Earl Mann Beats the Klan: Jackie Robinson and the First Integrated Games in Atlanta

Abstract

At 1:30 p.m. on April 8, 1949, Earl Mann, the president of the Atlanta Crackers of the Class AA Southern Association, had his regular monthly meeting with Hughes Spalding, the chairman of the Crackers' board of directors. Spalding did not record in his desk diary what he and Mann discussed, but surely a major topic of their conversation was the game scheduled for that evening at venerable Ponce de Leon Park. (1) The game pitted the all-white Crackers against the integrated Brooklyn Dodgers, with their two black players, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. The Dodgers-Crackers contest would be the first mixed-race baseball game in Atlanta and the first in a major city of the Deep THE SETTING: ATLANTA IN 1949 In 1941 Atlanta was known for a soft drink, Coca-Cola, and a novel about the Lost Cause made into a movie, Gone With the Wind. World War II changed that image and transformed Atlanta from an overgrown village into a bustling major city. The war stimulated explosive economic and population growth that continued throughout the decade. The federal government made Atlanta the military supply center for the Southeast and the area headquarters for all military personnel stationed in the region. The war effort pumped millions of dollars into the local economy, and thousands of servicemen passed through the city. Atlanta also became the regional seat for more than fifty government agencies, so many that the city became known as the Little Washington of the South. In September 1943 the huge Bell Bomber plant began operations in nearby Marietta, Georgia. It employed between thirty thousand and forty thousand workers and had a weekly payroll of $1.5 million. Shortly after the war, the Ford Motor Company and the General Motors Corporation built large plants on the outskirts of the city. These manufacturers employed tens of thousands of workers and had an economic impact in the tens of millions of dollars. Between 1945 and 1950 the number of factories in Atlanta increased by 75 percent, and many national corporations established branch offices in the city. Retail business thrived with net sales exceeding $500 million in 1947. Atlanta was the banking, communications, and transportation center of the region. The city was home to the Federal Reserve Bank for the region. Its telephone exchange was the largest in the South and the third largest in the world. Delta Air Lines, which moved to Atlanta in 1941 and began operating commercial flights connecting the cities of the South, built a $1 million hub in the city in 1947. In 1948 the Atlanta airport serviced more than five hundred thousand passengers, and during certain months of the year it was the busiest in the country. In the fall of 1948 construction began on a $40 million expressway system. At the same time, Atlanta became the site of the first southern television station, Welcome South Brother (WSB). The population of Atlanta rose from 302,288 in 1940 to 331,314 in 1950, while the population of the metro area increased from 518,100 to 664,033. Many soldiers who had trained in or visited Atlanta during the war settled there after their discharge from the military. By 1949 Atlanta had emerged as the undisputed capital of the (2) The war also had a tremendous impact on race relations in the city, and in the years immediately afterward, Atlanta experienced tumultuous racial upheaval. African American servicemen returning from the fight against fascism overseas demanded greater equality and democracy at home. They would not obsequiously return to the inferior status that society had previously assigned to them. Some whites resisted, resorting to violence to maintain the racial status quo of strict segregation and white supremacy. African Americans constituted slightly more than one-third of Atlanta's population. (3) They exerted their political power for the first time in decades in a special election in February 1946 when they provided the margin of victory to Helen Douglas Mankin, a liberal white woman, in her race for the US Congress. …