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The attack on the CNN building (arguably more political violence than just rioting of the looting variety as it was in most of the rest of the country) happened on the first day of major protesting in Atlanta. The next day the curfew was announced and the mayor and governor jointly called in the National Guard, and activity continued to decline from then on, even when there was a very widely publicized police shooting in the city over the following weeks they only managed to burn down a Wendy's. This in a city that's like 50% black, vs much worse riots in cities with vastly smaller black populations and no serious history of recent radical leftist violence as in Portland and Seattle (eg. Kenosha is 10% black, Minneapolis is 19% black). So I think my point stands.
So, look, I agree with you that Atlanta clearly outperforms what its racial demography would predict according to those with a sort of crude “black = ghetto” hard-HBD outlook. The black middle class / “talented tenth” is indeed real; I know and like a number of such people myself, and I know that you are socially close with more of them than I am and are, justifiably, interested in going to bat for them.
Atlanta, and the fact that it is a reasonably well-functioning major American metropolis despite its unpromising (on paper) demography, is one of the things that makes me believe that an independent black ethnostate (formally-established or merely de facto) on the American continent could actually be realistic and successful. If anything, I think Atlanta deserves a bit of blame for the extent to which it has brain-drained so many of the successful non-ghetto blacks in this country, who have been flocking to it in considerable numbers, leaving black communities in other American cities even more bereft of talent and human capital than they already were.
I spent a few days in Atlanta in high school for a competition/field trip, and at the time I quite liked the city. One reason, of course, is that I did not have a strong racial consciousness at the time - I was obviously aware of how black the city was relative to my hometown, but that didn’t matter to me then in the way it does now - but also it just seemed like a pretty nice, clean, modern city. It has become significantly blacker in the intervening years, and on metrics like crime and disorder it has genuinely and indisputably gotten worse during that time, but it’s obviously difficult to disentangle how much of that change is connected to changing demography versus how much is simply due to whatever combination of factors is causing similar degradation in nearly every other American city right now.
I’m not ready to call Atlanta a success story right now - especially given the potentially very serious crisis it recently averted by stopping Buckhead from seceding - but I think it’s fair to acknowledge that Atlanta serves as an intriguing example that at least complicates the purely racialist paradigm popular on the hard right.
There's some good news there, as of June homicide rates are down 30% year over year (although still a ways above the 2017 nadir). Homicide rates will probably always be well above, say, San Francisco or New York, though.
But yeah, it's an interesting city. I remember there was a black cultural commentator on Twitter a few years ago who made the point that because of the longstanding Georgia black middle class, and the drain of college graduates from across the south, the infrastructure is in place in Atlanta for a lot of state and federal initiatives designed in the civil rights era to work better than they do elsewhere. So stuff like affirmative action in contracting or construction, which is a big racket in a lot of cities in the deep south, is still corrupt in Atlanta but the baseline quality of the black-owned firms is much higher, you've got some guy called like Carl Smith IV whose family have been in the business for 75 years bidding for stuff. The talent pool for things like city government is much better, so institutions are stronger. And as you suggest, black people who do very well and go to Ivy schools etc come back to Atlanta for things like the dating pool and social scene, whereas those from elsewhere are more likely to stay in New York or Los Angeles. There also seems to be a lot more civic pride than exists in Baltimore or St Louis.
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