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“Save Them or Perish”

The second chapter focuses on the 1979–1981 kidnappings and murders of twenty-nine black youths in Atlanta. These abductions and killings, which primarily targeted young males from Atlanta’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, exacerbated African American anxieties about racial violence and raised the specters of Southern racism and the myth of gay pedophilia. Some responses to these murders emphasized the victims’ “street smarts,” “hustling,” and even their alleged same-sex sex work, thereby depriving them of the individualized innocence so readily lavished upon Etan Patz and other missing or murdered white youth. Moreover, in an effort to preserve Atlanta’s reputation as progressive and business-friendly, the city’s biracial political and economic establishment sought to downplay the racial and class dimensions of the abductions and slayings. The Atlanta tragedies thus exposed the racial and class limitations of the image of endangered childhood and illustrated how notions of white child-victimhood grounded the child safety regime.