President Trump unleashed the latest salvo Monday in a long-running battle over how America’s public lands should be treated.

In a stark contrast to recent presidents who have sought to leave a lasting legacy by creating national monuments, Mr. Trump plans to drastically reduce two of the monuments created by his predecessors. His action – which is expected to be challenged in court – will be a test of whether, in fact, he has the power to do so.

But, while Trump’s actions tread new legal ground, the underlying tensions at play in this current battle over America’s public lands stretch back more than a century. At the heart of these tensions lies both a shared sense of pride in America’s so-called natural cathedrals and a fundamental disagreement over how land use should be regulated.

“This is a reflection of the ongoing tug-of-war over preservation of resources and lands, and multiple-use activities” on those lands, says Robert Keiter, a law professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and director of the Wallace Stegner Center of Land, Resources, and the Environment.

National parks are often cited as “America’s best idea,” but Professor Keiter notes that simply reserving vast tracts of lands in the public domain as national forests, an action which began in the late 19th century, was also a pretty radical step at the time. But while Americans historically have had a great deal of pride in those public lands, there has also been long-standing pushback from some Westerners both about the amount of land in the public domain and the way in which it’s used – a battle over use that Trump is wading into with the Utah monuments. 

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

President Trump signs the hat of San Juan County Commission Chairman Bruce Adams after announcing big cuts to Utah's sprawling wilderness national monuments, at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City, Dec. 4.

Trump’s announcement Monday in Salt Lake City has been long anticipated, and affects two national monuments in southern Utah, both of which have been controversial: Bears Ears, a 1.35 million-acre monument designated by President Barack Obama a year ago at the urging of five area Native American tribes; and Grand Staircase-Escalante, a 1.9 million-acre monument designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996. The presidential proclamations that Trump signed Monday turn Bears ears into two small monuments of 130,000 acres and 72,000 acres (an 85 percent reduction) and divide Grand Staircase-Escalante into three smaller monuments of 210,000 acres, 550,000 acres, and 240,000 acres, cutting the total protected space nearly in half. 

A century-old dispute

Since the Antiquities Act was signed in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt, monuments have occupied a unique niche in American lands. They’re the only means by which a president, rather than Congress, can opt to protect lands, and 16 presidents have used the act to create more than 150 monuments, many of which later became some of America’s most iconic national parks.

The tension over how America’s public lands are used has its roots in the Western expansion of the 19th century, when settlers and companies hoping to make a profit looked to the vast mineral deposits and forests and grazing lands in the West as a potential bonanza, without many checks on use – practices that often led to rapid overgrazing, clearcutting, and degradation of lands that at one point seemed limitless. The notion that land should be set aside for something other than economic use was a fairly radical one at the time, and reflects the degree to which many Americans viewed their breathtaking vistas as a point of national pride: natural cathedrals as their answer to Europe’s treasured cathedrals.

“There was appropriate concern, maybe even despair, in the late 19th century over the outcome of full-out resource extraction and unrestrained land use,” says Patty Limerick, director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado in Boulder. But there was also, she notes, plenty of opposition among some Westerners to the idea of setting aside land for preservation, or even keeping such large tracts public. “There were some unmistakable currents of resistance 120 years ago,” says Professor Limerick. “Episodically, those currents of resistance seem to surge, and a movement that seems to echo previous movements comes into view.”

These tensions tend to bubble up anew at regular intervals, albeit with different constituencies and triggers each time. There was the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s, the “wise-use movement” that gained traction in the late 1980s and '90s, and the recent altercations over grazing rights that have been symbolized by the Bundy family and the standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016. The common element tends to be a growing sense that Westerners’ rightful use of public lands is being curtailed by a federal government overstepping its bounds. “Traditional users often see public lands as ‘their’ lands,” notes Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder.

While the context and circumstances have changed over the decades, at its heart, the tensions revolve around a fundamental disagreement over how land use should be regulated. Should public lands be exploited for “multiple use” – which often means mining, drilling, grazing, forestry, and other traditional extractive activities? Or preserved for natural beauty and low-impact recreational activities, as has increasingly been the emphasis in recent decades? While monuments – including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante – are open to the public and often allow some traditional uses like grazing and hunting to continue, they generally close off the protected area to new drilling or mining leases. (The restrictions are specific to each particular monument.)

“Over the last half century we have moved progressively and noticeably toward the protection of public lands in the West, as reflected in the Wilderness Act of 1964 and all the various national parks and [monument] designations that have occurred,” says Keiter. Currently, he says, close to 40 percent of the public land in 11 Western states is in some sort of legally protected status: parks, monuments, wilderness areas, wilderness study areas, roadless areas, refuges. The general public has endorsed that shift, Keiter says. But “that sentiment and action has been met with mixed results in various Western states.”

Conflicted pride?

Utah has been an epicenter of the latest battle over monuments, and its legislators have been the most vocal in urging Trump to shrink or eliminate certain monuments. But Professor Squillace and others note that four of Utah’s “mighty five” parks – which are a foundation of the state’s tourism industry and a source of great pride for Utahns – started as monuments.

When former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R) introduced a bill in January to sell 3.3 million acres of federal lands in the West, he was forced to withdraw it days later by his Republican constituents, many of whom regularly hunt and fish on those lands. Perceived threats to federal lands over the past year have resulted in huge rallies at statehouses in conservative states – including Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming – as local residents, many of them anglers and hunters, voiced their support of public lands.

On Saturday, thousands turned out in Salt Lake City to protest Trump’s anticipated actions on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, while a smaller rally gathered at a different location to thank Trump for those actions.

What remains unclear is whether Trump actually has the power to reduce these monuments. While some conservative legal scholars say he does, other law experts don’t believe that’s the case. The conservative argument claims that the Antiquities Act – in giving broad powers to create monuments – implies those powers can also be used to reduce or eliminate monuments. And it looks at the precedent of several past presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, and Howard Taft, who reduced monuments.

None of those reductions were ever challenged in court, however, and none have occurred since passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which many legal experts believe even more explicitly limits presidential powers to revoke or reduce monuments.

“It’s a relatively straightforward legal issue the court will have to confront, about whether the president has the authority to alter a decision on a national monument by a predecessor,” says Squillace. “The Antiquities Act appears to grant only that one-way authority to grant the land.”

Squillace and others say the outcome of the court challenge will have long-range impacts not just for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase and their surrounding communities, but also for how monuments are approached in the future. In particular, they worry about a scenario in which subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations opt to create and un-create each other’s monuments, with the lands becoming a sort of partisan yo-yo. “It creates a real potential roller coaster with respect to managing these public lands,” says Squillace.

Scott Bauer/AP

House Speaker Paul Ryan, shown here touring a Harley-Davidson factory in Wisconsin in September, says tax cuts are 'one of the biggest things we can do to improve people's lives.'

The Republican tax rewrite that has now passed both House and Senate represents a legislative triumph for one core idea: that lighter tax burdens mean more economic growth.

Right now, it’s not just the sales pitch behind the tax plans, it’s arguably the idea that most unites a Republican Party challenged by internal divisions and electoral uncertainty.

“If we can’t do better than 1.9 percent [growth], we’ve got real problems in this country,” Sen. Rob Portman (R) of Ohio said last week, citing the current growth rate projected for the next decade by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

But now comes the test: Will the theory turn into economic reality? Will the virtue of tax cuts ring true for the voters who will decide coming elections?

Many economists say the House and Senate plans – which now must be reconciled into a final bill – may serve more as a giveaway to the rich than an enhancer of growth.

At the same time, wage growth and gross domestic product have disappointed in recent years. During seven years of recovery since the Great Recession, not once has GDP notched a calendar-year gain of 3 percent or higher. It’s not just economists on the political right who see a connection between growth and the health of America's social fabric. Many finance experts say lower corporate tax rates could boost long-term growth, at least modestly.

“The corporate rate cut by itself certainly should be a pro-growth provision,” says Alan Viard, a resident scholar at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and former senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “Telling companies both American and foreign-chartered that they can keep 80 percent of their profits operating in the US instead of 65 percent should make the United States a more attractive investment location. So you should see capital flow to the United States, which would make American workers more productive and would drive up their wages.”

The GOP bills would cut the top tax rate on corporations from 35 percent of income to 20 percent, while also reshaping the individual side of the tax code.

Bipartisan support

The idea of reducing nominal tax rates on corporations has had fans on the left, such as former-President Barack Obama, as well as on the right. The centrist Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is among those seeing a potentially sizable long-term boost in GDP from such reform.

The US stock market has rallied as prospects for passage of the tax legislation have improved.

But if many economists embrace the idea of making US corporate tax rates more competitive with those in other advanced nations, that doesn’t mean they necessarily like the GOP bills. Some see the tax plans adding a bit to long-term growth, but other prominent forecasters including Goldman Sachs and the Tax Policy Center forecast almost no GDP boost from the plan after 10 years.

And Republicans in Congress have pledged not just growth, but that Americans at all income levels will participate. Polls show voters are skeptical, and nonpartisan analysis by the staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation shows big benefits flowing to the rich under both the House and Senate plans, while the Senate version causes tax cuts for individual taxpayers to expire after 2025.

“It’s more of a sugar high” than a recipe for long-term growth, says Kimberly Clausing, an economist at Reed College in Portland, Ore. “And it’s a sugar high for those at the top of the [income] distribution.”

The Republican tax packages do contain some progressive components, such as limiting mortgage-interest deductions that help higher-income families the most, Ms. Clausing says.

A larger standard deduction, present in both plans, would give a tax break to many moderate-income households. So would an enlarged child tax credit.

Questionable appeal

But the bills also contain controversial elements. Eliminating the deduction for state income taxes hurts many taxpayers from high-tax states. Removal of Obamacare’s mandate to have health insurance, or pay a tax penalty, is projected to result in both fewer Americans with insurance and higher premiums.

Tax-rate cuts for individuals expire in the Senate bill, while both bills contain big tax breaks for the rich – from curbing the estate tax to reducing taxes on “pass-through” business income. And to the degree that tax cuts add to deficits, it may result in cuts to programs including Medicare unless Congress passes new budget plans.

Even conservatives are worried.

“The GOP had better hope and pray [President Trump’s] program instigates more widely distributed opportunities,” writes University of Maryland economist Peter Morici, or faster growth alone “won't save the party from major setbacks in the upcoming midterm and 2020 elections.”

Some studies suggest that previous tax cuts under former-Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush did help boost growth. In a 2006 study, the US Treasury Department found that tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, along with cuts in interest rates, helped move the economy out of recession and onto higher growth path, perhaps adding up to 3 million extra jobs by the end of 2004.

The idea that tax cuts can entirely pay for themselves through “dynamic effects,” as faster GDP growth expands the income base for taxes, is being pushed mightily by some Republicans in Congress. Few economists embrace that idea. 

How to pay for cuts

But debate has flared in recent days over whether mainstream forecasts are too pessimistic on how much of the potential revenue loss can be recovered through growth. A Joint Committee on Taxation report Thursday envisioned a possible extra $600 billion in revenue under the Senate tax bill over the next 10 years, compared with a traditional or "static" forecast of the bill's effects. But the report upset Republicans because that still would leave projected deficits $1 trillion higher during that time, as a result of the tax measure.

Even the Bush Treasury report noted that the effects of tax cuts on long-term growth depend on how they’re paid for. If it’s by spending cuts, positive growth effects might remain. But if tax cuts today are financed by tax hikes tomorrow, tax cuts actually mean lower GDP in the long run, the report concluded.

That’s just one of many studies, but it hints at a crucial economic and political challenge facing Republicans as they finalize their plan. The national debt is high, rising, and increasingly driven by entitlement costs that are hard to tame.

Efforts to boost GDP growth can be part of the solution.

“We’ve got to deal with the growth side if we’re going to get the debt and deficit under control,” Senator Portman said last week.

The track record for deficit control is not promising. The debt and deficits have risen under every president since Mr. Reagan, with the partial exception of Bill Clinton, who saw deficits fall under his tenure. Reagan accounted for the largest percentage increase in deficits; Mr. Obama for the largest dollar amount.

“It’s a perennial pattern,” says Mr. Viard of AEI about the rising debt. “Eventually, we will have to take action on it, but it will require a bipartisan agreement. Neither party is going to be in a position to make serious progress alone.”

Rodrigo Abd/AP

Supporters of presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla gather around a barricade as they protest what they call electoral fraud in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Dec. 1. Hondurans have been waiting nearly a week for a final count from Sunday's election.

In nearly every presidential election since Honduras’s 1980 democratic transition, the new leader was announced just hours after polls closed.

This year, more than a week has passed without a victor.  Repeatedly, including Monday, there have been promises of imminent results.

The political limbo, crackdown on civil liberties, and skyrocketing mistrust for what’s happening behind the scenes as votes are counted has put Honduras’s democratic integrity under fire.

But accusations of the ruling National Party trying to consolidate power by attempting the country’s first reelection and claims of meddling with the vote count are countered by a small but significant bright spot: The Honduran population is standing up and sending a message that democracy, and their role in it, won’t be undermined.

Tens of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets across the country to call for transparency. Following clashes between security forces and protesters Friday, which resulted in at least one death, the government imposed a 10-day, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, sending soldiers into the street. Hondurans adapted to the restraints, marching during the day and leaning over balconies to bang pots and pans in protest at night. There are now calls for a nation-wide general strike.

“The future of Honduras is in our hands,” says one university student milling outside the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) late last week, while protesters nearby built roadblocks with burning tires and faced off with riot police armed with tear gas. The young woman declined to give her name out of fear she might face political persecution for speaking out. “We don’t trust the Supreme Electoral Tribunal,” she says. “We are in a system of ingovernability.... [But] we are going to defend our institutions.” 

Reelection as a flashpoint

In the lead-up to the Nov. 26 vote, the reelection of President Juan Orlando Hernández seemed like a given. National polls projected a double-digit lead over challenger Salvador Nasralla.

But, after nearly 10 hours of silence from the electoral commission, officials announced Nov. 27 that Mr. Nasralla of the Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship had a 5-point lead with more than 50 percent of the votes counted.

“The polls said Juan Orlando was going to win, but citizens, everyday people, when you talked with them, you realized there was a strong current against” electing a president to a second consecutive term, says Eugenio Sosa, a sociologist who teaches at the National Autonomous University of Honduras.

He says he’s not surprised the polls and the media favored Mr. Hernández. “The state has complete control over big media organizations,” Mr. Sosa says. The international press watchdog Freedom House categorizes Honduran media as “not free.”

The question of presidents serving more than one term consecutively became a flashpoint in Honduras in 2009, when pajama-clad then-President Manuel Zelaya was removed from his home by the military and put on a plane for Costa Rica. Defenders of the coup painted Mr. Zelaya’s call for a non-binding vote to hold a constituent assembly as a plan to do away with a constitutional ban on presidential reelection to a second term.

Rodrigo Abd/AP

Supporters of opposition presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla march in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Sunday. Opposition leaders claim there was fraud in the presidential election and are demanding it be held again after the country erupted in deadly protests over the delayed vote count.

“Reelection, historically, hasn’t been a big sacred cow in Honduras,” says Rosemary Joyce, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the Honduras Culture and Politics blog. “Before Zelaya, we had truly never seen much conversation around [reelection]. But, using reelection to brand Zelaya has come back to haunt” the National Party.

Nearly two-thirds of Hondurans say they’re against reelection, according to a May 2017 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Once again, the Honduran people are saying no to reelection,” says Edwin Enriquo, who works in marketing, during a rally outside the opposition party headquarters Thursday.

“I don’t follow a party. I am following my convictions. I am defending my rights. We went to vote, and I feel it’s been a mockery to wait so long” for the results, Mr. Enriquo says of his first time participating in demonstrations.

While in Congress in 2012, Hernández played a leading role in illegally firing four Supreme Court judges, later replacing them with National Party sympathizers. These judges had a key part in overturning the constitutional ban on reelection last year, paving the way for his reelection bid.

“[A] pattern of subjecting institutions to his personal authority—or of ensuring their weakness—is clearly visible,” under Hernández’s administration, according to the Carnegie report.

Political agency

This isn’t the first time Hondurans have taken to the streets in recent years in the name of transparency. In 2015, months of peaceful, torch-lit protests swept the capital with some citizens calling for Hernández to step down over charges of campaign finance irregularities related to a Social Security scandal. Protesters were energized by the victories in neighboring Guatemala, including the use of months-long anti-corruption demonstrations to pressure President Otto Pérez Molina to step down.

“People in Honduras got the idea that they could be effective political agents,” says Professor Joyce of the 2015 protests and the citizens taking to the streets today.

She considers the “pragmatic” coalition of two parties with little in common coming together to support Nasralla’s candidacy as an alliance party to be a result of opposition politicians watching and participating in those 2015 protests.

The alliance “came out of listening to the people, out of a disgust in corruption generally,” she says.

After the announcement of Nasralla’s initial lead Monday, a series of events unfolded casting doubt over the TSE’s impartiality. There were no public updates for nearly 36 hours. After a reported computer glitch on Wednesday, the gap between Hernández and Nasralla shrank dramatically. By Thursday, Hernández was in the lead by 46,586 votes, or roughly 1.5 percentage points, and local media report this morning that Hernandez’s margin has inched to roughly 53,000 votes.

The deadline to announce results has been pushed back repeatedly, with one TSE official calling for an independent auditor. “[S]erious doubts are being raised,” Marcos Ramiro Lobo of the TSE told Reuters. Under opposition and international pressure, the TSE agreed to recount some contested ballots over the weekend, but there are another 5,200 polling places that the opposition believes merit a recount.  Some international observers, including the European Union and the Organization of American States, say those grievances should be taken into consideration.

Mr. Sosa says if the TSE follows through on requests for a transparent, total recount, he believes citizens will honor the results.

Either way, an announcement is expected from the TSE on Monday.

“If the National Party is declared the true winner, I expect to see more social movements emerge, and a stronger opposition,” he says.

“The people will be more critical, more indignant, more tuned in to what is happening in their government and with their country.”

[Editor's note: This story has been updated since its publication on Friday to reflect events over the weekend.]

James Morgan feels in his bones that being a “descendant of slaves” is still a defining quality of his existence as a black man in America.

In that way, the retired gas-line worker takes particular pride in Atlanta’s nearly five decades of black leadership, epitomized today by Mayor Kasim Reed, a descendant of Nigeria’s Igbo tribe who has overseen a spectacular economic run for the South’s preeminent trade and culture hub.

Born and raised on the city’s rapidly-gentrifying east side, Mr. Morgan, wearing a fedora and leather jacket, understands the importance of the city as a paragon of black competence – a legacy that to him seems especially important as the FBI in November reported an uptick in racial hate crimes nationally against both whites and blacks.

Yet Atlanta and its AA+ bond rating face a pivotal choice Tuesday. Morgan, for one, says he is torn between the two candidates facing each other in a run-off. On one hand, there is former City Councilor Keisha Lance Bottoms, the daughter of the late '60s-era soul singer Major Lance; on the other City Councilor Mary Norwood, an energetic campaigner from tony – and majority-white – Buckhead, who lost to Reed by just over 700 votes in 2009. If elected, Ms. Norwood would be Atlanta's first white woman mayor – and its first white mayor in more than four decades.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Atlanta resident James Morgan says that after nearly 50 years of black leadership, Atlanta may be ready for a white mayor.

Despite a long string of black mayors, “wealth passes to whites, poverty passes to us,” says Morgan, taking a stroll through Atlanta’s Kirkwood neighborhood on a chilly fall morning. “As blacks, we don’t care how high the tide is going because our boats have holes in them. To fix that, we are going to need a different type of politician. We need whites to come in and help us with it.”

In some ways, that may be happening. The Atlanta mayoral election has provided a snapshot of an increasingly diverse urban electorate with priorities that, in some respects, seem to rise above race.

At the same time, this emerging coalition – ranging from socially conservative black retirees to culturally progressive white doctoral students – has the capacity to upend a carefully calibrated power balance that many African-Americans still believe is necessary to showcase black excellence to an ever-skeptical world.

“People have loved the fact that Atlanta has had strong black mayors,” says Maynard Eaton, a long-time Atlanta columnist and political strategist. “After all, this is the South, and Atlanta is the cradle of the civil rights movement. But there are young folks who have come up in a more racially tolerant era – below 40, young families – who are wondering: ‘What the [heck] has a black mayor done for me?’ They are the ones saying, ‘Let’s give white folks a chance.’ The black thing isn’t as black as it once was.”

It is a drama that has played out in other cities – including Detroit; Memphis, Tenn.; and Savannah, Ga. – where majority-black populations have recently elected white mayors. It also comes during a fall when voters in New Orleans and Charlotte just elected their first black women mayors. But given its prominence in black culture, the Atlanta mayoral election may provide what Mr. Eaton calls a “tipping point” for black power in the United States.

The Atlanta metro area, set on the southern Appalachian slope, is home to nearly 6 million people, making it the country’s ninth-most populous.

But the city of Atlanta proper, at fewer than 600,000 residents, is smaller than Portland, Ore. The city whose burning by Gen. William Sherman in 1864 broke the Confederacy was 54 percent black in 2010, down from 67 percent in 1990. The 2020 census may well see blacks lose the majority but retain a plurality, says Michael Leo Owens, the Atlanta-based author of “God and Government in the Ghetto.”

The center of that shift: The city’s oak-laced east side, filled with bungalows and ranches, that is currently diversifying away from burglar bars and corner snack shops to burger bars and $750,000 cookie cutter homes.

David Goldman/AP

Atlanta city councilwoman and mayoral candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms speaks at an election night party in Atlanta, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2017. Nearly a dozen candidates are competing to succeed term-limited Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. With so many contenders running, it's a safe bet that some of these elections won't be settled Tuesday. For any race in which no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two finishers will return for a runoff election Dec. 5.

The mayoral race will likely be won or lost here, where young couples with wallet-chains and strollers roll past septuagenarian black retirees, and where rising home valuations have led to uproar over taxes but also created millions in newfound wealth for black families who sold their homesteads.

Kirkwood, for one, sits on the ridge of what Mr. Owens calls a “crescent of gentrification.” 

Here, the election touches on deeper issues of economic displacement and the steep wealth gaps that in many ways are the underbelly of Atlanta’s success. But there is also a harder look at the stubborn lack of opportunity and advancement for the city’s poorer and more vulnerable neighborhoods, such as Vine City and Mechanicsville. A corruption probe at City Hall has hurt Lance Bottoms, who was forced to return campaign contributions from an implicated vendor.

“Many African-Americans are long past the idea of Atlanta as a black municipal empowerment city par excellence,” says Professor Owens. That’s why “Keisha Lance Bottoms has to work very hard to figure out how she’s going to get a lot of those black voters. The areas that demonstrated some of the greatest degrees of excitement and mobilization between the general election and the runoff have actually been districts that are white or have recently become majority white or plurality black.”

Two generations ago, white flight turned the streetcar suburbs on the city’s east side from nearly all white to nearly all black in the span of a decade. Now an influx of new urbanites is changing the demographic mix again.

“This area of town proves that diversity equals success,” says Atlanta native Perry Schwartz, who in 1971 led a school desegregation program under the city’s first black school superintendent. “And I think this is how the future could look if things go well.”

Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie has been studying the shift from her front porch.

She lives and votes on the East Side, which bucked the racial dynamics by supporting a Bernie-Sanders style outsider, Cathy Woolard, in the mayoral election. The area also handily reelected Natalyn Archibong, who is African-American, to City Council. Ms. Archibong, an Atlanta native and lawyer, has embraced the neighborhood’s change while staying receptive to local issues from mass transit to crime.

“Blacks are still a force to be reckoned with in terms of being a voting bloc” in Atlanta, says Dr. Gillespie, the author of “Race and the Obama Administration: Substance, Symbols and Hope.”

But “when I look at my neighborhood, I see it as being young and progressive, kind of hipster-y, and these are the kinds … of white voters who are not necessarily going to be drawn to [a candidate] because she’s white,” she says. “These are the types of voters who actually are also invested in the notion of Atlanta being the city that’s too busy to hate, and who see a cachet in having blacks as their elected leadership. … They challenge the idea that Atlanta’s changing [racial make-up] is going to portend the end of blacks being able to hold [City Hall].”

Outside dynamics have largely superseded the emergence of white mayors in majority black cities. The ineptitude of the Ray Nagin administration was laid bare after hurricane Katrina. In Detroit, black voters couldn’t ignore a municipal bankruptcy that emerged under black leadership – or the scandal that landed former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in prison for 28 years. The city re-elected its white mayor, Mike Duggan, by a 3-to-1 margin earlier this month. To be sure, Atlanta has not been immune to scandal, especially long-running probes into vendor contracting at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest tarmac. One such investigation landed a past mayor in federal prison.

So far, these new white mayors have, if anything, embraced solidarity with African-American communities.

In Savannah, Mayor Eddie DeLoach is spearheading a fight to remove the name of segregationist Gov. Eugene Talmadge from the iconic Savannah Bridge. Mayor Mitch Landrieu led an effort to remove four Confederate statutes from downtown New Orleans. Moreover, New Orleans just replaced the term-limited Mr. Landrieu with LaToya Cantrell, the city’s first woman mayor.

Yet ugly overtones of the past still seep through. Just days before the November election, thousands of Atlantans received a robocall urging the election of Lance-Bottoms.

“Keep Atlanta black,” the female voice said. “Only Keisha can stop the white takeover of City Hall.” Lance-Bottoms denied involvement and asked the state attorney general to investigate.

No matter its provenance, the “keep Atlanta black” message crudely evoked an academic white paper that circulated ahead of the 2009 election, suggesting that Atlantans would be best served by coalescing behind a black candidate.

Such overtly racist appeals jarred many people, including North Carolina native Charles VunCannon, a doctoral student at Emory University, who recently bought a home in what he deems “bohemian” East Atlanta.

“I’m new to Atlanta’s political dynamics, but no matter what is going on, I’ll be looking at the person, not their race” when I vote, says Mr. VunCannon, taking time out of his day to pick litter at a nearby off-ramp.

For his part, Mr. Morgan is the direct beneficiary of Maynard Jackson, the city’s first black mayor, who was elected in 1973.

Mr. Jackson, who died in 2003, created new institutions to give voice to individual neighborhoods, the framework for the city’s neighborhood culture. Jackson also instituted affirmative action that led to Morgan getting a job on a gas company crew.

The job became Morgan’s first real interaction with white counterparts. A feeling of unease as he came aboard quickly gave way to real camaraderie, he says.

It is a lesson he sees all around him in Kirkwood, where he hopes the courage to transcend race leads to deeper – and, perhaps, lasting – breakthroughs.

“The question now is whether the climate we have created here can be duplicated,” he says.

FICTION:

Dark at the Crossing
By Elliot Ackerman
Knopf, 256 pp.
Set against the war in Syria, this National Book Award-nominated novel by former US Marine Elliot Ackerman focuses on the actions of characters caught up in the chaos of fighting. (CSMonitor.com review, 2/2/17)

Lincoln in the Bardo
By George Saunders
Random House, 368 pp.
This 2017 Man Booker Prize winner by acclaimed short story writer George Saunders juxtaposes a family tragedy – the death of President Abraham Lincoln’s son – with the national tragedy of the Civil War.
(CSMonitor.com review, 2/27/17)

The Hate u Give
By Angie Thomas
Balzer + Bray, 464 pp.
This dark but excellent young adult novel provides a window into conversations about race. (CSMonitor.com review, 3/1/17)

Strange the Dreamer
By Laini Taylor
Little, Brown, 544 pp.
This evocative and lyrical young adult fantasy novel by National Book Award finalist Laini Taylor blends a love story with a search for a lost city and a battle between humans and gods. (CSMonitor.com review, 3/31/17)

The Golden Legend
By Nadeem Aslam
Knopf, 336 pp.
Set in contemporary Pakistan, acclaimed author Nadeem Aslam’s fifth novel tells the story of a widow who must decide whether to pardon her husband’s killers. Aslam handles themes of religious conflict, violence, and family dissent with dignity and grace. (CSMonitor.com review, 4/18/17)

The Leavers
By Lisa Ko
Algonquin, 352 pp.
Lisa Ko’s powerful debut novel examines transracial adoption, bravely and beautifully sorting through issues of love, loyalty, and identity. (CSMonitor.com review, 5/2/17)

Salt Houses
By Hala Alyan
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pp.
Drawing on her formidable skills as a storyteller and lyrically gifted writer, Palestinian-American writer and poet Hala Alyan uses her debut novel to tell the story of the diaspora of a Palestinian family. (CSMonitor.com review, 5/9/17)

The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories
By Penelope Lively
Penguin, 208 pp.
British author Penelope Lively mixes perspicacity and grace in this short story collection. (CSMonitor.com review, 5/30/17)

Anything Is Possible
By Elizabeth Strout
Random House, 272 pp.
Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout’s perceptive and unflinching short stories set in small-town rural America showcase the drama in everyday life.
(CSMonitor.com review, 5/30/17)

The Essex Serpent
By Sarah Perry
Custom House, 432 pp.
A Loch Ness-like monster and a woman scientist face off in this engaging novel set in England in the Victorian era. (CSMonitor.com review, 6/19/17)

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
By Arundhati Roy
Knopf Doubleday, 464 pp.
Arundhati Roy’s first novel in two decades returns to the religious divisions polarizing India.
(CSMonitor.com review, 7/18/17)

Glass Houses
By Louise Penny
Minotaur Books, 400 pp.
Louise Penny transcends the limits of genre fiction with yet another excellent “Chief Inspector Armand Gamache” murder mystery
set in a rural village
in Quebec.
(CSMonitor.com review, 9/7/17)

Sing, Unburied, Sing
By Jesmyn Ward
Scribner, 304 pp.
Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel about a racially mixed family with one parent in prison has been called a “Beloved” for the incarcerated generation, with echoes of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.
(CSMonitor.com review, 10/11/17)

NONFICTION:

The New Odyssey
by Patrick Kingsley
Liveright, 368 pp.
Based on firsthand observations and interviews, journalist Patrick Kingsley paints a vivid picture of what migrants from Africa and the Middle East experience during their journeys to Europe. (CSMonitor.com review, 1/10/17)

The Souls of China
By Ian Johnson
Knopf Doubleday, 480 pp.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson traces the remarkable rebirth of religion in China. (CSMonitor.com review, 5/12/17)

Thunder in the Mountains
by Daniel J. Sharfstein
W.W. Norton & Co., 640 pp.
Historian Daniel Sharfstein recounts the tragedy of the Nez Perce War.
(CSMonitor.com review, 4/27/17)

I Was Told to Come Alone
By Souad Mekhennet
Henry Holt, 368 pp.
A journalist with a specialty in terrorism and security, Souad Mekhennet offers a chilling but intelligent up-close look at the war on terror.
(CSMonitor.com review, 6/14/17)

Hue 1968
By Mark Bowden
Grove Atlantic, 608 pp.
“Black Hawk Down” author Mark Bowden wades into deep historical waters with this skillful, gripping account of the turning point of the Vietnam War. (CSMonitor.com review, 6/15/17)

Sea Power
By Adm. James Stavridis
Penguin, 384 pp.
Adm. James Stavridis has crafted a fascinating and bracing examination of the ways that the world’s major bodies of water and politics intersect. (CSMonitor.com review, 6/27/17)

Be Free or Die
By Cate Lineberry
St. Martin’s Press, 288 pp.
Journalist Cate Lineberry tells the remarkable story of former slave and US Congressman Robert Smalls. (CSMonitor.com review, 6/20/17)

Reading with Patrick
By Michelle Kuo
Random House, 320 pp.
This is the touching true story of a one-time teacher who put her prestigious career on hold (she was fresh out of Harvard Law School) when she heard that a former student in Arkansas had landed in jail and needed her help.
(CSMonitor.com review, 7/10/17)

Henry David Thoreau
By Laura Dassow Walls
University of Chicago Press, 640 pp.
Laura Dassow Walls offers a well-crafted biography of Walden’s most famous resident.
(CSMonitor.com review, 7/14/17)

An Odyssey
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Knopf, 320 pp.
A classics professor learns much when his father becomes his student, studying the “Odyssey” with him and even traveling to the sites that inspired it.
(CSMonitor.com review, 9/20/17)

The Future Is History
By Masha Gessen
Penguin, 528 pp.
Russian-American journalist and activist Masha Gessen offers a dark examination of what went wrong in contemporary Russia. (CSMonitor.com review, 10/3/17)

Code Girls
By Liza Mundy
Hachette Books, 432 pp.
Journalist Liza Mundy tells the captivating story of America’s female code-breakers in World War II. (CSMonitor.com review, 10/12/17)

The Gourmands’ Way
By Justin Spring
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pp.
This engaging culinary history features profiles of six talented American writers who were strongly impacted by Paris and the French – a fascination they passed along to their American readers. (CSMonitor.com review, 10/13/17)

Stanton
By Walter Stahr
Simon & Schuster, 768 pp.
This excellent biography brings President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of War out of the historical shadows.
(CSMonitor.com review, 9/15/17)

Grant
By Ron Chernow
Penguin, 1,104 pp.
“Hamilton” biographer Ron Chernow returns with his latest take on a historical figure, vigorously portraying Ulysses S. Grant as a great military leader, champion of rights, and honest man. (CSMonitor.com review, 10/10/17)

Lenin
By Victor Sebestyen
Knopf Doubleday, 592 pp.
Hungarian-born author and historian Victor Sebestyen illuminates one of history’s most destructive leaders.
(CSMonitor.com review, 11/13/17)

Calder
By Jed Perl
Knopf Doubleday, 704 pp.
Art critic Jed Perl has written a comprehensive biography that clearly establishes American sculptor Alexander Calder as one of the artistic giants of the 20th century. (CSMonitor.com review, 11/30/17)

AP Photo

Amado Nanalang watches basketball games in 2015 while making bets at a sports book owned and operated by CG Technology in Las Vegas.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Dec. 4 about the federal ban on sports gambling, with many of the justices appearing to lean toward overturning the ban in order to uphold state rights. The high court, not to mention the states, must be cautious about such a move.

Illegal sports gambling may already be widely practiced and mostly underground. But if state lawmakers and sports leagues are allowed to rake in money from legal betting on sports, they will then promote and expand it. Can they be trusted to control the potential social costs, such as match-fixing by players and underage gambling?

This court case is as much about the integrity of sports and the damage to vulnerable populations as it is the Constitution’s provision for states to regulate their internal matters. Congress was not wrong when it passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which imposed a national ban while grandfathering the practice for four states that already allowed it.

As casino gambling has declined, New Jersey decided to challenge the law in hopes of reviving its gambling industry and maintaining the flow of taxes from betting. Its case to overturn the federal ban has not fared well in lower courts. But for some reason, the Supreme Court decided to take up the issue. A majority of the justices may believe it is time for states that want sports gambling to come to grips with it on their own.

Yet the track record on all legalized gambling in the United States does not argue for even more of it on sports. Problem gambling has negative effects on an estimated 7 percent of the population, according to work by McGill University professor Jeffrey Derevensky. The most obvious effect is the cost of gambling addiction on individuals and their families. But legalized gambling also hits those least able to afford it. The poorest third of Americans buy more than half of all lottery tickets. They are often targeted by government to keep buying tickets.

And based on the high level of match-fixing in world soccer under FIFA, the US should be worried about potential pressure on pro players from gambling syndicates. Note that the US Justice Department now has a court trial against many former FIFA-related officials over charges of corruption.

New Jersey itself is worried enough about sports gambling that it had set plans to shield amateur sports from its effects and to track gamblers by their location within the state. But can such legal and technological efforts really work in the Digital Age?

Such questions are difficult for states to answer let alone court judges. The Supreme Court has often weighed the social consequences of its rulings. If it bursts the dam on sports gambling, Americans must be ready to counter the money-seeking motives of state governments and sports leagues. Gambling has too many costs to treat it as a norm and a cash cow.