Race & The Shaping of 20th Century Atlanta

IDENTIFICATIONS

Butler Street YMCA
Atlanta University
Grady Hospital
NAACP
Ebenezer Baptist Church
Clarence A. Bacote
John Wesley Dobbs
Chapman et al. v. King (1946)
Helen Douglas Mankin
Grace Towns Hamilton
1946 black voting registration drive
Atlanta Negro Voters League
A. T. Walden
William B. Hartsfield
Lester Maddox
"An Appeal for Human Rights" (March 9, 1960)
Atlanta Daily World
Rich's Department Store
Maynard Jackson
Sam Massell
Andrew Young
Heman E. Perry
Macedonia (Bagley) Park
West Side Mutual Development Committee
"Peyton Wall"
Techwood
Atlanta Urban League
Auburn Avenue
"Black Shirts"
Economic Opportunity Act (1964)
Atlanta Civic League
Commission on Interracial Cooperation
Neighborhood Union
Lugenia Burns Hope
SNCC
Atlanta Project
Vine City
Summerhill
Dixie Hills
Atlanta Community Relations Commission
Model Cities program
Underground Atlanta
Washington Park
Mozley Park
Hughes Spalding Pavilion
Jesse Hill, Jr.
Afro-American Patrolmen League
Walter White
Atlanta NAACP
Colored Jitney Bus Association
Rev. William Holmes Borders
MARTA
Booker T. Washington High School
Vivian Calhoun, et al. v. A. C. Latimer, et al. (1958)
Sibley Commission
magnet schools

QUESTIONS

1. What impediments were enacted to restrict black voting, employment and socio-economic advancement in Georgia after the Civil War and the years to come?
2. How did Atlanta's black neighborhoods and schools differ from white ones, beginning in the 1870s and 1880s?
3. Why was segregation seen by progressives of both races as a better alternative to exclusion?
4. What changes occurred in the 1930s-40s that directly affected black voting?
5. Why is the 1949 election seen as a "turning point" in Atlanta politics?
6. Was Atlanta, as Mayor Hartsfield claimed, "A City Too Busy to Hate"? Why did the Atlanta Committee for Cooperative Action (ACCA) believe that Hartsfield's claim was a false image?
7. How did the emergence of the student movement and its use of nonviolent direct action create tensions among new student activists and the movement's "old guard" in Atlanta?
8. What changes did Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr., bring to Atlanta's black community, and how were these changes more cosmetic than substantial?
9. Why did some people believe that Atlanta was a "city in crisis" by March 1975? How did Mayor Jackson attempt to calm the fears of the white business and political establishment?
10. What efforts were made to try to regulate and control the areas in which blacks in Atlanta could live and move?
11. In what ways has "urban renewal" in Atlanta actually meant "Negro removal"?
12. How have white housing units been used as racial buffers?
13. How did Mayors Hartsfield, Allen and Massell employ annexation as a means of keeping Atlanta white?
14. What kinds of jobs were closed to black men and women in Atlanta prior to the 1960s? How did the NRA and WPA and other New Deal agencies countenance discrimination in employment practices and wages in Atlanta?
15. Why didn't federal efforts to increase job opportunities achieve their hoped-for results?
16. How did Mayor Jackson attempt to bring Atlanta's blacks into the city's economic mainstream?
17. How were Atlanta's black neighborhoods neglected in regard to basic city services? How did blacks help themselves in gaining such services? 
18. What tactics did SNCC's Atlanta Project employ to awaken Atlanta's whites to the problem of poor black neighborhoods?
19. Why and how did Mayor Allen and other Atlanta's officials respond to the needs of black neighborhoods?
20. What park and recreational facilities were available for Atlanta's blacks prior to the 1960s? Why did park space in the city remain insufficient and inadequate in the years which followed?
21. How has the city of Atlanta responded to black health needs?
22. Why did Atlanta's blacks have higher mortality rates than whites?
23. What factors led to the city of Atlanta hiring black policemen and firemen? What restrictions were placed on and indignities endured by black policemen and firemen? Why had many of these issues not been resolved by as late as the 1990s?
24. How has Atlanta's mass transit system cared little for the needs of black citizens? How and when were the city's transit segregation laws eliminated? How did the role of race in mass transit development remain significant through the 1980s?
25. What inequities and indignities did Atlanta's blacks endure in public education? How did black leaders and organizations such as the Neighborhood Union and NAACP attempt to correct the situation? How did the white community react to their efforts?
26. How did the Great Depression serve as a setback for black public education in Atlanta, and why didn't the New Deal solve anything?
27. How did Atlantans respond to the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision of 1954? What measures were used to stall desegregation for years? 
28. How did whites, effectively, re-segregate Atlanta schools, after 1965? What drove the whites away?
29. What was the "Atlanta Compromise of 1973"? Why was the black community divided over the compromise?
30. How did Atlanta’s civic leaders (government, business elites) hope to use the 1996 Olympic Games to revitalize downtown by altering the “rent gap” in areas of downtown? What kind of CBD (or downtown) did they want to create by this process?
31. What legacies of racism in Atlanta can be seen today?

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