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For the #ScholarStrike, I am sharing this thread on how my institution, Georgia Tech, has throughout the 20th century benefited from and contributed to racist crime narratives that justify segregation, gentrification, and mass incarceration in Atlanta.
In July 1957, Georgia Tech professor William K. Pursley was beaten on Juniper Street. He later died from injuries sustained in the attack. Reporters for the Atlanta Constitution lumped this crime in with three others, and breathlessly reported gory details and breaks in the case
Reporters and investigators continuously wrote and spoke of these crimes in relation to one anther, even though evidence connecting them was scant at best. Reporters emphasized the race of the various suspects along with the appearance and profession of the victims.
Taken together, these crimes justified a police "round up" of suspects, again reported uncritically by The Atlanta Constitution. Police are the only sources cited in many of these stories.
What emerges is a narrative of Black criminals assaulting white citizens in their homes and places of business. That narrative persists even as the crimes are revealed to be unrelated, and even as three white men confess to attacking Pursley.
On July 27, 1957, the editorial board of the Atlanta Constitution cites Pursley’s confessed attackers in calling for “all such hoodlums” to be taken “off the streets.”
The page also includes another editorial declaring that “all Atlanta will profit from urban renewal.” The piece argues that “clear[ing] out some 598 acres of substandard housing” and “making it available for private development” is a “progressive move.”
![The page also includes another editorial declaring that “all Atlanta will profit from urban renewal.” The piece argues that “clear[ing] out some 598 acres of substandard housing” and “making it available for private development” is a “progressive move.”](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EhgPbquX0BU3Rrw.jpg "The page also includes another editorial declaring that “all Atlanta will profit from urban renewal.” The piece argues that “clear[ing] out some 598 acres of substandard housing” and “making it available for private development” is a “progressive move.”")
As coverage from the paper of Urban Renewal in the following years will make clear, "taxpayers' funds to service" existing property is code for, among other things, policing.
The day's political cartoon implicitly brings these threads together. The "idle hoodlums" linger on an otherwise-empty street corner while headlines taken from coverage of all four murders float above them.
In covering these crimes, the paper spent July telling the story of citizen victims beseigned by primarily Black criminals. Now, police crackdowns and urban renewal become the clear and obvious solutions. Both sustained and exacerbated segregation.
Urban Rewenal came to Atlanta at the same time as the interstates. Both helped to displace and contain Black communities. Then-mayor Bill Hartsfield bragged, at the time, about I-20’s capacity to maintain segregation. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traffic-atlanta-segregation.html
Georgia Tech is only passively involved in this discourse, but that is the point, to a certain extent. Tech mourned Pursley’s death but, so far as I can tell, did not involve itself in criticizing the city police’s racist response to it.
When 5 professors published their concerns about the investigation and media coverage of the crime, they publicly apologized to police when part of their letter was interpreted as a critique of the investigation.
These professors expressed a concern about the way their dead friend was depicted in the press, but also explicitly supported violent and racist ways Atlanta police were re-establishing the border between Georgia Tech and the city.
In 1972, the University System of Georgia took matters into their own hands by transforming campus “security forces” into police departments. On January 21, 1973, the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution published a cover story on this transformation.
If “January 21” sounds vaguely familiar to you, it might be because it’s the day after the presidential inauguration. In a detail that you could not make up, this story about campus police appears directly below coverage of Nixon’s second inauguration.
This coincidence is instructive: The paper celebrates the “law and order” president and the new campus police on the same day. See this article to see what one Nixon advisor has said about the racist intent of that platform. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
In Atlanta, the paper quotes new GT Police Chief Porter Weaver, who depicts the campus as a site under invasion from criminal outsiders: “I would say that 95 percent of all the major crimes were caused by people other than those in the Georgia Tech community.”
Dr. Richard Fuller, head of campus security, declares that the campus is vulnerable “because it is open to the world.” “We know if we could build a fence around the campus it would help solve the problem. But that’s not possible.”
The article closes with a quote from then-USG Chancellor George Simpson: “I guess it’s just a more dangerous world we’re living in.” To protect its campuses from this “dangerous world,” the USG nearly quadruples funding for police from 1968 to 1973, from $716,038 to $2,793,00.
The article asks no questions about accountability or equity. It quotes exactly zero voices critical of campus police forces. It quotes exactly zero voices that aren’t employed by USG. It is textbook copaganda. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-is-copaganda-explainer
The Atlanta Journal Constitution has been more willing to question GTPD policies and procedures since officers shot and killed a student in 2017. https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/tech-shooting-shines-spotlight-campus-police/TMmCUoXxsUBtcLH3gH1E7H/
But in the meantime, GTPD has been actively producing their own public relations via, among other things, #viral events like this one (which, incidentally, is published on GTPD's own youtube page).
These communications depict GTPD as friendly members of the campus community. When they spoke to my cohort at new faculty orientation, they echoed that article from the Nixon era. They depicted themselves as the line between the Georgia Tech community and dangerous outsiders.
We should call them, they told us, when we saw someone who didn’t belong. At the time, someone asked how we could tell who didn’t belong, and the answer was similar to Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity: we would know it when we see it.
This is already too long, so I will close by pointing to how the role GTPD plays in enforcing the boundary between city and campus is in line with stated administrative goals for Georgia Tech going forward, and how both will harm the surrounding communities.
Earlier this summer, Provost Rafael Bras published a vision for a post-COVID Georgia Tech. I encourage you to read my colleague, @nonmodernist’s blow-by-blow take down/explanation of this document. https://twitter.com/nonmodernist/status/1281633040255660037?s=20
For our purposes, Bras’s dream version of Georgia Tech involves new private development along the west side of campus, which he describes with an actual, honest-to-god frontier metaphor.
https://provost.gatech.edu/blog/looking-future-georgia-tech-through-lens-pandemic-experience
https://provost.gatech.edu/blog/looking-future-georgia-tech-through-lens-pandemic-experience
This vision includes “a live-work-play strip” and “a Tech-sponsored (not run) high quality school, ideally a public (charter) school, but possibly a private school if it can be made affordable.”
Bras’s parenthetical clarifications about his school is instructive. He imagines a charter school, which dictates instructional priorities to the community, likely excludes some or all of those neighboring students, and siphons public funding from other public schools.
His kicker reveals the extent to which this mission is aligned with GTPD’s: “I would argue that hosting the school in Georgia Tech-controlled land and facilities would make the emergence of a true community possible.”
I would argue, conversely, that “a true community” emerges only when you listen to other members of the community. But then, as the policing practices of and around Georgia Tech have made clear, Tech does not consider our geographical neighbors to be a part of its community.
In the interest of time and brevity, I only screenshot some of my primary sources here. If you are interested in further documentation/citations/full pdfs, hit me up!
