Atlanta

Atlanta. Established in 1836 as a regional railroad hub, “Terminus” (briefly, “Marthasville”) was incorporated as the city of Atlanta in 1847. As late as 1860, its population stood at just 9,554. The Civil War Union general William T. Sherman brought this municipality to national attention in 1864. The Atlanta that Sherman's Army of the Tennessee occupied on 2 September 1864 had served as the nerve center of the Confederacy, but the smoldering city that he evacuated on 15 November was a burned‐out ruin. It would not remain so for long.

On 21 December 1886, Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady, addressing the New England Society of New York, singled out General Sherman and assured him that he was “considered an able man in our parts, though some people think he is a kind of careless man about fire, and that from the ashes he left us in 1864 we have raised a brave and beautiful city.” In 1881, 1887, and 1895, Atlanta boosters promoted their city's rebirth with a series of international expositions; during the 1920s and again in the 1960s, its commercial leadership launched “Forward Atlanta” campaigns to attract new businesses to the city. These manifestations of the “Atlanta Spirit,” together with its development as a transportation center—first rail, then air and automotive—meant growth and expansion, resulting in population bursts from 37,409 in 1880 to more than 200,000 in 1920 and nearly 500,000 in 1970. By the early 1990s, when Atlanta was advertising its “internationality” and successfully advancing itself as host city for the 1996 Summer Olympics, the municipality served as the focal point for a metropolitan region of more than three million inhabitants.

As the transportation and communications center for the Southeast, Atlanta by the late twentieth century provided regional offices for most major American corporations and was also corporate headquarters for Coca‐Cola, Delta Airlines, and the Turner Communications division of Time‐Warner Corporation. Its major research universities included Emory, Georgia State, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the six‐member Atlanta University Center, the world's largest concentration of historically black institutions of higher learning.

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Atlanta promoted itself ceaselessly, some said shamelessly, as the capital of a new—albeit segregated—South. Booker T. Washington's apparent acceptance of this “separate but equal” doctrine in his address at the 1895 Cotton States Exposition came to be called the “Atlanta Compromise.” But many black Atlantans—from Washington's contemporary W.E.B. Du Bois to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.—rejected this policy of accommodation, challenged it in the courts and in the streets, and eventually overturned racial segregation. Their long struggle earned for Atlanta the title of “Civil Rights Capital.”

As the civil rights movement unfolded, Atlanta presented itself to the nation as “The City Too Busy to Hate.” Unlike other southern cities, its leadership preached and practiced controlled change. Atlanta could embrace relatively progressive racial policies because, as political scientist Clarence N. Stone demonstrated in Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (1989), a tight coalition of business leaders and governmental officials assumed leadership during the 1940s, expanded its base during the 1960s and 1970s, and survived into the post–civil rights era. Maintaining its regional leadership in the face of increasing competition from other New South cities loomed as Atlanta's challenge for the twenty‐first century.
See also Railroads.

Bibliography

Ronald Bayor , Race and the Shaping of Twentieth‐Century Atlanta, 1996.
Darlene R. Roth and and Andy Ambrose , Metropolitan Frontiers: A Short History of Atlanta, 1996.

Dana F. White