Flash Back

49 Years Ago This Month: Atlanta's "Berlin Wall"

Paul Crater — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Photograph courtesy of the Atlanta History Center

In December 1962, Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. ordered barricades to be built across two Atlanta streets to discourage black citizens from purchasing homes in an adjacent all-white neighborhood. What seemed to him like a judicious compromise backfired, creating an embarrassment for the city as national media questioned its otherwise glowing reputation for racial harmony.

The controversy started in Peyton Forest, a prosperous, white subdivision of Cascade Heights in southwest Atlanta. The surrounding area was undergoing a racial transition that made white residents uneasy. When Dr. Clinton Warner, a Morehouse graduate, bought a house there, white homeowners asked the mayor to erect barriers on Peyton Road and nearby Harlan Road to prevent further “intrusion.” The Board of Aldermen approved the legislation on December 17, and Mayor Allen quickly signed it. Early the next morning, city maintenance crews, consisting mostly of black workers, erected wooden barriers saying “Road Closed.”

The reaction from the black community was immediate and furious. Petitions were filed in Atlanta’s courts, protesters picketed City Hall with signs referring to Atlanta’s “Berlin Wall,” civil rights organizations called for boycotts of white businesses around Cascade Heights, and black leaders publicly lambasted the mayor. Allen, who had been elected the previous year with overwhelming black support, must have been stung by the comparison to the repressive East German barrier. In fact, in his inaugural address, Allen had said, “It was in Berlin that the tragic and dramatic lesson of what happens to a divided city came home to me.”

The criticism surprised Allen, who’d believed his actions would put the focus on hundreds of acres of unused land north of Cascade Heights. The symbolism, however, was overpowering. Peyton Road remained blocked until March 1, 1963, when a judge ruled the barriers unconstitutional. The mayor had them removed within minutes of the decision. Despite this misstep, Ivan Allen Jr.’s legacy was shaped by his strong leadership in civil rights.

45 Years Ago This Month: The Lester Maddox Gubernatorial Election

Paul Crater — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:00:00 GMT

In the Georgia Gubernatorial Election of November 1966, Lester Maddox rode a wave of resentment over the advancement of the civil rights movement and finished in a virtual tie with Republican millionaire Bo Callaway. Neither candidate won a majority due to former Governor Ellis Arnall’s third-party candidacy. After some wrangling in the courts, the Democrat-controlled Georgia legislature selected Maddox as the winner.

Photograph courtesy of the Atlanta History Center

Lacking political connections and a campaign infrastructure, Maddox simply outworked the competition. He covered the state in his Pontiac station wagon, shaking hands and distributing American flags, bumper stickers, and bubble gum to enthusiastic supporters. Maddox was a seasoned campaigner (he’d run unsuccessfully three times before), yet he boasted of his political inexperience: “God,” he said, was his campaign manager. Actually, it was his brother, Wesley.

Maddox’s opponent in the general election was textile heir Bo Callaway, a recent Republican convert in the mold of Barry Goldwater. The two conservative candidates ran neck and neck. Disenchanted liberals backed Arnall as a write-in candidate, which threw the election into the hands of Maddox’s Democratic allies in the legislature.

Many Georgians were horrified that the pistol-waving eccentric who chased away black ministers from his segregated chicken restaurant, the Pickrick, could become governor. His election also worried Atlanta’s business elite. But Maddox’s rural, blue-collar supporters were elated.

Maddox’s unlikely candidacy hinged on a number of factors, but what swept him into office (for only one term) was the electorate’s unease with the pace of integration and his own folksy charm as champion of the little guy. His racial demagoguery overshadowed his conservative stance on moral values and government intrusion into private enterprise, two issues that have dominated national politics in the decades since.

20 Years Ago This Month: Braves Lose World Series—And Get a Parade!

Rebecca Burns — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:00:00 GMT

Atlanta sports fans have a notorious—and well-deserved—reputation for fair-weather fickleness. But on October 29, 1991, 750,000 Atlantans stormed Downtown to cheer for a losing team: the Atlanta Braves, returning from a defeat by the Minnesota Twins in a nail-biting World Series that saw both teams go from worst to first in their leagues.

The crowds were so dense, three MARTA stations had to be closed (more than 300,000 people took the train that day). Fans swarmed the cars carrying the roster of emerging stars—John Smoltz, Tom Glavine, Sid Bream, Deion Sanders, Mark Lemke, David Justice—and politicos, including then Mayor Maynard Jackson and former Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., who had recruited the Braves to the city twenty-five years earlier.

>> GALLERY: View Braves covers from our archives

The politicos and players rode in classic convertibles driven by members of local car clubs. Jan and Terry Appling piloted a vintage burgundy 1966 Mustang carrying Brian Hunter and Tommy Gregg. “We thought we’d just ride down Peachtree and it would be a little fling,” recalls Jan Appling. “It started out fine, but it grew to a humongous throng of people, beyond what anybody conceived, as we got down the route. People were everywhere, getting on cars, grabbing the players. They had baseball bats they wanted to have signed. It was scary.” Still, she and her husband didn’t really grasp the magnitude of the event until the next morning when they read newspaper reports.

But, says Appling, who later took part in the far more controlled 1995 parade when the Braves actually won the Series, nothing compared to the excitement of the 1991 season. Secretary of the Native Atlantans Club, Appling has been a Braves fan all her life. “My parents were Atlanta Crackers fans before the Braves even existed,” she notes.

Photograph courtesy of the Atlanta History Center

Rebecca Burns is Emmis Publishing's director of digital strategy.
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50 Years Ago This Month: Rapid Transit Pipe Dreams

Rebecca Burns — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:24:00 GMT

“It is no mere flight of the imagination to say that an inadequate, unbalanced transportation system in the Atlanta area could cause economic stagnation,” wrote the magazine’s editors in a lead article in a special September 1961 issue on getting around Atlanta. After all, as they noted a few pages earlier, the metro area’s population had surged past the 1 million mark. The article touted a planned sixty-mile transit network, which would be completed in 1969.

In fact, it was not until 1971 that voters passed a referendum that allowed for the start of what is today’s MARTA system, and not until 1979 that the first rail spur—from Avondale to Georgia State—began operation.

A few months earlier, the magazine reported on the proposed “circumferential highway,” aka the Perimeter. That project was completed by 1969. Today an estimated 2 million people travel on the Perimeter daily, while MARTA buses and trains transport 500,000 passengers.

Fifty Years Ago This Month: APS Is Integrated

Rebecca Burns — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:43:00 GMT

On the morning of August 30, 1961, nine African American students headed for the first day of classes at four all-white Atlanta high schools. They were shadowed by hundreds of reporters, dozens of police officers, and crowds of parents, politicians, and onlookers. At the end of the day, unlike scenes in other Southern cities that resisted desegregation, Atlanta was peaceful. No violence erupted, no white kids showed in blackface, no parents stood on school grounds yelling epithets, and media coverage stuck closely to the script suggested in the information packets that PR-savvy Atlanta organizers distributed in advance. In a press conference, President John Kennedy commended city leaders for organizing integration “with dignity and without incident” and urged other school systems to “look closely at what Atlanta has done.”

Like so much of Atlanta’s carefully burnished image, the good PR was the result of pragmatic behind-the-scenes efforts. Although the 1961 APS integration did not result in the violence of Little Rock or chaos of New Orleans, it arrived a full seven years after the Brown v. Board ruling, and only because of a court order (Georgia segregationists tried to shut down public schools entirely rather than integrate). The peaceful integration was the result of months of planning by OASIS (Organizations Assisting Schools in September), a biracial coalition of four dozen community groups. OASIS volunteers organized “house meetings” in which facilitators fielded questions from parents, using workbooks covering topics that ranged from the obvious (“must Atlanta desegregate?”) to the offensive (“will desegregation result in increased health problems?”) to the racially phobic (“will school desegregation lead to intermarriage?”).

The real heroes of the day were the nine teenagers who entered the hostile territory of those four high schools, and their bravery was largely greeted with silence. Mary McMullen Francis, who integrated Grady High School, told Atlanta magazine four decades later that no one asked her how her day went, and no one talked about her experience. “Even in my own community, it was as if it never happened. The city made it known that nobody wanted you to talk about it.”

Rebecca Burns is Emmis Publishing's director of digital strategy.
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42 Years Ago This Month: The First Atlanta International Pop Festival

Scott Roberts — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:36:00 GMT

“There it was, man, pop culture in the middle of an unreal dust bowl with a wide asphalt rim.” Thus wrote the Atlanta Constitution’s Albert Scardino forty-two years ago about the first Atlanta International Pop Festival, which took place on the Fourth of July weekend in 1969. Held on a stock car track in the town of Hampton, thirty miles south of Downtown, the festival and its two days of peace and love scooped the much more famous event in Woodstock, New York, by more than a month. Despite the sweltering temperatures (nearly 100 degrees both days), huge crowds (as high as 130,000), and potential for illegal shenanigans and general debauchery, the event featuring such acts as the Staple Singers, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and headliner Janis Joplin went off with very little trouble. As Paul Beeman with the Atlanta Journal put it at the time: “All were having their own scene. Digging themselves.”

The happening has often mistakenly been remembered as being held at Piedmont Park, probably because principal organizer Alex Cooley booked the Grateful Dead and a handful of others at that location on the Monday following the festival in an effort to appease his guilty conscience over actually making a $12,000 profit on the fest. (Can you imagine? A concert promoter making money!) “You have to understand the context,” explained Cooley. “It was the height of the Vietnam War, and Lester Maddox was governor. I wanted to do something that would make people where I lived understand that we could change.”

Cooley’s original intention of turning the Atlanta Pop Festival into an annual event was not to be. Only one more would happen, in 1970, this time in the town of Byron—and boasting more than three times the attendance of the first. The second festival featured Macon’s Allman Brothers and what would be one of the last live appearances of Jimi Hendrix, who died of a drug overdose two months later.

Photograph by Phillip Rauls

Scott Roberts is our copy editor.
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44 Years Ago This Month: Six Flags Over Georgia Opens

Rebecca Burns — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:00:00 GMT

It took $12 million to transform a 276-acre dairy farm west of Downtown into the Southeast’s first theme park; that Magic Kingdom down in Orlando wouldn’t open for four years. But all the clearing and construction didn’t eradicate the red clay and scrubby pines of the Cobb County surroundings when Six Flags Over Georgia opened for business on June 16, 1967. That rustic flavor added to the verisimilitude of Six Flags Over Georgia’s prime attractions: the Dahlonega Mine Train roller coaster, which hurtled from a thirty-seven-foot peak, and the Tales of the Okefenokee boat ride, which took passengers past slightly creepy scenes based on Joel Chandler Harris fables.

Another prime attraction was the 1,000-seat Krofft’s Circus puppet show, an early foray by the brothers Sid and Marty Krofft, best known as the creators of such groovy TV fare as H.R. Pufnstuf and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. The Kroffts would go on to open a competing amusement park, the World of Sid and Marty Krofft, in the Omni complex in the 1970s.

On that 1967 opening day, 3,325 people rode the rides at Six Flags, among them a young member of the marketing staff by the name of Spurgeon Richardson. His career at the park rose as steadily as the steep incline on the Great American Scream Machine; when Atlanta magazine covered the park’s twentieth anniversary in the May 1987 issue, Richardson was Six Flags’ VP and general manager.

The man whose mission was marketing the Mind Bender would later go on to tougher challenges helming the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau. Asked to compare the two jobs, he said, “At Six Flags, I rather enjoyed giving instructions to the 1,500 teenagers we’d hire each year. At the ACVB, I learned to enjoy taking instruction from 1,500 member businesses.”

Richardson still loves to ride roller coasters, especially wooden ones. “I love that clickety-clack sound of a wooden coaster. My favorite is the Great American Scream Machine. I love riding it, and I love that name. I wish I’d come up with that. That was brilliant marketing.”

>> VIDEOS: Watch this video and this video that document the Tales of the Okefenokee boat ride

Rebecca Burns is Emmis Publishing's director of digital strategy.
Learn more about her | Contact her

25 Years Ago This Month: Now, Imagined Then

Justin Heckert — Mon, 02 May 2011 12:00:00 GMT

Twenty-five years ago, our future was a floating bubble in the sky. Inside that bubble, a futuristic man would direct futuristic Atlanta traffic from above, and pedestrians would shop at the outside mall and walk along the river that would replace Freedom Parkway. Shimmery, Oz-like buildings would dwarf the Peachtree Plaza and Georgia Pacific Tower in the skyline. Rapid transit trains, pedestrian bridges . . . This was going to be 2011. The perspective should look familiar: Robert Fowler and four designers from Tipton Masterson Associates took a picture in 1986 from the same vantage point made famous last year by the apocalyptic poster for The Walking Dead. They traced the picture onto paper and colored it in with Magic Marker, pastels, and a felt-tip pen. “It’s a very playful drawing,” says Fowler, who was commissioned by Atlanta magazine to do the rendering. “We sat down and considered what we could make 2011 look like and decided we couldn’t do anything adequate, inspiring, or engaging enough with our serious thoughts. So we decided, okay, let’s just have some fun. And now looking at this drawing is fun, but yet not at all what I’d try to make a city look like.”

1986 artwork by artists and architectural staff of Tipton Masterson Associates Ltd., currently known as Fowler Design Association Inc., Architecture, Interior Design, Land & Town Planning; photograph of artwork by Patrick Heagney

46 Years Ago This Month: The Braves Come to Town

Rebecca Burns — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 12:00:00 GMT

The night before the first braves game played in Atlanta, general manager Dick Cecil called Atlanta Journal sportswriter Lee Walburn: “Want to join us for batting practice?”

Walburn raced to the stadium and was at home plate “before the players strapped their jocks on.” And so, with soon-to-be announcer Ernie Johnson pitching, Walburn hit the first ball in Atlanta Stadium, a line drive into left field.

“Of course, the next night Tommie Aaron hit the first home run in the Atlanta stadium, and that’s what history will record,” says Walburn. Tommie and big brother Hank played that April 9, 1965, game in Atlanta—an exhibition outing against the Detroit Tigers—as Milwaukee Braves. Although Atlanta won the franchise in 1964, legal disputes kept the team tied up in Milwaukee into early 1966.

The Atlanta Braves played their first official season opener on April 12, 1966, losing 3–2 to the Pittsburgh Pirates in front of a sellout crowd in a thirteen-inning game. The starting lineup included Hank Aaron in right field and Joe Torre as catcher. The first pitch was thrown by Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., who had led efforts to bring big league sports to Atlanta, famously saying the stadium was erected “on land we didn’t own, with money we didn’t have, and for teams we had not signed.”

Nine years later, Hank Aaron would hit his record-setting 715th home run in that stadium. It was a moment that Walburn—who went on to become PR director for the Braves and, in time, editor in chief of Atlanta magazine—would write about decades later: As Aaron “circles the bases with the same casual gait he’s used 714 times before, nearly 54,000 of us rise from our seats like a giant ocean wave churned by a sudden gust of wind.”

Photograph courtesy of the Atlanta History Center

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32 Years Ago This Month: Ray Charles Serenades the Legislature

Rebecca Burns — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:44:00 GMT

On March 7, 1979, musician Ray Charles played an unusual venue: Georgia’s Gold Dome. Charles serenaded lawmakers with “Georgia on My Mind,” his rendition of which was named the official state song by law a month later. Although other states have official songs, Georgia’s specification of a particular performer is rare. But critics have deemed Charles’s chart-topping 1960 recording of “Georgia” the definitive interpretation, and state lawmakers concurred, passing the bill honoring him 130–10 in the House and 45–4 in the Senate.

By all accounts, Charles’s performance in the statehouse was a tender and moving scene. But it was not quite as dramatic as depicted in the Oscar-winning biopic Ray a quarter century later. In the movie, Charles is invited to play for lawmakers as part of an apology for being “banned for life” from his native state because of refusing to play a segregated Augusta venue in 1961, a move that triggered riotous student protests. The Augusta Chronicle did some archival rooting around when the movie was released and found no evidence to back up the cinematic story line. Yes, a 1961 Bell Auditorium show was canceled, and yes, Charles was sued for breaching a contract and refusing to comply with segregated seating in the theater. But while students at historically black Paine College played a role in Charles’s concert cancellation, they did not take to the streets, but instead dispatched a rep to send Charles a telegram summarizing their concerns about the auditorium.

Even if the Hollywood hoopla is false, it’s true that Charles continued to earn accolades from his home state. A few months after the Gold Dome performance, Charles was an inaugural inductee into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.

Photograph courtesy of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame