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Martin Luther King, Jr.s upbringing in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1930s and ’40s is treated, with some focus on how “the Ebenezer tradition” and the larger African American church culture in Atlanta and the South impacted his growing understanding of and vision for the Christian church as a whole, from his childhood to his adult years. As the son and grandson of Ebenezer pastors and of pious women who were an active presence in that congregation for generations, King is pictured as one who always attached great significance to the church and church-related concerns. His early sense of the church as “a second home,” as extended family, as the fountainhead of culture, as a refuge, as educational center, as custodian of a deep and vital spirituality, and as a benchmark for congregational activism is underscored. The chapter concludes with attention to King’s struggle to negotiate the boundaries between the Christian fundamentalism to which he was exposed at Ebenezer and the theological liberalism he studied as a student at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University.

This chapter reveals how white parents used the rationale of “freedom of association” to protect their children from attending school with African Americans. It discusses that when it became apparent that the public school system would be desegregated, whites applied the same line of reasoning in reenrolling their children at private religious academies. It notes that these institutions had supposedly suffered defeat. It argues that the emphasis white Atlantans placed on the right to make choices for their children free of governmental inference was not merely a conceit intended to conceal their crude racial prejudice.

This chapter follows Mary Edwards Bryan’s flight from war-torn Louisiana in spring 1863 and her journey to Atlanta to seek employment and greater security. The authors examine wartime conditions for women in Atlanta and discuss the constraints imposed upon newspapers and journals as a result of the destruction of paper mills. During this time of strain, Mary’s sought direction and employment from Catherine Webb Barber of Southern Literary Companion, Simeon A. Atkinson of Southern Field and Fireside, and Josiah S. Peterson of Atlanta Daily Gazette. Wartime privations made employment tenuous, however, and Mary ultimately had to return to Louisiana and her husband.

By examining tourist culture, this chapter shows how the commodification of the “old world” Spain and South is performed via its construction of seemingly “new” urban spaces, in particular, the Olympic cities of Barcelona and Atlanta. Meanwhile, films like José Luis Guerín’s En construcción (2001) and John Sayles’s Sunshine State (2002), though very different, directly address the issue of urban renewal in, respectively, Barcelona and the Florida coastline, demonstrating the “construction” that making the old into something new is a performance that involves constructing it as “authentically” old, thus making it worthy—and interesting—for renewal. What Guerín and Sayles critique, therefore, is not the altering of the landscape itself, but the performativity inherent in constructing space around binary opposites, specifically those of new and old as well as foreigner (or tourist) and native.

This chapter captures the development of Westminster in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the late 1950s, Westminster’s student body had quadrupled, and the school was housed on the current West Paces Ferry Road campus. School leaders prepared for the possible closing of Atlanta Public Schools as black Atlantans called for desegregation in the face of oppositional state policies. As the civil rights movement increased in momentum, Westminster and other local schools, including Lovett and Trinity, received inquiries into their admissions policies from interracial organizations such as the Greater Atlanta Council on Human Relations and leading civil rights activists including the Kings, Abernathys, and Youngs, and black families such as the Rosses. Private school leaders worked to find a balance among multiple contexts and influences, including the enlarged federal presence in education and increased questions about federal tax-exempt status for private schools. Concurrently, a school culture at Westminster developed in ways that continued to reflect the “Old South” and included racist traditions while some white students earnestly debated and discussed the issues of the day.

This chapter demonstrates how the potential for collaboration was developed in Denver and Atlanta and how it is proving appropriate and effective for both internal and external strategies of social reform. Membership size of churches in both cities varies widely; many—49% of churches in Denver and 52% in Atlanta — have between 100 and 500 members. There is a strong tendency in both cities for black churches to own their buildings rather than rent them. In addition, a majority of churches in both cities conduct at least one nonreligious community outreach program. Metro Denver Black Church Initiative was launched in Denver to improve conditions in low-income black neighborhoods through the local churches. Furthermore, the outreach to the community in Atlanta is described.

In his “Autobiography of Religious Development,” written as an assignment at Crozer Seminary, the twenty-one-year-old M. L. King described his religious environment as a “universe,” a socially constructed world that molded his identity and outlook in life in general. The moral and physical focus of that universe was the sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church located in Atlanta where his father presided from the pulpit and the son had been baptized. He wrote, “The church has always been a second home for me.” “As far back as I can remember I was in church every Sunday.”

King seldom spoke publicly about the Sustainers and Reformers who preceded him or the powerful mentors who shaped him as a preacher. He understood perhaps that American culture wants utter authenticity of its leaders or feared that if he connected his debt to the black tradition, he would lose his integrity with white audiences. The sole on-the-record statement King made with regard to his own preaching happened in Atlanta one week after JFK's assassination. King was bedridden with flu but nevertheless permitted a long interview to a young student named Donald H. Smith.

This chapter offers Mary Bryan's introduction to full-time employment as a writer and editor with the Georgia Temperance Crusader after the journal's relocation to Atlanta. It covers not only her journalistic experience but also her introduction to the city and its literary scene, including personalities such as James Summerfield Slaughter, Maria Jourdan Westmoreland, Myron Napier Bartlett, and William Henry Peck. The authors follow the evolution of Mary’s career as she directs her ambition toward the New York Ledger and working for its famed publisher Robert Bonner. With the threat of civil war looming, Mary battles her father's objections to her working in the North, only to find that he has concluded an arrangement compelling her return to her husband in Louisiana. She takes with her only an agreement to write for the Georgia-based Southern Field and Fireside and its editor John Reuben Thompson.

William T. Sherman's conquest of Atlanta in 1864 has long occupied a prominent position in the popular and scholarly understanding of the Civil War, how warfare affected civilians, how people remember war, and how they imagine rejuvenation and rebuilding. Little of this literature has explored a ground-level understanding of how soldiers and civilians, during the war itself, represented destruction and devastation, how these perceptions shaped their attitudes toward the war, and how memories of destruction fed into postwar reconstruction. A large literature exists about how the Confederate defeat was remembered and how that memory shaped the definition of the postwar New South. This paper considers remembering in a different sense—how wartime destruction shaped the city's identity. In the emerging narrative about Atlanta, defeat also meant rebirth. The Phoenix in the early years of the war's aftermath meshed notions of destructions with reconstruction, with the end of the Old South replaced by the making of the New South.

This chapter describes the genesis of the kneel-in movement in the months after the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. It details the first wave of kneel-in protests that began in Atlanta in August of that year as a collaboration between the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Atlanta Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights. Emphasis is placed on how the kneel-ins were understood—by those who planned and engaged in them, by those inside the targeted churches, and by those who analyzed and publicized them. An interpretation that emphasizes kneel-ins' dramatic character is developed using the categories of “spectacle of exclusion” and “spectacle of embrace.” Conflicting views of the motives of those who engaged in kneel-ins are considered. Finally, 1960 kneel-in campaigns in Atlanta, Savannah and Memphis are described in detail.

This chapter focuses on the death of James Baldwin, which made a big impact on Sonia Sanchez’s life. When Sanchez first read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, she knew she was home. Seeing Baldwin on TV, she immediately felt a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America’s contradictions transformed his face into a warrior’s face, whose tongue transformed massacres into triumphs. When Sanchez first met him in the late 1960s, she was stricken by his smile smiling out at the New York City audience he had just attacked. Sanchez, however, focuses on the next to the last time they spoke in Atlanta, when Atlanta was just coming out from under serial murders. At the time, Atlanta looked on Baldwin as an outsider attempting to stir up things better left unsaid.

Albert Murray commands Company F, Second US Artillery, a part of Maj. Gen. James McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee, as it moved south during the Atlanta campaign. When McPherson’s army approached the outer defenses of Atlanta, Albert’s battery was detached from the Sixteenth Corps and sent to the front line defenses of the Seventeenth Corps. On July 22, 1864, in anticipation of Confederate flank attack, his battery was ordered to return to the Sixteenth Corps, but he and the battery were captured in the same forest where General McPherson was killed. He was sent to a Confederate officer’s prison in Georgia where he became afflicted with typhoid and died within a few weeks. His death was not known until a paroled Union officer wrote to the adjutant general in Washington in March 1865.

This chapter chronicles how early decisions by Dr. William Pressly, founding president of Westminster, and other private school leaders began to blur the boundaries between public and private. Westminster, established in 1951, became a popular private school among white middle- and upper-class Atlantans. As Pressly became a leader of the National Council of Independent Schools, he began to negotiate multiple contexts, including that of the city of Atlanta, the state of Georgia, and independent schools nationally. Westminster’s early school culture reflected “Old South” sentiments and racist traditions, while at the same time the first black students to desegregate the school were being born. They would be raised in the segregated black communities and schools developed because of and in spite of Jim Crow. What they gained as young boys and girls would help equip them for experiences that they did not know lay ahead—desegregating and attending Westminster.