Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914-1948.

Abstract

From memories of everyday experience, Living vividly recreates life in city during three decades from World War 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 Metropolitan Opera, from 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 important, exciting project--a truly human portrait of a city of people. Living presents a diverse array of voices--domestics and businessmen, teachers and factory workers, doctors and ballplayers. There are memories of 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 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 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 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 city at play: Baseball was popular sport, remembers Arthur Leroy Idlett, who grew up in 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 book around such topics as transportation, health and religion, education, leisure, and politics, authors provide a narrative commentary that places diverse remembrances in social and historical context. Resurfacing throughout book as a central theme are memories of Jim Crow and peculiarities of black-white relations. Accounts of Klan rallies, job and housing discrimination, and poll taxes are here, along with stories about Commission on Interracial Cooperation, early black forays into local politics, and role of 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 majority of voices are those of ordinary Atlantans, men and women who in these pages relive day-to-day experiences of a half-century ago.