazine tried to capture the scene, although they perhaps overstated the case a bit to make their point:
The tiny dance floor is packed. Guitar riffs flash like lightning from amplifiers three feet above the crush of swaying, sweating dancers. In the men’s room, a couple is clumsily trying to have sex standing in the toilet stall next to the overflowing urinal. “Put it there,” slurs the dark-haired woman to her obviously smashed partner. Outside, a tourist visiting from Toronto meets an attractive, well-educated woman, a chemist, she tells him. Half an hour later, they are having oral sex in the parking lot alongside someone’s parked van. He couldn’t remember her name. — Friday night at Carlos McGee’s, July 1981
In the early 1980s, the Buckhead bars catered to a crowd of mostly white, single professionals. As the decade progressed and on into the 90s, the bars and clubs became more and more upscale and increasingly catered to a well-to-do, mostly black clientele. The area became famous as a party spot for Atlanta area rappers and singers, including Outkast, Usher, and Jermaine Dupri, who mentioned Buckhead's clubs in his song Welcome to Atlanta.
Following a Super Bowl party in Buckhead on January 31, 2000, a fight broke out between the entourage of Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens and another group of people, resulting in the stabbing deaths of two young men. That turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back. Following that highly-publicized incident, Buckhead's affluent, white residents decided that they had enough of the party. It was one thing when white frat boys and sorority sisters were getting loaded all night, but another thing when black rappers and pro football players were taking over the streets and people were getting stabbed. Of course, the Ray Lewis incident was hardly the first violent episode in Buckhead Village).
The rampant drunk driving and underage drinking were apparently acceptable as long as the crowd was white, but once the skin color turned darker, the authorities took measures to reduce crime and re-establish a more residential character to the area. The Atlanta City Council passed an ordinance to close bars at 2:30 rather than 4:00 am, and liquor licenses were made more difficult to obtain. Developers and land speculators bought out the property beneath the bars and eventually most of the Buckhead nightlife district was acquired for the Buckhead Atlanta multi-use project. Many of the former bars and clubs were razed in 2007. Now it's all high-end boutiques and services catering to the ultra-wealthy,
In 2008, a group calling itself the Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation proposed the secession of Buckhead into its own city after more than 50 years as part of Atlanta. At the time, the so-called Tea Party was emerging as a new, conservative movement, and the Taxpayers Foundation's argument to create a city of Buckhead was based on the desire for lower taxes and more local control of governance.
Going back to at least the mid-19th Century, some wealthy white landowners in the American South have complained that their tax dollars were being misused to benefit poor minorities. As explained by historian Heather Cox Richardson, in the years after the Civil War, northern Republicans had invented a system of national taxation, including an income tax, while simultaneously allowing African American men to vote. This meant that, after the Civil War, for the first time in American history, voting had a direct impact on people’s pocketbooks.
After the war, southern Democrats organized as the Ku Klux Klan to try to stop Black Americans from taking their rightful place in society. They assaulted, raped, and murdered their Black neighbors to keep them from voting. But President Ulysses S. Grant met domestic terrorism with federal authority, established the Department of Justice, and arrested Klan members, driving their movement underground.
So reactionary whites began to argue that their problem with Black voting wasn't actually about race at all, but rather about finance. They said that they objected to poor voters being able to elect leaders who promised to deliver services or public improvements, like schools and roads (you know, "free stuff"), paid for by taxes levied on property holders.
In the South of the post-Civil War years, almost all property holders were white. They argued that Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to poor Black people. It was, they insisted, “socialism,” or, after workers in Paris created a commune in 1871, “communism.”
This, Richardson argues, is the origin of the American obsession with “socialism,” more than 40 years before Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution. Since that time, Americans have cried “socialism” whenever ordinary Americans try to use the government to level the economic playing field by calling for business regulation, or for schools and roads, or by asking for a basic social safety net. But the public funding of roads and education and health care is not the same thing as government taking over the means of production. Rather, it is an attempt to prevent a small oligarchy from using the government to gather power to themselves, cutting off the access of ordinary Americans to resources, a chance to rise, and, ultimately, to equality before the law.
To be clear, I'm not equating the Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation with the KKK, or saying that people who want to see a separate City of Buckhead are all racists. What I am saying is that the grievance against white landowners' tax dollars being used for projects that benefit poorer minorities is a continuation of the same complaint as that of the 19th-Century, Reconstruction-Era whites. But now, instead of saying "poor persons shouldn't be allowed to vote," the secessionists are saying, "poor people shouldn't be allowed to vote on how my money is spent." I'm also saying that in Buckhead, it seems that crime is a lot less tolerable when committed by Black folks than it is by their white counterparts.
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