So could what happened in Baltimore happen here in Atlanta?
We would like to think that the answer is no. We would like to think that this region’s civic, faith-based, law-enforcement and political leadership is strong enough to withstand that kind of challenge. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. put it, and we would like to think that we’ve built the lines of communication needed to ensure that people can be heard, so that frustration will have an outlet other than violence. We’d like to believe that King’s legacy of nonviolence still means something here.
Until Saturday night, a lot of people in Baltimore may have told themselves much the same thing.
But drive through some of the poorer sections of metro Atlanta, through areas that are invisible to most of those reading this, and you too may begin to have some doubts. Statistics compound rather than dispel those doubts. In one recent study, metro Atlanta was ranked highest in the country in income inequality, at more than twice the national average; Baltimore wasn’t in the Top Ten.
A second recent study concludes that the Atlanta metro area ranks last in the country in economic mobility, behind even Detroit. Upward mobility in metro Atlanta — defined as the ability of a child in the lowest-earning 20 percent to rise into the highest-earning bracket — is less than half what it is in cities such as Houston, Boston, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, and it’s low for white as well as black Atlanta residents.
Why? In metro Atlanta, researchers found, poverty tends to be geographically concentrated, and bad traffic and a truncated mass-transit system make it difficult for poor residents to break out of those neighborhoods to reach jobs. And if you think of poverty as an inner-city issue, your perspective on metro Atlanta is badly out of date. Most of the growth of poverty in this region has occurred in suburban counties once considered to be havens from it.
None of that means that riots are going to break out in metro Atlanta anytime soon. But what we’ve learned in Ferguson and now Baltimore is that in a volatile situation, all it can take is a spark — even an unjustified spark — to make things explode. And you can never tell where or when that spark might come.
In Baltimore, it came in the form of Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man taken into police custody who unaccountably ended up dead, the latest in a disturbing series of such deaths. But the roots of this problem run deeper than Gray’s death, and deeper even than strained relationships between law enforcement and citizens. Likewise, the solutions are much more difficult and complex than merely tossing looters and rioters into prison, where they belong. That doesn’t mean that such steps aren’t necessary and justified; it means that they won’t be sufficient. They treat the symptom, not the cause.
In discussing such issues, King liked to turn to a quote from Victor Hugo, taken in turn from his novel “Les Miserables”:
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not merely he who commits the sin but he who causes the darkness.”
NOTE: A longer version of this column can be found at bit.ly/JBookBallmer
About the Author
