White Ice

"When NHL commissioner Clarence Campbell announced that Atlanta had received an NHL franchise, ownership was tasked with selling a northern game that most of the city's Black residents had never experienced. The team marketed itself to upper-middle class White residents by portraying a hockey game as an exclusive event-with the whiteness of the players themselves providing critical support for that claim. In a city that had given Hank Aaron a cool reception and had effectively guaranteed the whitening of a successful Black basketball team, the prospect of a sport with White players was an inherent draw that leaders hoped would mitigate White flight from the city and draw residents of the surrounding suburbs back to the city center. The team was ultimately marketed as the Flames, a reference to William Sherman's burning of Atlanta and the city's rise from the ashes to its rightful place as a Deep South hub of culture and economy. It wasn't a name with specific racial coding, but with the city's racial history and the Lost Cause iconography that dotted its landscape, a Civil War name could only add to the impression of a White team playing to White fans in a majority Black city. Thus the politics of civic development and race combined yet again, but this time in a form foreign to most longtime sports enthusiasts in the Deep South"--