People

Hosea “Hosey” Williams served as a Georgia legislator, Atlanta City Council member, and DeKalb County commissioner, but his extracurricular activities earned him the most notoriety.

The Reverend Joseph Lowery is uncharacteristically quiet as he sits at a long table inside the modest room in Downtown’s Atlanta Life Insurance Company building. Between bites of fried chicken and peach cobbler, he occasionally interjects or asks a question, but mostly he listens attentively, staring out at a group that’s as diverse as the issues for which its members are so passionate.

Sometime after midnight, in the early morning of December 16, 1939—more than five hours after settling into their seats—the city’s elite flowed out of Loew’s Grand Theatre, overjoyed at the spectacle they’d just witnessed. Margaret Mitchell emerged, enormously relieved. Hollywood had not destroyed her story after all.

Atlanta’s millionaire consumer guru Clark Howard never aimed to be a media star, much less the darling of the public and the object of beautiful women’s attentions. The bespectacled Howard is a self-described nerd, a dweeb, or as he expresses it, “a complete flake,” whose idea of a fun Saturday night is sitting at the computer searching for best buys.

If you took a map of Atlanta and placed dots on every spot where Woodruff—during his time the most admired, most influential, and richest man in Atlanta—left a mark, the terrain would be covered.

The cars keep coming—sedan, coupe, SUV, SUV, hybrid, van, SUV, truck, station wagon, sedan, truck. It's midmorning and technically well after the end of rush hour, on a leafy, tree-lined residential street. But this is the ATL, the automotive industry's bitch, whose car-clogged freeways and surface-street arteries are choking on a diet of pure vehicular cholesterol, and traffic just keeps on coming.

Lester Maddox, best known as an anti-integrationist and chicken restaurateur, stumbled into the governorship. When his opponent failed to win a majority of votes, the General Assembly picked Maddox.

In the segregated South where the brothers Young grew up, the YMCA was much more than a place to work out. With restaurants, hotels, auditoriums, and convention centers off-limits to blacks, the Y—which was not integrated until 1963—served as a gathering place for meetings, concerts, and educational programs.

Dear Richard,Remember me?We had dinner last January?

John Lewis’s 2012 reelection staff decided to embrace the congressman’s civil disobedience record with merchandise featuring a photo from the activist’s 1963 arrest at an Atlanta Toddle House sit-in.