Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of Its People and Events, 1940s-1970s

Introduction

INTRODUCTION A LANT A in the 1940s did not look greatly different from the city that had stood fifty years before. Horse cars had long vanished from the streets, and visions of a new and greater city were dancing in the heads of many of its leading citizens; but streetcars still clanged and rattled from the residential areas into the downtown section, and in the heart of town steam trains still smoked and whistled in the railroad gulch, parts of which were not yet covered over by viaducts. Neither had white attitudes toward a large segment of the city's population vastly changed. The relationship of white Atlantans with black Atlantans , who in 1940 made up roughly one-third of its 300,000 population, was much the same as it had been in Scarlett O'Hara's day. Blacks had been freed from slavery by the Emancipation Proclamation and could no longer be bought and sold like mules or bales of cotton. But where they lived and what jobs were open to them and what opportunities there were for them to express themselves politically were still as circumscribed in Atlanta and in the deep South as a whole, as they had been in the days of Gone with the Wind. There were friendships between whites and blacks and even affection in their personal relationships. But any attempt to describe them as living side by side in "separate but equal" facilities would be a sardonic and bitter jest. However, in the mid-forties as World War II came to an end, and on into the fifties, there had begun, quietly at first but with a growing fervor that turned into open violence in the sixties, an uneasy protest, an outspoken refusal on the part of black Atlantans to accept any longer what had been their status for nearly three-quarters of a century. And out of these years of traumatic change came the Atlanta we know today; still not a city of brotherly love, but one in which black power, both political and economic, is accepted, albeit reluctantly by some whites, and in which citizens of both races live and work, play and socialize in a relationship that would have been unthinkable only a generation ago. A good way to introduce the decade of the 1940s is to examine an article written by Mayor William B. Hartsfield early in 1940.l Entitled "My Hat's Off to Atlanta," it takes the city into the forties with a proud flourish of trumpets, which naturally included a blowing of the mayor's own political horn. He was still glowing from his and Atlanta's triumph the previous December in presenting the world premiere of Gone with the Wind, which focused international attention on the city, and in playing host earlier in the year to ten thousand Baptists who had gathered from many countries for a meeting of the Baptist World Alliance. But his theme now was that this was only the beginning of Atlanta's journey toward greatness. Addressing "Mr. and Mrs. Atlanta," he wrote: "The Atlanta of today is 4 INTRODUCTION moving forward as never before. She is growing both inside and outside of her limits, but she is growing in something more than mere brick and stone—in civic spirit, unbounded faith and optimism in her own future, still retaining that charm and courtesy which marks the precious heritage of the Old South." He cited accomplishments that had attracted no national attention but that would have a profound effect upon the city's future. These were extensive programs of street repair, a reorganization and cleanup of the police department, traffic controls that had cut the city's death rate from 87 in 1936 to half that in 1939, and a new method of financial operation that put the city on a cash basis, limiting future budgets to the past year's actual tax returns. In the immediate future, he pointed out, Atlanta would see improvements in all fields—cultural, industrial, and civic. The Metropolitan Opera, absent from Atlanta since the Depression year of 1930, was due to come back in 1940. A small but beautiful park with a sparkling fountain had been under construction for more than a year and would be dedicated before the year was out. Streets would be widened, the airport improved. But all of these things, and all the favorable publicity the city had received, Hartsfield declared, would avail nothing if its people did not continue to...