Danielle Wiggins, "Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Mar 8, 2026

Danielle Wiggins, assistant professor of history at Georgetown and author of Black Excellence, explores how Atlanta shaped modern Black liberalism. She traces the rise of disciplinary strategies like community policing, corporate-funded family programs, and public-private development. The conversation focuses on Atlanta’s role, intraracial inequality, and how Black uplift efforts intersected with neoliberal politics.

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INSIGHT

Black Excellence As A Demanding Moral Standard

Black excellence functions as both celebration and demanding discipline that requires Black people to be "twice as good."
Danielle Wiggins traces the phrase to Jesse Jackson's 1970s speech urging children to be sober, serious, and awake while others are not.

INSIGHT

Black Liberalism Balances State Action And Internal Discipline

Black liberalism combines aggressive state intervention with a persistent push for internal reform and self-discipline among Black people.
Wiggins names this ongoing critique of behavior versus structure the "disciplinary impulse" within Black liberal tradition.

ANECDOTE

Different Explanations For The Atlanta Child Murders

Atlanta leaders framed 1970s child murders as evidence of a "broken community" and self-pathologized Black neighborhoods.
Police, NAACP, and elites created safe houses and community centers while grassroots families argued disinvestment, not moral failure, caused vulnerability.

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A provocative new history of modern black liberalism

Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.

In the 1970s and ’80s, cities across the country elected black mayors for the first time. Just as these officials gained political power, however, their cities felt the full brunt of white flight and deindustrialization. Tasked with governing cities in crisis, black political leaders responded in seemingly conservative ways to the social problems that austerity worsened. Nowhere was this response more evident than in Atlanta. In the nation’s preeminent black urban regime, black leaders such as mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young employed the power of policing and the private sector to discipline black Atlantans, hoping they would equip vulnerable communities with the tools to manage the volatility of the era.

Danielle Wiggins shows that these punitive responses to the problems of crime, family instability, and unemployment were informed by black liberalism’s disciplinary impulse: an enduring tendency to reform behaviors believed to threaten black survival in a white supremacist nation. Forged in response to the violence of Jim Crow, the disciplinary impulse relied upon notions of pathology and its inverse, black excellence. Wiggins identifies several black liberal efforts to cultivate excellent black communities, families, and workers in the post–civil rights era, including community policing, corporate-sponsored family initiatives, and black entrepreneurship.

In embracing disciplinary strategies, however, black liberals often focused on behavior at the expense of addressing structural inequality. Consequently, their approaches dovetailed with those of the “New” Democrats, whose post–Great Society social policies were informed by urban black liberals. Black Excellence reveals thus how urban black liberals not only reshaped black politics but, as Democrats, also helped build the neoliberal Democratic Party.

Guest: Danielle Wiggins is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on U.S. and African American history since the 1960s. She is currently researching race and the politics of energy since the 1960s. Focusing on the 1970s energy crisis, her project will explore how black Americans thought about energy, consumption, growth, and sustainability in ways that alternately challenged, intersected with, and radically rethought mainstream energy discourses.

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