You got the money, and we got the power

You got the money, and we got the power is Isaac Blakey’s concise account of how political authority and private capital bargain with one another in Atlanta. Recounted by Wes Jordan to Roger White, the phrase frames neighborhood power not as a rejection of development but as leverage over its terms: developers may bring money and projects, while communities can press for concrete returns.

The phrase and its setting

Wes recalls a meeting sought by white developers, contractors, and union representatives who wanted to address opposition to Highway 600, which they planned to run through South Atlanta. Their lawyer began by discussing Atlanta’s regional and global importance. Blakey interrupted the presentation to move directly to what the neighborhood wanted: “You got the money, and we got the power”. The accompanying demand, “We want some money”, makes the statement deliberately practical. The speakers’ grand language about the economy and the global village meets a counterclaim grounded in who can approve, resist, or complicate a project.

The line does not describe an equal distribution of resources. The developers have capital and the means to propose construction; the neighborhood has political power that those developers need to reckon with. Blakey’s formulation converts that imbalance into bargaining leverage. Its force lies in making both sides’ assets explicit rather than allowing the developers’ account of public benefit to stand on its own.

The Atlanta Way as exchange

Wes calls this arrangement the Atlanta Way, while distinguishing it from a culture of straightforward bribery. In his account, the business interests may be asked to build day-care centers, youth centers, health clinics, parks, and swimming pools. Those facilities let elected representatives show constituents what a project has brought to their neighborhoods; in return, officials and community leaders may consider doing something to advance the developers’ aims. The political bargain is therefore expressed through public-facing improvements, even as it links neighborhood benefits to support for development.

Wes illustrates the arrangement with the billion-dollar airport expansion pursued when Maynard was mayor. Maynard told business interests that 30 percent of the work would go to minority contractors. They initially balked, Wes says, but the scale of the remaining contract was enough to keep them engaged. Maynard later claimed that the airport created twenty-five Black millionaires. In Wes’s telling, the episode shows how a large commercial project could be made to deliver benefits beyond its principal investors—and how the prospect of those benefits could help make a bargain acceptable.

Political power beyond formal promises

Wes’s account of campaign finance supplies a sharper, less public version of the same tension between money and organization. He tells Roger that a citywide candidate cannot win on merit alone: money and a neighborhood-level organization are necessary, particularly in South Atlanta. One campaign group offered him a $20,000 check in exchange for signing a letter supporting its agenda; he returned the money, but later saw himself denounced in a local paper and believed he had lost the group’s vote. The episode taught him, as he recounts it, that rejecting a political bargain does not make its consequences disappear.

The get-out-the-vote operation Wes describes depends on local intermediaries who claim they can deliver votes in particular neighborhoods. Candidates may be pressed to pay operators in cash, in advance, with no guarantee that the promised votes will materialize and no recourse if they do not. Wes estimates that an operator might keep half the money, while presenting the arrangement as a service campaigns believe they need. He tells Roger that such payments amount to buying votes and says a candidate should set aside at least half a million dollars for voter mobilization; a million, he claims, would increase the chances of success by 50 percent. He identifies Andre Fleet as the candidate whose million dollars is guaranteed. This account complicates the phrase: political power can be exercised through public negotiation over a project, but electoral influence can also be mediated by costly and opaque transactions.

The city’s political geography

Wes explains the Atlanta Way through an image of a baseball being unwound. In his analogy, the hard black core represents 280,000 Black residents of South Atlanta whose votes control the city, while the surrounding white string represents three million white residents of North Atlanta and the surrounding counties. The image presents a divided metropolitan region whose political and economic power is interdependent: a much smaller city electorate can matter decisively to the business interests and populations surrounding it.

The phrase also sits against Atlanta’s ambition to grow outward and upward. Wes points to the towers along Peachtree Street as evidence of a business-led effort to make the city a national, and eventually international, center. The novel’s account of Charlie Croker’s edge-city vision supplies a counterpoint: commercial expansion depends on forecasts of future demand, and a development can stand conspicuously empty before that future arrives. Against such expansive plans, Blakey’s words insist that money alone does not settle what happens to a neighborhood. The phrase gives political leverage its own claim in the city’s contest over who benefits from growth.