From the memories of everyday experience, "Living Atlanta" vividly
recreates life in the city during the three decades from World War
I through World War II--a period in which a small, regional capital
became a center of industry, education, finance, commerce, and
travel. This profusely illustrated volume draws on nearly two
hundred interviews with Atlanta residents who recall, in their own
words, "the way it was"--from segregated streetcars to college
fraternity parties, from moonshine peddling to visiting
performances by the Metropolitan Opera, from the growth of
neighborhoods to religious revivals. The book is based on a
celebrated public radio series that was broadcast in 1979-80 and
hailed by Studs Terkel as "an important, exciting project--a truly
human portrait of a city of people." "Living Atlanta" presents a
diverse array of voices--domestics and businessmen, teachers and
factory workers, doctors and ballplayers. There are memories of the
city when it wasn't quite a city: "Back in those young days it was
country in Atlanta," musician Rosa Lee Carson reflects. "It sure
was. Why, you could even raise a cow out there in your yard." There
are eyewitness accounts of such major events as the Great Fire of
1917: "The wind blowing that way, it was awful," recalls fire
fighter Hugh McDonald. "There'd be a big board on fire, and the
wind would carry that board, and it'd hit another house and start
right up on that one. And it just kept spreading." There are
glimpses of the workday: "It's a real job firing an engine, a darn
hard job," says railroad man J. R. Spratlin. "I was using a scoop
and there wasn't no eight hour haul then, there was twelve hours,
sometimes sixteen." And there are scenes of the city at play:
"Baseball was the popular sport," remembers Arthur Leroy Idlett,
who grew up in the Pittsburgh neighborhood. "Everybody had teams.
And people--you could put some kids out there playing baseball, and
before you knew a thing, you got a crowd out there, watching kids
play." Organizing the book around such topics as transportation,
health and religion, education, leisure, and politics, the authors
provide a narrative commentary that places the diverse remembrances
in social and historical context. Resurfacing throughout the book
as a central theme are the memories of Jim Crow and the
peculiarities of black-white relations. Accounts of Klan rallies,
job and housing discrimination, and poll taxes are here, along with
stories about the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, early
black forays into local politics, and the role of the city's black
colleges. Martin Luther King, Sr., historian Clarence Bacote,
former police chief Herbert Jenkins, educator Benjamin Mays, and
sociologist Arthur Raper are among those whose recollections are
gathered here, but the majority of the voices are those of ordinary
Atlantans, men and women who in these pages relive day-to-day
experiences of a half-century ago.
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