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ATLANTA TODAY... A friend of mine within two years of retirement from the Federal Service was selected for transfer and given a choice of three cities for assignment, two above the mason & dixon line and Atlanta, Georgia. My friend who had lived, and worked on the East coast for a period of 25 years selected Atlanta as the city he would be most comfortable with before and after retirement. How was it possible for anyone to leave a city in the Northeast and relocate to a city (Atlanta) in the deep South. I began to think of others who had opted for the same scenario. I was particularly curious as to the reason so many Blacks both professional and non-professional were selecting Atlanta as the most viable place to settle at this stage in our history. With this in mind I decided to explore some of the reasons. Georgia, one of the original thirteen colonies with Atlanta, one of the principal cities had seen all the heartaches and traumas affecting Blacks; slavery, lynchings, segregation together with all the other evils of a separate society. The end of World War II signaled a change in the Atlanta metropolitan area and with it a change in the way Atlantians viewed their city and themselves. Atlanta would no longer be laughed at as the city that had contributed only two things to the world Coca-Cola and the Ku Klux Klan, but a city that had seized the opportunity to continue its upward drive in the post-war years. [[6 images]] [[captions]] Walter White, NAACP Executive Secretary, 1930-1955 DR. W.E.B. DU BOIS Moses Andy Young Moorehouse group [[/captions]] 432