Certain People (27 page)

Today, it is all quite different. Now blacks and whites dine comfortably together at the best restaurants, sit side by side at the symphony and theatre as well as on the bus, and wander in and out of the most expensive hotels. Led by the liberal Coca-Cola Company—Atlanta's leading industry—equal job opportunities for blacks exist on every level. (Atlanta blacks are very loyal to Coca-Cola and keep
their refrigerators stocked with it; it is said, furthermore, that when Coca-Cola first appeared in Jacob's Drug Store on Peachtree Street it was made from a recipe developed by a black cook, who, of course, got no credit for her earthshaking invention.) In Atlanta today it is possible to believe that half a century of oppressive treatment to blacks never existed. The major area where discrimination still exists is in housing. Atlanta's whites still do not want black people living next door, no matter how affluent they may be. In northwest Atlanta a section called Collier Heights is somewhat unique in that it was developed by a black builder as an exclusive community of expensive homes for wealthy blacks. Large, sprawling houses on large lots dot the hillsides of Collier Heights, where the streets wind prettily through tall stands of Georgia pine. Many of the houses have backyard swimming pools, and there is little that one would call garish or tasteless here; Collier Heights is where “old black money” lives, and it has acquired the polish that Dr. Brown so admired. Because there was nothing but a forested wilderness there before, there was no problem when black families staked out Collier Heights as a place to live. But in southwest Atlanta, which has become a more recent enclave of black wealth, it was a somewhat different story. Southwest Atlanta was originally an upper-middle-class, largely Jewish, area, and, when black families began moving in, there was panic. Large houses were thrown on the market for a fraction of their worth as white people saw the neighborhood “going black.” One black woman recalls with amusement how she bought a house worth easily $100,-000 ten years ago from its fleeing white owner. She had watched the price tag on the house slip from $50,000 to $40,000 to $35,000. At the $35,000 level, she and her husband made the owner an offer. He explained that he had promised the house to another black, but that the man had not been able to raise the final $500 of the selling price. The prospective buyer had begged for time while he tried to borrow $500 from his father-in-law, but had telephoned to say that he had not yet been able to locate his father-in-law. As it happened, the woman knew exactly where the missing father-in-law was at that given moment. He was playing bridge with some friends of hers nearby, but she decided not to impart this information. She snapped up the house for $35,000 cash. At one point, as blacks were moving farther and farther into southwest Atlanta, the real estate panic reached such a fevered pitch that a barricade was erected across a road leading into an all-white section called Peyton Forest to prevent blacks from
penetrating any deeper. The barricade soon came down. South
east
Atlanta, meanwhile, remains lily-white.

In addition to the Hamiltons, Townses, and Howards, the Atlanta Old Guard black families include the Ruckers (in real estate), the Caters, the Yateses (both families in the grocery business and there is a white C. R. Yates as well as a black C. R. Yates in Atlanta), the Miltons (banking), the Harpers, Trents, Hopkinses, Faulkners, Penns, Pittses, the Thomases, the Holmses, the Whites (the late educator, Walter White, was an Atlantan), the Martins, Murphys, Palmers, and Holloways. Holloway's Jewelry Store was where every proper black Atlanta girl picked out her engagement ring. The Cunninghams prospered in the real estate business, and one Atlanta woman recalls, “Mama liked Sam Cunningham's son, Ralph, and tried to pair us up together. I said to Mama, ‘You know, that Ralph Cunningham's just not as nice as you
think
.' She said, ‘Well, he ought to be. He's from a nice family.'” Old Mr. A. F. Herndon, who made a lot of money operating barbershops in downtown Atlanta for an all-white trade, in 1905 organized the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, which today is the fourth largest black-owned life insurance company in America. A. F. Herndon became Atlanta's first black millionaire, and his son, Norris Herndon, a bachelor, still lives in the huge Georgian Herndon mansion, just across the street from Grace and Henry Hamilton, and serves on the board of Atlanta Life. Originally, the businesses that made these men rich were all located on or just off Auburn Avenue, downtown, and the families that owned the businesses lived nearby. Mr. Herndon started his company in a one-room office in the Rucker Building on Auburn Avenue. Holloway's Jewelry Store was there, and so was the Rucker real estate office and Mr. Howard's funeral home. The merchants of Auburn Avenue prospered to such an extent that the street became a kind of symbol of black achievement—first to black Atlantans, and eventually to upwardly moving blacks everywhere. John Wesley Dobbs was a legendary Atlanta figure who headed the black Masonic Lodge. Though he was only a postal clerk, he managed to put all six of his daughters through college, and all of them became successful women—the most famous of whom is singer Mattiwilda Dobbs. Mr. Dobbs was a spellbinding speaker, and in his speeches he began extolling the glories of “Sweet Auburn Avenue.” Maynard Jackson, Sr.—the father of Atlanta's present mayor, who was a clergyman and married to one of Mr. Dobbs's daughters—took up the phrase “Sweet Auburn Avenue”
in his sermons, and eventually it made its way to Tin Pan Alley, where it became the title of a song. If a man could make it to Sweet Auburn Avenue, he could make it to the stars.

The families that prospered along Sweet Auburn Avenue, many light-skinned, were a proud and tight-knit group. Upper-class blacks often make a distinction between “friends” and “visiting friends.” Friends are mere nodding acquaintances. Visiting friends are like family, and the Auburn Avenue families not only visited each other but called each other “Auntie” and “Uncle.” Their children married each other. Most were members of the First Congregational Church, Atlanta's black “society” church (Friendship Methodist Church and the Baptist African Methodist Episcopal Church are also “nice” black churches, but exist farther down the social ladder). First Congregational became the fashionable church because of Atlanta University's early ties with Congregationalist missionaries, and it was at First Congregational that the National Medical Association was founded in 1895 when the American Medical Association would not admit black physicians to its ranks. A local joke has it that no one can join the First Congregational Church unless his skin is as light as the lightest faces in the stained glass windows.

Along Auburn Avenue, probity was stressed along with piety. “Education, Determination, Integrity” were the three themes emphasized by Auburn Avenue parents. A high moral tone was demanded of everyone because, after all, black people came from all over the country just to walk down Auburn Avenue to see the stores, business and professional offices, and fine homes of well-to-do black men and women who had managed to “get over” despite a segregated situation. Of course there were some people on Auburn Avenue who managed not quite to measure up to the high standards set. There was Mr. Ben Davis, for example, who was the head of the Odd Fellows and who was considered a “questionable character.” Ben, it was said, “had a lot of women on his string,” and he “set them up in houses.” Ben Davis's son was not permitted to call on nice black girls and, sure enough, the son later went to prison. So strongly did old Mr. Rucker feel about Ben Davis that he wouldn't let his daughters walk on the same side of the street as Ben Davis's establishment.

Auburn Avenue today is not as sweet as it once was, as black businesses have spread to other parts of the city and black families have scattered to the northwest and southwest suburbs. Atlanta Life is still there, along with a few black real estate, doctors', and lawyers'
offices. But it is still, as a glorious memory, a powerful symbol to Atlanta's blacks. When the Citizens Trust Bank, rated the seventh largest black bank in the United States, and the board chairman of which is old Mr. L. D. Milton, moved to its handsome new glass tower several years ago, it decided not to move
too
far away, and the new bank is just a couple of blocks off Auburn. It is also possible that Auburn Avenue, and the success it symbolized, is a major reason why Atlanta became integrated so quickly and easily: black wealth in the city had simply become too powerful a force to discriminate against. Cynics in Atlanta say that Atlanta's liberal treatment of blacks today is not due to intellectual enlightenment or to Christian tolerance. But when, in the 1950s, blacks began boycotting Atlanta stores and streetcars, the economic pinch that was felt was fierce. The city had to integrate or go under.

But why did integration come with such relative smoothness and ease to Atlanta, whereas other Southern cities, such as Shreveport, Louisiana—which is still considered the most segregated city in the United States—resisted it so belligerently? Perhaps it is because Atlanta is a new city. It even has a new name. It used to be called Terminus, Georgia, because East-West and North-South railroads terminated there. When it was renamed, poetically, Atlanta—with suggestions of a legendary sunken civilization risen from the depths—it seemed to take a whole new grasp of things and view of life. When General Sherman's troops marched through Atlanta, they left little standing. The city had to rebuild itself from scratch. Such Southern cities as Savannah and New Orleans seem still to be frozen in time, somewhere in the last century. But Atlanta had to renew itself, and did, and is now bursting with youth and vigor. “There's a feeling here that Atlanta is on the crest of the wave of the future,” one man says. “The last thing an Atlantan wants to be accused of is not keeping up with—or even not being ahead of—the times.” And so Atlanta became an oasis in the black South. During the period of Reconstruction and the era of segregation that followed, former slave-owners saw the wisdom of promoting their ex-slaves in business, and of helping them set up their grocery stores and chemists' shops along Sweet Auburn Avenue. The Atlanta
Constitution
also helped, by taking a moderate editorial tone toward black people. The many educators and clergymen were powerful go-betweens in race relations, and there was a strong moral tone carried from Protestant New England by missionaries of
the Congregationalist Church. What had been a black bottom class became a kind of ruling class.

And yet, ironically enough, the very fact of segregation once helped certain black businesses to succeed in Atlanta. When black customers were not particularly welcomed at white banks, a black bank had to be the answer, and—consistent with Atlanta's spirit of enterprise and building—thus came into existence the Citizens Trust Bank. When white insurance companies were reluctant to issue policies to blacks, or were unwilling to pay black claims, a company such as Atlanta Life filled the need. Black funeral directors were in a unique position of power. In any Southern town during the segregation era, the two most powerful men were its white sheriff and the black funeral director. The two men usually worked in tandem. The sheriff had authority for obvious reasons, and it was wise to be on his good side. But when a black man or woman was killed in a Saturday night barroom brawl, and the sheriff was called, he brought the body to a black undertaking establishment. In return for this favor, he usually received a slight consideration and, furthermore, he could be reasonably sure that the undertaker would help him get votes in the black community at election time.

Ironically, too, integration has created problems for black businesses by diluting the power of black money. A black sheriff may find that it is more rewarding to deliver a black (or white, for that matter) corpse to a white funeral parlor. Today, though the Citizens Trust Bank, once one of Atlanta's proudest black institutions, boasts deposits of $27,683,000 and assets of $33,688,000, things are not quite as rosy as those figures would lead one to suppose, according to its new president. The bank was founded in 1922 by an insurance man named Herman Perry, and its presidency was later assumed by L. D. Milton, of a prestigious old-line family. The Milton family and the Yates family were partners in a drugstore business and, as an indication of how tightly knit Atlanta's black families can become, Mr. Milton is married to a Murphy, whose grandfather is a Howard. Mr. Milton, a graduate of Brown University, had been a schoolteacher and, though his lineage was of the finest, it did not seem to occur to anyone that his qualifications as a banker were somewhat slender. Still, all seemed to go well until Mr. Milton began approaching his twilight years. One of Mr. Milton's protégés was a young man named Joel Stokes, who was widely touted by Mr. Milton and his bank as a financial genius. A genius he may have been, but Stokes also managed
to misuse and misplace certain funds, to use collateral put up for loans for his own private purposes, and to lose track of some $35,000 of the bank's funds. When his defalcations were discovered, Stokes was arrested, sent to trial, convicted, and sent to the penitentiary. At the time of the trial, Mr. Milton was declared too ill to testify, although, according to a friend, he seemed to recover from his illness shortly thereafter. Mr. Milton resigned his presidency in 1971, his wife took over his personal financial affairs—the bank made Mr. Milton very rich—and a new president was appointed.

He was a young man named Charles McKinley Reynolds, Jr. Mr. Reynolds held an economics degree from Morehouse College, had done additional study in business administration at Wayne State and Atlanta Universities, and also had a degree in mortuary science. But his tenure at Citizens Trust was short-lived, and Reynolds remained with the bank only four years before moving on to another post.

There were other problems. Heavy loans, coupled with a drop in deposits, had resulted in what the bank euphemistically described as “a capital deficiency.” The 1974–1975 economic recession, of course, did not help matters. The bank had been a heavy lender in consumer credit and had been heavily into home mortgage loans. The bank had not dealt heavily in commercial credit, had made few business loans and, since most black businesses are small, these loans are small. But the recession made it more difficult for black businesses to compete with white businesses and with one another, and rising interest rates made it harder for the Citizens Trust to compete with other banks and deliver the same quality of service. In the recession, several black businesses that the bank had financed went under. Individual customers who had taken out mortgage or home improvement loans could not make their payments.