“A Shifting of the Center of Gravity of the Jewish Community”: Jewish Responses to Residential Racial Segregation in Atlanta in the Interwar Period

• In Event: Rethinking Changing Urban Neighborhoods: Segregation, Migration, & Activism

Abstract

The members of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, Atlanta’s first Jewish religious organization, had lived and worshiped in their city’s oldest residential neighborhood since the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1920s, the city council developed a zoning and land use plan that segregated residential space by both race and class, while a growing stream of congregation members quit the racially-mixed south side for the whites-only middle-class suburbs sprouting in the city’s northeast quadrant. By 1931, their house of worship had moved to the north side as well. This paper will examine this Jewish congregation’s responses to several factors that drove internal debates about where in the city they should be. City leaders’ pursuit of residential segregation by race was but one of these factors. Class, too, played a role, as an increasing number of working-class Atlantans of all races – including communities of eastern European Jews – were moving to the south side. The congregation was additionally motivated by fear of antisemitism, heightened by the 1915 lynching of congregation member Leo Frank. In sum, this presentation will add complexity to the historical analysis of American Jews’ “white flight” from urban to suburban space.

Author

• Marni Davis, Georgia State University