“Rats, Roaches, and Unemployment”: The Origins of Community-Oriented Radical Social Movements in Atlanta, 1964–68

This paper reassesses the significance of the activism of poor and working-class individuals in Atlanta after the end of Jim Crow. Through an examination of the antipoverty organizing among the residents of Vine City, Atlanta’s poorest neighborhood, I maintain that local residents spurred new social movements, affected the administration of federal antipoverty programs, and helped shape the next three decades of social and economic development in Atlanta. When the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) started the Atlanta Project, its first ever urban organizing project, SNCC activists underestimated the volume of pre-existing community activism by poor African Americans in Atlanta. Among other initiatives, the residents had organized the Vine City Improvement Association, the Vine City Council, and an alternative community action program led exclusively by poor residents that aimed to administer War on Poverty programs. Following the city’s only race riot, residents circulated a petition amongst themselves asking SNCC to leave Atlanta. By examining the grassroots antipoverty activism that co-existed alongside the Atlanta Project, I maintain that the expulsion of SNCC was not actually the rejection of the Atlanta Project’s Black Power tenets. Instead, the repudiation of SNCC was part of a longer struggle for community control of antipoverty efforts and signaled the beginning of a new type of community-oriented Black Power movement. Out of these disagreements, new movements emerged in Atlanta. Antipoverty activists became key members of the local Black Power, women’s liberation, and gay liberation movements. Studying how these residents worked together (and failed to work together) in the mid-1960s is thus important to understanding how and why new radical social movements subsequently emerged in Atlanta.