“I Think of Bulldozers and Republicans”

When I think of the changes that have happened in the South over the past 20 years, I think of the place where I grew up. I spent the first 18 years of my life on a farm six miles northeast of Lawrenceville, Georgia, in a community called Hog Mountain. Until the early 1970s, that small community was fairly stable, church and school-centered, and sparsely populated with working-class white people who traveled to Atlanta to work on assembly lines or who worked small farms and businesses. It was yellow-dog Democratic, except for the renegades who defected to Barry Goldwater in the 1960s.

When I think of that community now, I think of bulldozers and Republicans and the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. Two years ago, my nephew picked me up at the Atlanta airport, and said he would like to take me on a little tour on the way to my family visit. We stopped outside of Snellville on the road that once ran in front of my grandparents’ house, and the house where my seven brothers and sisters were born before my parents staked their own claim to a dirt farm. Not only had the two houses been razed as well as the barn made from stones that came from clearing the fields — but the magnificent giant oaks and the pecan grove were also gone. Nothing was left but raw, red clay in preparation for construction of a Home Depot.

And then we went to the former site of Woodward’s Mill, where my family ground corn for the community for over 100 years. I felt we had driven onto a moonscape: every touch of green, every rock had been leveled for the development of the enormous Mall of Georgia. I was stunned by my sense of loss.

Gwinnett County, the home of my memories and so many of my extended family, has become wall-to-wall housing developments for the prosperous, high-tech industries, redistribution centers for chain stores, strip malls — and its elected officials are Republican. Trees and fields are scarce. Rivers run strange colors. It once managed to maintain much of its white and prosperous demography by voting to keep MARTA (public transit) from coming out there, because that might bring people of color into its many communities.

However, new changes and challenges are coming to Gwinnett County. The black population is growing because many who migrated North are now returning home; former migrant workers are now becoming construction workers and are settling in; Bosnians are in most of the schools; and the sight of Asian people operating stores, running motels, or shopping in malls is not uncommon.

Racial politics are more complex. There are black, brown and white tensions, particularly around jobs and opportunity because so many people are placed in competition with each other for jobs of ever-declining quality.

Schools are multi-racial, a mixture of diverse economic classes, and in this fastest growing region of the nation, they are a battleground between the theocratic right and those who believe that democracy depends on inclusion and equality.

In fact, racial, gender, and economic equality remain central issues in my rapidly growing and changing home-town. We have a working poor that has no safety net and little hope of adequate work; we still practice racial discrimination and violence; and women are underpaid and subject to violence at home and on the streets.

The South’s major challenge for the future is to find ways to save its land from sprawl and industrial pollution while creating jobs that provide everyone a living wage — and to build a true, fully-inclusive democracy that ensures human rights and makes the dignity and worth of everyone a reality.