Implementing the Civil Rights Industrial Complex: Atlanta, the Domestication of Civil Rights, and the Practice of Southern Neoliberalism

• In Event: Queerness and Race in Atlanta

Abstract

In the 1980s and 1990s, Atlanta was one of the premier sites for the institutionalization and domestication of the Civil Rights Movement. The gratuitous memorialization of Martin Luther King for example, helped to facilitate one of the greatest experiments in the appropriation of antiracist ideology and progressive political struggles. This paper explores this culture of memorialization, the thriving business of civil rights tourism, and the incorporation of Black history month as central to the creation of a neoliberal post-civil rights subjectivity, particularly for Atlanta’s youth. Doing so will expose the ways in which Black resistance was converted into a manageable public lexicon that helped to articulate the benign, yet strategic racial politics of the New South. This paper will also examine some of the new social and political energies mobilized in the 1980s and early 1990s, including the Black Women’s Health Project, and the increasingly visible influence of black feminist intellectuals and activists. Such activism critiqued the institutionalization of Civil Rights as a masculinist project that was deeply committed to patriarchal authority and charismatic male leadership, and instead helped to create a language that challenged the incorporation and repression of Black freedom struggles.

Author

• Aisha K. Finch, University of California-Los Angeles