North Atlanta

North Atlanta is the affluent, predominantly white side of Atlanta in Wes Jordan’s description of the city’s racial geography. Set against South Atlanta’s Black political core, it is not merely a compass point: it marks a sphere of wealth and influence whose relationship to the city’s Black electorate helps explain the political practice Jordan calls the Atlanta Way.

Identity and Setting

Jordan places North Atlanta opposite South Atlanta and associates it with white Atlanta and Buckhead. In a separate conversation about the Fanon case, he emphasizes the striking social divide between Fareek Fanon, described as one of the greatest athletes to come from Black Atlanta, and Elizabeth Armholster, the daughter of one of North Atlanta’s richest and most prominent men. The comparison makes the geography personal as well as political: the dispute crosses a boundary between communities with sharply unequal wealth and status.

North Atlanta in Jordan’s Political Map

Jordan explains the city through a baseball: beneath its white cover and winding layers of string is a small, hard black core. In his account, that core represents 280,000 Black residents in South Atlanta, whose votes control the city itself; around it are three million white people in North Atlanta and the surrounding counties, including Cobb, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Forsyth, Cherokee, and Paulding. These are Jordan’s figures and metaphor, not a neutral map. Their purpose is to describe the political tension between a Black electorate with decisive municipal power and a much larger white population distributed across the region.

Political Significance

For Jordan, that tension produces the Atlanta Way: a bargain in which political power and business interests are brought into negotiation. He recalls the airport’s billion-dollar expansion under Maynard, who promised that 30 percent of the project would go to minority contractors. The business interests initially balked, but the remaining $700 million was still attractive; Maynard later took pride in saying the airport had created twenty-five Black millionaires. The example gives Jordan’s metaphor a material consequence: North Atlanta’s wealth is not simply outside the city’s politics, but part of the constituency whose interests are negotiated with the Black voters who control the city government. In the Fanon matter, that same geography makes the potential public controversy legible as a conflict crossing Atlanta’s racial and class divisions.