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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]]



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