The first Black Lives Matter (BLM) activist to rise to the helm of an American city, Mayor Khalid Kamau took the reins of South Fulton, a suburb of Atlanta, in 2021, full of idealism and socialist hopes for “the most African-American city” in the country. Three years and several disappointments later, the activist who dreamed of changing his country is now thinking of leaving, disheartened by the scent of decline that, according to him, surrounds the American empire.
It is in a wealthy area of South Fulton, crossed by a toponymy that evokes the french prestige like Versailles Drive or Montclaire Estates, which Khalid Kamau receives The duty. The brick house that welcomes us is certainly worth a few million. “It belongs to a friend,” assures Khalid Kamau as he receives us without pomp, a hooded jacket on his back despite the heat of the day combined with that of the furnace in action.
This opulent setting contrasts with the socialist commitment of this extraordinary 48-year-old mayor, who explains that he uses the double lowercase in his name to express “the primacy of the community over the individual, in keeping with the African Yoruba tradition.”
Once in power, one of his first acts was to take up residence in the Camelot Condominiums, a South Fulton housing complex that is royal in name only. Rife with crime, drugs and poverty, Camelot had been languishing in the indifference of previous administrations when the new mayor decided to draw the spotlight by becoming a neighbor to its underprivileged population.
The adventure lasted 10 months. “It wasn’t the murders or the rats that made me leave,” assures Khalid Kamau. “It was the mold that was starting to affect my lungs more and more.” At least 15 homicides have taken place since 2019 in the complex, according to a review in local newspapers. The mayor’s spotlight on Camelot has not completely dispelled its dark side: empty alcohol bottles and used syringes littered the playground when the mayor passed by Duty at the end of March. The corpse of a cat was also rotting in the parking lot.
Black Lives Matter in Power
Coming from the most militant and committed activism, Khalid Kamau took office in 2021, determined to bring his hometown to the left. The platform that elected this emulator of Bernie Sanders promised more affordable housing, higher wages, shorter work weeks — and a city hall openly devoted to serving as a lever to emancipate its African-American population.
“If there was ever a place where a platform inspired by the ideals of Black Lives Matter had a chance to take root, it was here,” says Khalid Kamau, speaking of South Fulton, a city of 112,000 people that is predominantly African-American. His gamble paid off: driven by his slogan “Black On Purpose,” he won the mayoral race with nearly 60% of the vote… in an election in which less than 14% of the electorate went to the polls.
This victory, due to 8% of the voting-age population, did not cool the ardor or ambitions of the man who made the leap into politics to tackle the changes he had been demanding since the streets in his former life. Before becoming a councilor, then mayor, Khalid Kamau demonstrated against the politicians whose clothes he now wears, protesting all the way to Atlanta City Hall to denounce police brutality and the decline of rights.
Little Socialist Revolution in South Fulton
His arrival in power marked the beginning of a small revolution in South Fulton. The employees of the City workers saw their base wages jump to $15 and then $20 an hour, nearly four times Georgia’s minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. South Fulton also increased its purchases of land coveted by private developers to create parks for the community.
“A developer wanted to build cheap townhouses that threatened to drive down the value of surrounding properties. Instead, we bought the land he was eyeing,” the mayor said, “to build a park that will increase the value of the surrounding area. That’s what socialism is all about: getting a community to pool its resources to improve its quality of life.”
It is also a way of responding to the precept of “liberation of the land” dear to Malcolm X, an influential thinker in the mayor’s career, who campaigned for the creation of a territory by and for blacks within the United States.
The mayor also wants to take advantage of the proximity of Atlanta’s airport, the world’s busiest, to make South Fulton the spearhead of a market stretching from London to Cape Town.
“We want to establish a reverse triangular trade to circulate dollars and products among the black diaspora scattered across Europe, Africa and America,” explains Khalid Kamau. A form of economic revenge on history, he insists, “where slaves were trafficked a few centuries ago.”
A mayor in handcuffs
Three years in power and a few legal troubles have, however, eroded the mayor’s idealism. Six of the seven city councilors campaigned against his victory in the last election and “they have been fighting tooth and nail to block our reforms ever since,” says Khalid Kamau — to the point of initiating legal action to oust him from the city hall.
“The mayor has never understood the difference between activism and governance,” said Councillor Natasha Williams-Brown. “He sees his role as an elected official as a vehicle to promote his agenda and he makes a mockery of municipal democracy. The result is that he uses authoritarian methods and has done absolutely nothing for the city.”
The breaking point between the mayor and the council came in July 2022. The mayor, Williams-Brown charges, had rallied his base for a particularly heated meeting that required police intervention. “Our physical safety was compromised. We realized that there was no way we could negotiate with him.”
Headlines showing Khalid Kamau in handcuffs in July 2023 did nothing to improve the mood at City Hall. The mayor faces a criminal charge stemming from a break-in a year ago at a private property in South Fulton. As he awaits trial, he maintains his innocence and claims the house looked “abandoned.”
The “systematic” obstruction of the council, which he believes is being swallowed up by “people who derive their wealth from their proximity to the white power circles of Atlanta”, disabuses him of the ability of politics to change society.
“It’s been a very frustrating experience being mayor,” he laments. “I’m constantly banging my head against the status quo for $40,000 a year, a salary that’s barely enough to afford an apartment, much less a house.” In the realm of capitalism, the power of money, he concludes, still rules the world.
“I don’t know if I’m going to run again. With the influence that wealth has on politics in this country, I might have a bigger impact as a millionaire than as mayor.”
Back to the Jim Crow era
The attacks on abortion rights, voting accessibility and affirmative action in universities, decided by a right-leaning American Supreme Court, discourage him from his country’s hopes of redemption.
“In a slowly warming bath, you end up boiling alive,” illustrates Khalid Kamau. “In the United States, there are still thousands of Confederate monuments that commemorate a war fought to keep my people enslaved. States even meddle in history classes to make the truth about the Civil War illegal, on the grounds that it polarizes and instills shame in white children. They should be ashamed — not of being white, but of what their ancestors did.”
He recalls that he is part of the first generation of African-Americans born with “the right to vote, the right to eat in the same cafeteria as white people and the recognition of their human dignity.” His mother, a nurse, was barred from public libraries; his father, an accountant, born in Birmingham, Alabama, lived through the era of black churches burned by white supremacist reactionaries. As Donald Trump approaches the White House again, he worries that his country is sliding “little by little into a new Jim Crow era” — and believes more and more firmly that the place for black people may be elsewhere than in the United States.
“I have friends who moved to Africa and their only regret is not having left this country sooner,” he concludes. “We built it and it continues to reject us. I even wonder today if America is still worth fighting for.”
This report was financed with the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund-The duty.