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Economic expediency has also eased Georgia's social reckoning, particularly in Atlanta. While other major Southern cities were witnessing the spectacle of defiance, in Atlanta a coalition of black and white businessmen, politicians, editors and civic leaders gathered behind then-Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. to shape a different image for the capital: "The city too busy to hate." Dr. Vivian Henderson, president of Clark College, feels not too much should be made of Atlanta's motives: "Self-enlightenment is not the takeoff point. The most potent factor has been the national policies that forced the South to change its ways of doing business—the court orders, the executive orders and the new legislation in civil rights. If it had not been for these factors, the steps the busi ness community would have taken would have been minuscule." So the word went out. When the laws tumbled down upon the state, there would be no standing in the door, no fire hoses or dogs. There were exceptions, such as Lester Maddox brandishing his pistol and pick handle in front of his fried chicken emporium, students rioting at the University of Georgia when the first black students were admitted. But Mayor Ivan Allen was the first Southern politician to testify in favor of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Atlanta became a weekend oasis for civil rights workers from Mississippi and Alabama.
Atlanta is the state's and the South's showcase, the Southern city of the future. Its skyline has lifted with the boom. Major league sports teams have come to play in a new stadium; a $13 million cultural palace houses a theater company, an art museum and symphony orchestra. It is the sophisticated home of eager businessmen and dropped-out young people, Hari Krishna chanters and fundamentalist ranters, Lester Maddox and Ralph David Abernathy, braless Women's Libbers and aging United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Repeating Older Mistakes
At opposite ends of Atlanta's Peachtree Street, the white youth of the South stare across a gap within a generation. Airline stewardesses and young businessmen by the hundreds push into a converted warehouse called Uncle Sam's six nights a week for beer and music. They are the city's singles, decked out in bell-bottoms and hot pants, in from the fancy apartment complexes surrounding Atlanta. At midnight Friday and Saturday, they don Uncle Sam paper hats passed out by the management to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Dixie. When Lieut. William Calley was released from the Fort Benning stockade, Owner Don Davis dedicated the night's festivities "to Richard Nixon and Rusty Calley." Says Davis: "This is where the Silent Majority can make noise."