Cityhood by “Deannexation”: Race and the Referendum on Eagles Landing

• In Event: Race and Political Boundaries in American Democracy

Abstract

New cities reflect and manifest what Burns (1994) describes as “private values in public institutions.” Communities of interest advocate for and create new cities all the time, particularly for protection and defense of political preferences and influence over municipal land use and taxation (Rice, Waldner, and Smith 2014). Race and class, along with other factors, contribute, too, to the creation of new cities in the United States.

Generally, new cities in the United States result from the incorporation of unincorporated areas of counties, creating few issues for existing cities proximate to them. Sometimes, calls for some new cities symbolize and substantiate municipal secession movements (e.g., Haselhoff 2002) or “defections” from county control (Waldner and Smith 2015). Typically, residents of an existing city seek to partition it, allowing themselves to leave behind their old cities to be solely governed by the counties where they reside (Waldner and Smith 2015) or they call for the creation of a new city via the normal approach of incorporating and annexing unincorporated county land (Leon-Moreta 2015). However, some calls for new cities advocate partitioning an existing city by “deannexation”; they propose taking portions of the existing city for the creation of a new city. Their objective is to create a city where public institutions may better reflect their private values and interests, and in many instances where the existing city is majority-nonwhite the campaigns claim to be “color-blind,” even as the distributive politics of cityhood certainly would not be (Connor 2014a).

We study the recent “color-blind” campaign for the new city of Eagles Landing, a failed campaign led mainly by a coalition of white property owners that proposed, advocated for, and secured a 2018 referendum to create a new city from portions of the existing majority-black city of Stockbridge, Georgia, located in metropolitan Atlanta, where cityhood movements have been common for the last two decades (Connor 2014b). Specifically, the proposal and referendum called for the creation of a new city of Eagles Landing by the politically, fiscally, and racially problematic policy of “deannexation” of resource-rich portions of the majority-black city, a city that is also a strong black municipal empowerment city (i.e., black mayor and majority-black city council). We draw on public opinion data about the proposed city, precinct-level returns from the referendum, and content analysis of campaign materials and media coverage to discern the racial dimensions and degree to which race, particularly racial resentment and Black backlash, explain the rise and fall of this deviant case of a cityhood campaign.

Author

• Andra Gillespie, Emory University