W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk at Atlanta University 3/19
Jump to… 19 things you didn’t know about Atlanta’s past Swimmers and boaters once flocked to a six-acre lake in Grant Park Atlanta was founded on sprawl—and hospitality W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk at Atlanta University Zoo Atlanta was founded with animals from a defunct circus There’s a hidden cave in Chastain Park Little Richard and James Brown cut their teeth at the Royal Peacock Atlanta’s first celeb chef was the mother of modern Southern cooking Rich’s downtown hosted annual fashion shows that drew the likes of Pucci and Hubert de Givenchy Atlanta’s first talk radio station launched national voices The country’s deadliest hotel fire prompted new national safety codes Atlanta once had its own “Berlin Wall” Atlanta had its own version of Haight-Ashbury In the 1970s Atlantans hit the ski slopes in Vinings The Sex Pistols made its American debut in a Piedmont Road shopping center Pleasant Peasant brought casual fine dining to Atlanta Eastside Atlanta neighborhoods were almost split by an interstate The Kinks, Willie Nelson, and ZZ Top left their handprints on Peachtree Road Smokey and the Bandit II blew up Atlanta’s most famous roller coaster CNN Center was once the site of the world’s largest indoor amusement park
1918: W.E.B. Du Bois Photograph by C. M. Battey
A century before FX’s Atlanta broadcast an experimental take on the Southern African American experience, W.E.B. Du Bois invented the genre with his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk . Du Bois wrote and published this hybrid collection of essays and sketches while he was a professor at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta). But it’s not widely associated with Atlanta—perhaps because he had a contentious relationship with the university, or perhaps because his legacy is more tightly bound with his home state of Massachusetts.
3/19
Jump to… 19 things you didn’t know about Atlanta’s past Swimmers and boaters once flocked to a six-acre lake in Grant Park Atlanta was founded on sprawl—and hospitality W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk at Atlanta University Zoo Atlanta was founded with animals from a defunct circus There’s a hidden cave in Chastain Park Little Richard and James Brown cut their teeth at the Royal Peacock Atlanta’s first celeb chef was the mother of modern Southern cooking Rich’s downtown hosted annual fashion shows that drew the likes of Pucci and Hubert de Givenchy Atlanta’s first talk radio station launched national voices The country’s deadliest hotel fire prompted new national safety codes Atlanta once had its own “Berlin Wall” Atlanta had its own version of Haight-Ashbury In the 1970s Atlantans hit the ski slopes in Vinings The Sex Pistols made its American debut in a Piedmont Road shopping center Pleasant Peasant brought casual fine dining to Atlanta Eastside Atlanta neighborhoods were almost split by an interstate The Kinks, Willie Nelson, and ZZ Top left their handprints on Peachtree Road Smokey and the Bandit II blew up Atlanta’s most famous roller coaster CNN Center was once the site of the world’s largest indoor amusement park