Vote Next Week Will Decide Future Of Transit In Gwinnett

Posted March 14, 2019

External Article: WABE

Ronald Bayor, professor emeritus in the School of History and Sociology, was quoted in the “Vote Next Week Will Decide Future Of Transit In Gwinnett” article on the proposed MARTA expansion in an article . WABE, March 14, 2019.

Excerpt:

Gwinnett has voted on MARTA before. In 1971, the idea failed. It went down again in 1990.

“But remember that these counties were largely rural during that time and largely white,” said Ronald Bayor, a professor emeritus at Georgia Tech who taught history, and wrote the book, “Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta.”

In those previous votes, Bayor said even if people didn’t say they were voting against MARTA because of race, they would talk about things like crime, or falling home values.

“What that usually meant was they were afraid of minorities coming into their areas,” he said.

Things could be different with the vote this time around. The demographics of Gwinnett have changed dramatically. The county has gone from being largely white, to having big Latino and black populations.

Read the full article here.

The School of History and Sociology is a unit of the Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.