Commentary : PERSPECTIVE ON RACE RELATIONS : Racial Vultures Prey on Atlanta : It was only when Southerners stopped holding down others that they could stand up.

The “city too busy to hate”--the home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the shining symbol of the New South--now is struggling with a polarizing threat. The Southeastern Legal Foundation, legal hit squad of the New Right, has filed suit to end affirmative action in Atlanta. Mayor Bill Campbell, who as a child was one of the first to integrate the North Carolina schools, vowed to fight to defend the commitment to civil rights.

History moves in strange and wondrous ways. At the turn of the last century, Atlanta was at the center of the struggle to reverse the emancipation and rights granted to the newly freed slaves in the South. In the turmoil fed by the Ku Klux Klan--lynchings, violence, upheaval--African Americans grew weary. In 1895, Booker T. Washington, a preeminent black leader, made his Atlanta Compromise speech, arguing that blacks should give up their dream of integration and focus on education and self-improvement. This was more capitulation than compromise and helped pave the way for the disastrous 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson, which held that separate-but-equal facilities, divided by race, were constitutional. Led by Atlanta, the South descended into the horror of segregation, of legal apartheid.

It took decades of struggle, and the clarion call of another Atlanta leader, Dr. King, to reclaim equal protection under the law and bring legal apartheid to an end.

Now at the turn of the 20th century, Atlanta faces a similar challenge 100 years later. The reactionary campaign to reverse the civil rights movement, to use race-bait politics to divide America, has targeted Atlanta. Once again, the polarizers seek to use the power of reactionary courts. Once again, they mask racial discord and division in appeal to principle. Once again, even champions of civil rights grow weary. But this time, Atlanta must stand up, not concede, and lay the basis for a new national reaction.

It is sad that these racial vultures have come to prey on a city that is working, where racial attitudes have slowly improved, where progress has been made, where people have learned to work together across lines of race and gender.

For what many realized only after the defeat of segregation was how much it had damaged the South--blacks, of course, but whites also. You can’t keep another man down in a ditch unless you are prepared to stay down there with him. In disenfranchising African Americans, Southern whites had disenfranchised themselves. Jimmy Carter could not have been nominated or elected president from an apartheid Georgia. Bill Clinton could not have emerged from a segregated Arkansas.

In segregating African Americans from their schools, Southern whites devalued their own education. Blacks were cheated in their separate and unequal schools, but so were whites. The South fell behind other regions in public education, and became a less attractive place to live.

In stripping African Americans of economic opportunity, Southern whites limited their own growth. The New South of CNN and the Atlanta Braves, of the Atlanta Olympics and rising export and high-tech industries could not have flourished under segregation. South Carolina would not be the site for German auto factories. It was only when they stopped holding down others that Southerners could stand up.

Under civil rights laws, with governments taking positive steps to reverse past and present discrimination, Atlanta helped show the way to a New South. A flourishing black middle class grew up. African American businesses found ways to enter previously closed markets.This stunning success is no doubt why the Atlanta political leadership and its business community oppose the Southeast Legal lawsuit. When the suit was threatened, business leaders worked to head it off. Several board members of the foundation resigned in protest. Business leaders sought to find a compromise.

But the Southeast Legal Foundation is not in the business of compromise. It was headed by Republican reactionary Rep. Bob Barr, before his election to Congress. Barr is infamous for his association with the modern successor of the White Citizens Council, a group that trafficks in racial hatred.

These are the modern descendants of Bull Connor and George Wallace. Like them, they wear suits, not sheets. Like them, they seek to invoke the color of the law to challenge basic constitutional rights. Like them, they claim to stand for justice as they enforce injustice, to seek unity as they create division. They should be exposed for what they are.

King also taught us that the arc of history is long, but that it bends toward justice. The arc of history has come back to Atlanta. One hundred years ago, the retreat of its distinguished leaders was part of the descent into segregation. We cannot end the century biting of the same bitter fruit that began it. The appeal of people of conscience across the country is that the courage and resistance of Atlanta this time will help throw back the new reaction, sustain the commitment to integration and continue building a New South for the next century.