Can new boundaries create better neighbors? Secession picks up steam.

Since Bill White moved to Atlanta’s northern district of Buckhead in 2018, he and many of his neighbors have watched the city grow more violent and more tense.

The police shooting of Rayshard Brooks, soon after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, incited unrest and temporary riots. Homicides jumped 60% during the pandemic, from 99 in 2019 to nearly 160 in 2020 and 2021. Buckhead residents – whiter and wealthier than the median Atlantan – feel afraid, says Mr. White. Some of his neighbors leave the house armed. 

As for Mr. White, he wants to leave Atlanta altogether. He just doesn’t want to move. Instead, Mr. White has spent the past year arguing that Buckhead should be its own city – the first in Georgia born of secession. Founding and chairing the Buckhead City Committee, Mr. White has built a team of allies in the district and the state Senate, though none of them represent Atlanta. 

Experts are skeptical that cityhood would help the group’s pledged goals of lowering taxes and crime. Critics call the movement district-level white fright. Regardless of its success looking increasingly unlikely, the Buckhead City movement is an example of a political Hail Mary being tossed more often in America today. 

From Maryland to Oregon to Atlanta, some residents who don’t feel represented by their city and state governments don’t only want new elected officials. They want entirely new cities and states. These new secession movements have different motives but share a sense of alienation with their governments. They agree with majority rule. They just want a different majority ruling. 

Practical or not, these movements challenge core ideas of American community. Their supporters often feel ignored by elected leaders and fellow citizens. To an extent, they’ve given up trying to resolve differences with people who disagree. But reconciliation can be important, and creating a new community has its own complications. In a country with existing boundaries, forming a new one requires breaking up another. 

“Because the idea of separation as a solution to political disputes is so deeply ingrained in American history, it’s not going to go away,” says Richard Kreitner, author of “Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union.” “It’s always going to be like a tool available for American discontents.”

America – a history of breakups

There have been few times in American history without some kind of active secession movement. The Pilgrims came to North America looking to separate from the Church of England. The Revolution was itself a kind of forced secession from Britain. Entire states, like Kentucky and Maine, split off from existing ones in the country’s early days. The Civil War began soon after Southern states began seceding.

Calls for separation today are often more fragmented. Sections of Northern California and Southern Oregon have proposed a new state of Jefferson. Down state Illinois and upstate New York occasionally float seceding from their state’s population centers. Texas has an old nationalist movement, dating back to its days of independence.

Ryan Griffiths, who studies secession at Syracuse University, says many of these groups are too small even for his database. That makes sense, since state boundaries have been set for decades. Even if many lines – like the near 90-degree angles in the Pacific Northwest – were drawn arbitrarily at first, they feel less fluid today. That makes any move to redraw them a long shot. 

“Where they are particularly impractical that’s often a sign that there’s an alternative thing going on,” says Professor Griffiths. “It’s virtue signaling or maybe it’s identity signaling.”

Values and identity are key to many of the movements motivated by America’s growing urban-rural divide. In states like Virginia and Oregon, rural areas have watched from the sidelines as population centers expand and change voting numbers. That process has left many outside the city feeling left behind and a small minority looking for a new home. 

Welcome to ... Greater Idaho?

A few years ago, Mike McCarter saw a flyer for a community meeting near his home in rural La Pine, Oregon. He attended, and found a group of Oregonians who shared his frustrations with the state’s direction and wanted an answer. Mr. McCarter stayed involved and later volunteered to become the group’s president. Their solution? Become Idaho. 

“Rural Oregon’s values line up much better with Idaho’s values – traditional values of faith, family freedom, independence,” says Mr. McCarter. 

He and the Greater Idaho movement propose shifting most of Eastern Oregon to its neighbor. About 10 counties have either voted in support of the idea or are voting on it this year. An Oregon state senator even said he’d consider introducing legislation on it.

That doesn’t mean it will succeed. But Mr. McCarter, a born and raised Oregonian, says people like him need a Plan B. The Willamette Valley, where Portland and Salem stand, has about 70% of the state’s population, and Mr. McCarter doesn’t think there are enough votes to change the state legislature. 

“We don’t look at it necessarily as a political issue,” he says. “It’s more ... value and cultural differences. There is a dramatic difference between urban and rural and the way people look at things.”

On climate, for example, folks in Portland might think of limiting diesel fuel as a necessary step to reduce carbon emissions. People in the country, though, see that as an affront to their lifestyle, which often requires machinery. Those lenses affect their views of homelessness, drugs, and crime, says Mr. McCarter. 

Mr. White, of Atlanta, doesn’t share a rural identity but has similar views on policy. His first priority in a new Buckhead City would be hiring more than three times the current number of Atlanta police officers assigned to the neighborhood – from about 80 to 240 – and raising their pay.

“This is our new home,” says Mr. White. “So when my sister-in-law looks at me and tells me, ‘I’m leaving,’ I said, ‘The hell you are. We’re going to stay and we’re going to stand up for ourselves and we’re going to find a way to fix this.’”

“Leaving seems like giving up”

Most people don’t share the same plan to fix things. 

Maurice Hobson, who lives in metro Atlanta and teaches at Georgia State University, sees an underlying message in a new city founded with “tough on crime” policies. 

“As a big Black man – a 6-foot-1, 220-pound Black man who looks like I can still play football – I will be nervous to go to Buckhead if they broke away,” says Mr. Hobson, a former University of Alabama football player and author of “The Legend of the Black Mecca,” about Atlanta’s political history.

Buckhead City would be 72% white and 11% Black, leaving Atlanta 27% white and 61% Black, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. If it left, it would take one-fifth of the city’s population and 40% of its tax base. Annexed in 1952, Buckhead is part of the vibrant, multiracial coalition that makes up Atlanta today.

“A city is about community,” says Carol Beard, a six-year Buckhead resident. “Leaving seems like giving up.”

In some ways, it is. Toni Foster, who owns an upholstery shop in Hines, Oregon, the sixth least populated county in the state, says she has given up since Kate Brown won a second term as Oregon’s governor. Ms. Foster volunteers for the Greater Idaho cause, collecting signatures, contacting friends, and helping set up public meetings. 

“We pretty much feel forgotten,” says Ms. Foster.

The Portland area already feels like a different state, she says. Ms. Foster and others in her area feel more Idahoan than Oregonian. Why not make it official, she asks?

That could set a concerning precedent, says Mr. Kreitner, author of the book on secession. America’s divisions are hard to map. Even new cities and new states couldn’t separate people who agree and disagree. It might not even help. 

“I don’t think that crumbling each of the states into a bunch of pieces is necessarily going to solve our issue,” he says. 

Mr. McCarter doesn’t want to crumble all states – just split one. Yet even he, who spends his retirement years driving around rural Oregon asking people to help move the state border, sometimes feels a loss for the state he wants to leave behind. 

“This year I’ll be 75 years old,” he says. “I’m born and raised in Oregon. The only time I haven’t lived here is during my military service during Vietnam, and I love Oregon, per se. But I have to balance on the scale of the name Oregon and the pride of being an Oregonian versus freedom, versus the American values.”