atlanta information

Historical background

Trail of tears

Europeans began to settle along the Georgia coast in 1733, 7,000 years after the first native Americans arrived. At the time of that settlement two groups of natives occupied most of present-day Georgia: the Creeks, who were actually a loose political confederation of several tribes, and the Cherokee. After the battle of Taliwa in 1755, the Chattahoochee river, near present-day Atlanta, established the boundary between these two nations, with the Creek north and west of the river, and the Cherokee south and east of it.

Increased settlement brought increased pressure for land, which white settlers tried to ease first by encouraging private land ownership among natives, and then by purchasing land and forcibly resettling the native inhabitants. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorised then-president Andrew Jackson to negotiate removal treaties with all remaining native tribes in the south-east. The Creeks were resettled to western Alabama in 1836, the Cherokee to Tennessee and points west two years later. Around one-third of the Creek nation and one quarter of all Cherokee died during resettlement.

• The Cherokees’ 1,000-mile journey became known as the Trail of Tears, or, translated directly from the Cherokee “Nunna daul Tsuny”, the Trail Where They Cried. Four thousand Cherokee died, but about 1,000 escaped the march. In 1868 they established their tribal government in Cherokee, North Carolina, and today are known as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.


End of the line

In 1833 Georgia’s first state-wide rail line was built, connecting Charleston, South Carolina with Augusta, Georgia. That same year, Wilson Lumpkin, Georgia’s governor, chartered three new railroad lines: one to connect the burgeoning coastal city of Savannah with the central city of Macon, another to connect Augusta to points west, and a third to run north-south from Macon to Forsyth, Georgia. With the state’s major cities linked to a growing national railroad web, all that remained was to connect these three routes to a central hub that would serve as a connection to the Tennessee Valley, and from there to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Engineers chose a spot seven miles east of the Chattahoochie river atop a 1,000-foot ridge, and because it would serve as the southern endpoint for a railroad line, they named it Terminus.

Library of Congress
Library of Congress

Atlanta's lifeblood

Though Terminus would eventually become Atlanta, there was little at the time of its founding to suggest it would ever amount to much: it was near no waterway (the Chattahoochie was unnavigable that far north); cotton grew better further south; and even the railroad executive who named Terminus commented, “the place can never be much of a trading city, yet may be important in some small way”. By 1850, however, it had become not just the end of a single line, but the best-connected city in the south. William Ezzard, the then-mayor, called Atlanta “the Gate City”—a bold claim for a 20-year-old town dwarfed in size and importance by Savannah, New Orleans and Charleston. But ever since Atlanta has indeed been the gateway to the south, even though it has always been more in than of that region

• Six years after its founding, Terminus changed its name to Marthasville, in honour of the youngest daughter of Governor Lumpkin. Two years after that, in 1845, Marthasville became Atlanta, supposedly a feminine version of “Atlantic”.

In most other southern cities, wealthy plantation families dominated; in Atlanta, however, merchants, land speculators and railroad investors became the city’s civic and political leaders. Atlanta’s emphasis on trade and railroads in a predominantly agrarian region made it a regional anomaly, more akin in economic outlook and growth patterns to a northern city than to its neighbours.

Atlanta’s rail lines contributed to boosting trade between the country’s developing interior and Georgia’s coastal cities. In 1849 (two years after the state of Georgia officially recognised Atlanta) Atlanta’s annual trade accounted for about $200,000; by 1857 it stood at about $3m. By 1860 Atlanta had become Georgia’s fourth-largest city – no small feat considering its distance from waterways and planting areas – though it was about to face its most trying decade.


Making Georgia howl

Atlanta took a characteristically iconoclastic stand in the run-up to the American civil war, which pitted northern states (the Union) against southern (the Confederacy), which wanted to secede and form their own country. Though Georgia voted to secede from the Union in 1861, Atlanta voted for Unionist candidates for president in 1860, and many businessmen there opposed secession because they feared (rightly) that it would keep investors away. After Georgia seceded, many Unionists either left Atlanta or kept a low profile: Atlanta became one of the Confederacy’s most important manufacturing and transport centres. As the men went off to war, women surged into factory work (Atlanta specialised in munitions and military supplies), and people from all over the south poured into Atlanta, whose population rose from under 10,000 in 1860 to 22,000 in 1863.

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Library of Congress

Atlanta's nemeses: Sherman and his troops

Inevitably, Atlanta’s strategic appeal to the Union rose concomitantly with its importance to the Confederacy. The Union's campaign to seize Atlanta began in earnest on May 9th, 1864, when troops under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman engaged Confederate forces in Dalton, Georgia. Sherman advanced almost unhindered to Atlanta, reaching its outskirts on July 20th. He wanted to take control of Atlanta’s main rail lines, but Confederate troops proved better at holding the city than they were at halting his advance; in August, unable to take Atlanta outright, he began to shell it furiously. On September 1st, General John Hood, who led the defence of Atlanta, evacuated his troops, and on September 5th General Sherman entered and ordered all remaining civilians—mainly women and children—to leave. He occupied the city for two months, and on November 16th, after Abraham Lincoln was re-elected president, departed for his famous March to the Sea, during which he vowed to “make Georgia howl” and to “march through Georgia, smashing things to the sea”. He burned Atlanta nearly to the ground, destroying between 4,000 and 5,000 buildings and leaving the city with $1.65 in its treasury.


Reconstruction

Atlanta sprang back from its devastation with remarkable zeal: by the end of 1865, 150 stores were operating, and the following year it did $4.5m in business, more than it had before the Civil War. By 1867, all of its railroad lines were again operational; this sparked a railroad-building boom that extended into the 1890s, and made Atlanta into the south-east’s commerce and transportation hub, particularly for southern-grown farm goods shipped northward.

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Library of Congress

The aftermath of war

The growth of railroads influenced the city’s growth not only commercially, but physically as well: streets radiated outward from the tracks, creating the odd curves that some streets in downtown Atlanta still follow (the grid pattern common to most American cities emerged in later rounds of construction). The tracks divided the city into northern and southern halves, separated by a smoky gulch in the centre.

As Atlanta grew it appealed northward for investment. This conciliatory and mercantile attitude gave rise again to the old suspicions that Atlanta was in, but not entirely of the South: that it was in fact a “damyankee” town filled with itinerant businessmen known pejoratively as “carpetbaggers” (not entirely a false claim: some estimate that over 25% of Atlanta’s most prominent businessmen between 1865 and 1890 came from outside the area). Atlanta welcomed the Union soldiers garrisoned there, and even went so far as to propose a monument to President Lincoln. And economically, this attitude paid off: by 1880 Atlanta had 196 manufacturing firms and almost 4,000 workers: 13 times as many firms and 12 times as many workers as it had just 20 years earlier.

In rising from the civil war’s ashes Atlanta rediscovered its identity in commerce. It relentlessly advertised its business-friendliness: not just the Chamber of Commerce and the Atlanta Manufacturers Association but editorialists at the Atlanta Constitution all extolled the city’s virtues to prospective investors. The International Cotton Exposition in 1881 and the Piedmont Exposition six years later—both designed to show off Atlanta’s commercial and industrial capacities—similarly drew national attention to Atlanta, culminating in an appearance by President Grover Cleveland, the first sitting president to visit Atlanta.


Jim Crow arrives

The late 19th century also proved an all-too-brief period of political enfranchisement for black Georgians: 37 black delegates were sent to the state’s constitutional convention in 1867; 32 black legislators took their seats in the state Congress the following year; and two black councilmen took their seats on Atlanta’s city council in 1870. But in September 1868, the legislature argued that the right to vote does not entail the right to hold office, and summarily expelled the black elected officials. Shortly thereafter, the Democrats—then the party of pro-segregationist southerners (mainly because Lincoln had been a Republican)—took control of both chambers of the state legislature, which, when combined with the Democrats’ “white primaries” in 1892, in effect ended black political participation altogether, voting included, until the next century. Jim Crow laws, which kept black and white Atlantans separate in nearly every area of public life—and even death, as blacks and whites had separate cemeteries—became ever more pervasive in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Library of Congress

The other Atlanta

• Jim Crow was a popular character in 19th century minstrel shows, in which white actors painted their faces black and performed songs and dances based around crude racial stereotypes. The name comes from a song written by Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, and was originally a racial epithet.

Despite segregation, Atlanta boasted a flourishing and active black community. Five of the country’s leading black universities were founded in late-19th century Atlanta: Clark University, Atlanta University (which merged in 1988), Morris Brown, Morehouse College and Spelman College. Black Atlantans, as in most other southern cities, had a near-monopoly on the barbering trade, and some enterprising barbers parlayed their success into other commercial ventures. The wealthiest former barber, Alonzo F. Herndon, owned not merely an elegant barbershop, but also a hotel, an insurance company (which he founded) and one of the city’s grandest houses. Auburn Avenue—dubbed “Sweet Auburn”—was the centre of black commercial Atlanta, boasting a range of businesses and concerns that rivalled any other street in the city, including the country’s first black-owned newspaper, Atlanta Daily World, which still publishes today.


Growing pains

Although the railroad industry remained Atlanta’s largest employer well into the 1920s, the city had commercial interests to thank for its increasingly rapid early-20th-century rise. The population grew from 37,400 in 1880 to about 267,000 in 1930, and in the second half of the 1920s 762 businesses moved to Atlanta. By 1930 Atlanta was the 29th most populous city in the United States, but had more office space than any city except New York. Sears-Roebuck, a department store chain, and General Motors, a car builder, both had their regional headquarters in Atlanta, and, Coca-Cola, the city’s most famous export, had grown from a local pharmacist’s homemade “nerve tonic” into a large and growing corporation.

• John Stith Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in 1886, after patenting such “medicines” as Triplex Liver Pills, Globe of Flower Cough Syrup and French Wine of Coca-Ideal Tonic. Coca-Cola took its name from two of the drink’s principal ingredients: the kola nut, which sweetened the drink (along with a hefty dose of sugar) and the coca leaf, which gave it its cocaine kick. Coca-Cola was not cocaine-free until 1929.

With growth came growing pains: not only did Atlanta struggle to provide municipal services like water and education to its growing populace, but the city’s increasing cosmopolitanism did not sit well with all of its residents. In September 1906, following a bitter gubernatorial campaign in which each candidate tried to top the other’s segregationist zeal, white mobs, egged on by rumours that black men were assaulting white women, indiscriminately attacked black Atlantans on downtown streets. Estimates of the dead and injured vary (the official total of 12 dead and 70 injured is probably low), but the incident hastened the residential segregation of Atlanta: although all four of Atlanta’s attempts legally and formally to segregate the city’s residential areas were ruled unconstitutional, extralegal pressures and informal agreements effectively kept black Atlantans out of white neighbourhoods.

Blacks were not the only minority group to bear the brunt of Atlanta’s prejudice: in 1913, Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman, was charged with assaulting and murdering a 13-year old girl. He was convicted and sentenced to hang, but Georgia’s governor commuted the sentence to life in prison. Consequently, Tom Watson, a newspaper publisher and future senator, called on Atlantans to carry out the original sentence themselves, which they did, lynching Frank on August 16th 1916.

• Leo Frank’s lynching contributed mightily to the rise of two groups: the B’Nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, which defended him, and the Ku Klux Klan, which opposed him. The Klan—a nativist vigilante group which opposed Catholics, Jews, and racial equality—claimed a membership of 6m in the 1920s, and were headquartered in Atlanta.


Competition for the railroads

The arrival of the car and airplane also contributed to Atlanta's growth. William D. Alexander, a bicycle dealer, imported the first car to Atlanta in 1901, and though it lacked headlights, a horn and a top, and took two hours to complete its maiden nine-mile journey, Atlantans were hooked: by decade’s end the city boasted 35 dealerships. Cars allowed the city to develop away from the railroad tracks, and led to two problems that plague the city today: traffic congestion and suburban sprawl. White Atlantans moved north, developing areas such as Buckhead, Home Park and Virginia-Highland, while black Atlantans headed to Washington Park, in the west of the city.

Atlanta also attached itself to the airplane, which arrived in the 1920s, with the same zeal it had for trains in the previous century. William B. Hartsfield, for whom Atlanta’s airport was named, persuaded the city council to buy an airfield, though many thought it folly. In 1931 Atlanta opened the country’s first air passenger terminal, and in 1938 its first air-traffic control tower. Hartsfield continued to develop Atlanta as an aviation centre after he was elected mayor in 1936, and it now boasts the world’s busiest airport.


The second world war and its aftermath

The second world war brought $10 billion in federal investment to the south, with much of that finding its way to Atlanta: B-29 bombers and munitions were both built in Atlanta and military bases surrounded the city. The promise of work drew rural migrants from across the south, and as able-bodied men were drafted, more and more women entered the workforce. In 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order forbidding discrimination in plants operating on defence contracts: for the first time all segments of Atlanta’s population—black and white, male and female—shared factory floors, just as black and white soldiers fought together overseas. These experiences led to ever-louder calls for racial enfranchisement: the Southern Regional Council (SRC), founded in 1943, comprised an interracial group of writers, preachers and academics who opposed segregation.

Though the SRC achieved little, the struggle for racial equality in Atlanta and across the country had begun. Mayor Hartsfield won black electoral support with such measures as instructing City Hall to refer to black Atlantans with the titles “Mr”, “Mrs” or “Miss”, rather than just by first name, and by not painting the signs on the airport’s segregated bathrooms, so they simply faded away. The city’s bus system desegregated easily and quietly, and an increasing number of companies desegregated their factories. Atlanta’s schools peacefully integrated in 1961, thanks in part to the zeal with which Hartsfield tracked, arrested and prosecuted incendiary organisations like the Ku Klux Klan.


The balance changes

Atlanta’s power had traditionally rested in the hands of white business leaders content to promote the city and encourage investment while leaving Jim Crow laws in place. Thanks in part to Martin Luther King, Jr, a native Atlantan whose struggles for civil rights across the south earned him international accolades (including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964), that changed during the 1960s. As social and legal pressures ended racist housing restrictions, white Atlantans moved to the suburbs and blacks began moving into formerly white neighbourhoods, making Atlanta a majority-black city (ironically, the end of legal segregation did not end de facto housing segregation: the suburbs remained mostly white). In 1969, one year after Dr King’s assassination, Maynard Jackson was elected Atlanta’s first black vice-mayor, and Sam Massell its first Jewish mayor. Mr Jackson became the first black mayor of Atlanta (or any major southern city) in 1973, one year after Andrew Young became the first black Georgian to be elected to the United States Congress in nearly a century.

During the 1970s, tourism and conventions fuelled Atlanta’s growth, which by century’s end outpaced almost all other American cities. Atlanta’s profile also rose with the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter, the first Georgian ever to hold the presidency, and with the rise of CNN, founded by Ted Turner, an eccentric local businessman. In 1996, Atlanta hosted the centennial Olympic Games, which, though derided by some for their blatant commercialism, turned the world’s attention to Atlanta, and left the city richer in stadia, housing and parks.

Recently, Atlantans have begun reversing the residential racial divide, with white people returning to the city, blacks heading out to the suburbs and both groups happier to live in integrated neighbourhoods. By 2000, around 7% of Atlantans were foreign-born, and the population in metropolitan Atlanta rose from 2.23m in 1980 to 4.1m in 2000.

posted by none @ 7:25 AM