In Black Excellence, Danielle Wiggins charts Black liberalism’s political development in Atlanta from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. In the 1960s, civic and business leaders had dubbed Atlanta “the city too busy to hate.” The historical actors of Black Excellence set out to realize this vision as “public purpose capitalism”: simultaneously pro-growth political ethos, racially inclusive vision of meritocratic “uplift,” and the use of public–private partnerships as tools of urban governance (pp. 141, 148–149). “Public purpose capitalism” animated Atlanta’s Black elite in the “post-civil rights era” (c. 1968–1995). It spurred Atlanta’s rise as a cosmopolitan, postindustrial “world city” combining prosperity with persistent “intraracial inequality” (pp. 147, 3). And in Wiggins’s telling, “public purpose capitalism” also came to underpin liberalism writ large.

Black Excellence combines political history with a strong emphasis on the relationship between Black elites and capital, business, and economic development. Poor and working-class Black communities, in Wiggins’s account, were usually caught in the interstices of this relationship—subjects of what she terms Black liberalism’s “enduring disciplinary impulse” (p. 3). This impulse, itself embedded in Black elites’ political, social, and intellectual life since Jim Crow, led “elite and middle-class Black Americans to reform, rehabilitate, and discipline…[the] poor and working class” (p. 3). In early twentieth-century Atlanta, “reformist” Black elites, from the female-led Neighborhood Union to W. E. B Du Bois, organized public health campaigns and investigated “blind tigers” (speakeasies) and dancehalls. Despite grasping the “structural [social] foundations” of crime, reformists obsessed over “deviancy” and crime’s “behavioral sources.” One of social reform’s preoccupations was the “black household” (pp. 24–33). Amidst the Great Depression, this sociocultural aspect of Black liberalism was joined by philanthropic economic development programs.

During the post-civil rights era, Black members of the Democratic Party won office in unprecedented numbers. Similarly to Leonard N. Moore (The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972 [2018]), Wiggins describes how Black officeholders secured significant power across the United States at precisely the same time as radical movements lost ground. Wiggins’s protagonists (or, perhaps, antiheroes) are mayors Maynard Jackson (1974–82, 1990–94); Andrew Young (1982–90), who coined the phrase “public purpose capitalism”; and Fulton County commission chair Michael Lomax. Their contemporaries included New Orleans’s Ernest Morial (1978–86), Los Angeles’s Tom Bradley (1973–93), and Detroit’s Coleman Young (1974–94). More explicitly than such contemporaries, however, Young aimed to make Atlanta “‘a global black city’…an ‘international Black Mecca’” (p. 148).

By that point, sociomoral rectitude and economic development had been joined by the third pillar of Black liberalism: policing. Jackson aggressively targeted what he, in novel argot, termed “black-on-black crime” (p. 77). Following the 1979–1981 Atlanta Child Murders (whose perpetrator was a Black man), Jackson and Young concluded that sociocultural “pathologies” really were afflicting poorer Black communities; pathologies formed by structural issues, but pathologies, nonetheless. Amid Ronald Reagan’s cuts to social programs, Black elites alighted on “self-help”: the poor could assist themselves via privately funded job-training and community programs, as well as by strengthening the family (p. 222). High-profile initiatives in this vein, such as the Black Family Project (on whose board Lomax served), emanated from Atlanta. Coca-Cola sponsored the annual Black Family Reunion.

Above all, however, Young’s reign as “globetrotting mayor” nonpareil blazed a trail for American liberalism (p. 194). Young engineered public–private partnerships such as Atlanta Industrial Park and the Underground, a shopping and entertainment complex. Young ended his mayoralty—Wiggins waspishly notes that he was fêted by CEOs at a swanky farewell party in downtown’s Marriot Marquis—celebrating $70 billion in new investment, job growth that led among US cities, and one-third of municipal contracts being awarded to minority-owned businesses. Wiggins contends that Young’s “mantle of opportunity” concealed socioeconomic failures; she details, for example, how the Underground’s Justice for Janitors campaign exposed service-sector workers’ precarity (p. 173). That said, Black Excellence does not seek to provide a full accounting of successes and failures. Wiggins does not rebut Black elites’ belief (the premise of “public purpose capitalism”) that growth creates the foundations for social advances. The real issue is that, in recent decades, working-class jobs have concentrated in lower-paid services rather than stabler, higher-paid productive sectors.

Virtually all of twentieth-century liberalism’s gains were undergirded by growth politics. This rather belies the claim of politicians such as Young and Lomax to represent a “new” Democratic party. Late in her book, Wiggins zooms out to show how Atlanta’s Black elites were leading “New Democrats,” associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) (pp. 182–188). Wiggins’s account aligns with that of Lily Geismer (Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality [2022]): both argue that New Democrats, of whom Bill Clinton is most (in)famous, did not imitate Reagan-style conservatism but crafted a market-oriented liberalism fundamentally rooted in longstanding liberal ideas of market-making and growth politics.

Wiggins’s much-needed insight is that New Democrats equally drew on Black liberalism’s traditions of “discipline,” meritocracy, and “uplift.” To move beyond Beltway rhetoric into power, the DLC needed actual models of governance. Young’s postindustrial Atlanta, with its influx of foreign investment, human-capital development programs, and global retail and tourism, was better aligned with the economic future than, say, Clinton’s Arkansas. Young and Lomax (a Columbia-credentialed academic) also anticipated their party’s emerging electoral core: a highly educated, multiracial, socially and culturally liberal “professional class” (Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer, eds., Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals since the 1960s [2025]).

Black Excellence successfully illustrates three intertwined points. First, Atlanta not only exemplified, but also modeled and inspired liberalism’s reformation around postindustrial metropolitan regions governed by a meritocratic ethos and the tools of public–private partnership. Second, Black elites—rooted in Atlanta more particularly than in any other sociopolitical milieu—were a vital, generative source of philosophy, ideas, and approaches for this reformed liberalism. Third, these Black elites’ outlook derived from a distinct Black liberal tradition rather than forming an imitation of conservatism or center-right “neoliberalism.” Black Excellence sits within a flourishing subfield of scholarship on modern liberalism, treating liberalism and Democrats as critical subjects of study on their own terms, not as corollaries of an ideologically hegemonic “age of Reagan.” Moreover, within this body of scholarship, Wiggins has provided the most thorough treatment of Black politicians’ role in liberalism’s reformation. Black Excellence is an essential read.