Letter From Atlanta
the north and south of a city's transformation
2008-02-27
By William Jelani Cobb

The one-legged woman with the cloudy eyes and eight decades of history etched into her skin leaned waaay in her wheelchair before she sprung her question: You ain't from here is you?  Her backdrop was a pock-marked parking lot on a blast furnace Atlanta afternoon. Her name, as she gave it to me was Miss Catherine – a subtle instruction that as grown you might be, you still ain’t old enough to say her first name without a preface. She was stranded on this strip of asphalt in a motorized wheelchair that has broken down. Maybe it was in the lingering South Queens accent or the fact that you forgot to say ma'am.

Or maybe you just wear New York on you like that brother in the club with too much cologne. Either way, she's sized you up with those cloudy eyes and responded to your offer for a ride with a question about your roots. And now she's taken it as her task to school you.

The place has changed, she says. It ain't like it used to be. No condemnation or pride, just a simple statement of the facts. And even if you haven't been here long, you know that she has a point.

Atlanta is a stone city that has become a steel and glass city. On paper, this is a mid-sized southern metropolis covering 132 square miles with a metro population of 4.7 million and an elevation of 980 feet above sea level. It built itself out of rails and commerce and cotton and ambitions of the New South.

But these are the dry municipal facts. In truth, Atlanta is a metaphor. An idea. A barometer.  A Mecca.

I’ve been in Atlanta for six years now but inside of five minutes here you can’t help but notice that this place is a scale model of black America with all of our glories, vanities, contradictions and failures.  The precise status of black America in 2008 can be found somewhere between the old Bankhead Parkway -  inspiration for a thousand hip hop references and home to even more hard realities -  and Cascade Road, bourgeois landing strip and metaphor for black success.

The fact is that we have spent decades trying to find a precise barometer for our post - civil rights experiences, the measure of our successes and failures in the era that began the moment Martin checked into the Lorraine Motel. There is no single number, no weighted index to explain what it means to have the real possibility of a black president, and while 40% of black children remain below the poverty line and a million black men languish in prison. There is no index, but there is a case study of these irreconcilable developments, a place where the balance sheet of progress and failure is as simple as a zip code.

And that place is Atlanta.

And that is what Miss Catherine meant; her eyes have witnessed Atlanta’s transformation from city to metaphor. The fingerprints of the past are all over the ATL, from the narrow 19th century streets to the street signs that coordinated municipal segregation. It was here that DuBois articulated his Talented Tenth theory and here that his nemesis Booker T. gave that Atlanta Compromise speech in what is now Piedmont Park. It was here –102 years ago -- that the envy of black success and bloated myths of a black crime wave detonated a race riot that raged its way into history.

The old woman looked out the car window, but she wasn’t seeing the Kroger Supermarket or the neon beacon outside Green's Liquors. "You got to watch out," she tells me protectively "there's people around who'll do you dirty." These are big-city woes. The product of a world that's become unfamiliar. In her city, Auburn Avenue is still a vibrant business district and the Atlantic Steel mill has not yet been transformed into Atlantic Station, a sprawling, concrete love letter to gentrification that dominates the center of the city.  And virtually everyone here has a Southern accent. There is no Whole Foods or Borders Books on Ponce de Leon Boulevard; instead there is the old stadium where a team that calls itself the Atlanta Crackers plays. But you also know that when she tells you things have changed she's being descriptive, not sentimental because colored folk of her generation are almost immune to nostalgia.

The old city is gone; its remnants are stored in archives and photographs and the fraying memories of eighty year-old women who ride motorized wheelchairs until the battery goes dead. For her and her people, the history of
this city is not acquired in books or lectures.

For them, history is lived memory. History is the hyphen between Hartsfield and Jackson.

In this new century, Atlanta, like Harlem in the last one, has become the capital of black America. And like Harlem then, Atlanta is a mix of old and new, homegrown and imported. The Great Migration inspired a mix of ambivalence and outright hostility among blacks who already lived in the North – a portion of history that becomes pertinent each time you hear a native Atlantan speak of “all those New Yorkers” who have relocated here. And true enough they have a point: the number one destination for whites moving out of New York City is the commuter suburbs of New Jersey; for blacks taking leave of the five boroughs -- it is Atlanta.

This is not New York, but there are now nearly five million stories in Atlanta’s metro area. It holds the distinction of being the only place where a black single mother with platinum hair can become a wildly popular mayor. People come with aspirations  and ideas. They succeed, they fail; but there's something to be said about the fact that so many people come specifically to this place to try.

So yeah, they have changed this place. And been changed by it. You acquire insider knowledge here in degrees; it shows up when you start telling people to go straightout Peachtree instead of straight up it. Or when you know without thinking that Pascal's is pronounced with a short A and the L in Dekalb County is silent.

I know these things; picked them up by paying attention and keeping my eyes open. So when Miss Catherine asked me warily if I'm from here, I tell her no, ma'am I'm not. But I live here now.