How Atlanta’s politics overtook the suburbs, too

The suburbs of Cobb County, Georgia, boomed during white flight on the promise of isolation from Atlanta. Residents there dating to the 1960s did not want Atlanta problems, or Atlanta transit, or Atlanta people. As a local commissioner once infamously put it, he would stock piranha in the Chattahoochee River that separates Cobb from Atlanta if it were necessary to keep the city out.

The county became a model of the conservative, suburban South, opposed to the kind of…