Atlanta Historical Society
University of Georgia Press
April 2005
On Sale: April 16, 2005
432 pages ISBN: 0820316970 EAN: 9780820316970 Trade Size Add to Wish List
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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