(A somewhat briefer version of this piece appeared last week at TIME.COM on MLK Day, on which date, its author was actually giving a talk on Robert E. Lee to a wonderful audience at Washington & Lee. Go figure the odds on that. Confirmed masochists may view the video of the talk here, beginning about 19 minutes in.)
The Auburn Avenue neighborhood where Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., was born in January 1929 was both a spatial and human embodiment of
Atlanta's paradoxical reputation for both strict racial segregation and black
economic success. Noted journalist and renowned apostle of the "New South," Henry
W. Grady, may have strained the credulity of his New York audience in 1886 when he insisted that he bore no resentment
toward his beloved Atlanta's arch-nemesis, General William Tecumseh Sherman, but
Grady's claim that "from the ashes he left us... we have raised a
brave and beautiful city" was more than the idle boast of a shameless booster. Atlanta's
speedily restored railroad connections and postbellum emergence as the Southeast's
principal trade and transportation hub all but assured its magnetic allure. By
1900 it was home to 90,000 people, more than a third of whom were black. A
bloody race riot in 1906 left at least a dozen and quite likely more black
Atlantans dead, yet--with the city's "Forward Atlanta," crusade for economic
growth proceeding apace--the city's black population continued to swell. It
stood at 90,000 by the time King was born into a well-established black middle
class of merchants, lawyers, educators (the city boasted six private black
colleges well before 1900) and ministers, concentrated in the city's West Side
on and around Auburn Avenue, which a prominent resident once called "the
richest Negro street in the world."
If Atlanta had established a
reputation as a relative mecca of upward mobility for black Georgians looking
to better themselves materially, it had proven no less a font of opportunity
for those of a more spiritual bent, including the infant King's father and
maternal grandfather, both of whom had been born into sharecropping families in
nearby rural counties. Martin (né Michael) Luther King, Sr., had arrived in
Atlanta as an aspiring, though scarcely literate, young minister in 1918. His
determined efforts to improve himself and his circumstances did not suffer in
the least from his fortuitous marriage to Alberta Williams, whose own father's meager
rural origins had not prevented him from building his small congregation into
the powerful Ebenezer Baptist Church, where, upon his death in 1931, he would
be succeeded in the pulpit by his son-in-law.
Growing up, the younger Martin's
solidly middle-class background offered some insulation from brutalities of the
Jim Crow system, but there were no guarantees. Scarcely a year after King was
born, Dennis Hubert, a sophomore at Morehouse College and also the son of a
prominent black minister, was brutally murdered for allegedly insulting two
young white women. For all this atrocity said about the limitations of middle-class
standing for the city's blacks, the young man's white killers were arrested,
convicted and sentenced to prison, an outcome highly unlikely, to say the
least, in any rural county anywhere in the state at that point.
It was not
surprising that a historian of that era found Atlanta "quite evidently not
proud of Georgia" or that, across the state, all but a very few whites heartily
reciprocated the sentiment. Indeed, this was the primary reason that Georgia's
overwhelming rural legislative majority had taken formal action in 1917 to
quarantine the capital city's insidious racial and political moderation. This
was accomplished through the brazenly anti-urban artifice of the "county-unit" electoral
system, which effectively guaranteed that the preferences of voters in Atlanta,
population 270,000 in 1930, could be neutralized completely by those of voters
in the state's three smallest counties, which had a combined population of
scarcely 10,000.
This was a situation tailor-made
for a rustic, race-baiting demagogue like Eugene Talmadge. Peppering his
speeches with the "n-word," stonewalling efforts to improve the schools, and
reveling in the impotent rebukes of "them lying Atlanta newspapers," Talmadge claimed
the governorship for the first of four times in 1932. For all he might have
done to impede progress across the state as a whole, however, Talmadge's impact
on Atlanta itself was notably less severe. Despite the economic reversals of
the Great Depression, the infusions of cash from a variety of New Deal programs
had already paid off for Atlantans by the end of the 1930s, with a greatly
expanded and modernized infrastructure and dramatic improvement in schools,
hospitals and other public institutions.
The overpowering urge to show the
world that Atlanta was back and better than ever was more than apparent in
December 1939 when the film version of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind premiered at the
Loew's Grand Theater. In keeping with the city's now well-known penchant
for self-promotion, PR-savvy Mayor William B. Hartsfield spared no exertion to
assure a glittery Hollywood presence for the event including, of course, Clark
Gable, Vivien Leigh and the film's other white actors. Fearing repercussions
from local whites, however, he extended no such hospitality to Hattie McDaniel,
Butterfly McQueen or other black cast members. In the end, the only black
participants of note in the entire affair were the members of the choir at the
Ebenezer Baptist Church, including the son of its pastor. Just shy of his 10th birthday,
Martin King sang along as, in keeping with the film's blatant racial
stereotyping, the group, dressed as slaves, performed spirituals for an
all-white audience at a Junior League charity gala.
King and Hartsfield would cross
paths frequently in the years to come. Under Hartsfield's leadership, Atlanta
would leave a racially fraught Birmingham, Ala., in its dust as it rode the
crest of World War II economic expansion to undisputed preeminence as the
South's most dynamic city. Steadily changing with the times, the popular and
uber-connected Hartsfield would draw on his gift for orchestration again and
again as he presided over the desegregation of downtown businesses and the city's
tiny but notably uneventful first steps toward integrating its public schools.
Meanwhile, returned to share Ebenezer's bully pulpit with his father, the
younger Rev. King began to cast doubt on the mayor's vaunted claim that his
city was "too busy to hate" by consistently pushing the envelope of social change
further and faster than Hartsfield had envisioned. This not only made King a
sometimes troublesome presence for the image-obsessed Hartsfield, but vice
versa, as the mayor's moderating interventions in conflicts over King's
protests may have forestalled some of the uglier racial confrontations that
ultimately served King's purposes best.
Atlanta had found its breezy,
boosterist persona in the artful and charming Hartsfield. It would be slower,
however, to acknowledge as its conscience the 1964 Nobel Laureate who, the day
after returning from Oslo, immediately antagonized the local business
establishment by venturing scarcely two blocks from his church to join workers
picketing for better wages at the city's Scripto Pen Company. Not surprisingly,
Hartsfield joined his mayoral successor, Ivan Allen, Jr., in a frantic effort to
persuade key white business leaders whose
feathers King had just ruffled that, lest the world see their city as reluctant
to embrace its globally acclaimed native son, they must, however grudgingly, lend their high-profile
presence to an upcoming gala celebrating his achievement. Sure enough, among the
1,500 people in attendance on the appointed evening were several members of the local
business elite, including none other than James V. Carmichael, the president of
Scripto Pen. Ironically, but surely fittingly as well, some 30 years later, his
plant's remains would be bulldozed in order to provide parking for visitors to
the city's Martin Luther King, Jr., Historic District.
