Opinion: Atlanta, the South are beacons still on the rise

Atlanta has a bright future, and I’ll tell you why.

Sure, we have the same problems as other cities, crime, traffic, urban blight, expensive housing. But there’s something else here which should carry us well into the century. By some strange combination of forces and beliefs, we know how to get along. And our star continues to rise.

In November of 1864, U.S. troops pillaged and burned along Peachtree and Marietta Streets, a cruel end to a cruel and endless war fought over pride, cheap cotton and the value of human life. The subsequent Reconstruction of the South revealed a federal government perplexed by, and increasingly indifferent to, the plight of a region whose little industry had been destroyed in the war. Most white Southern soldiers were not slaveholders but poor farmers, and most Black Freedmen never saw a dime of relief money.

Douglas D. Ford

Ensuing decades of underdevelopment, poverty and racial strife caused an exodus, white and Black, to Chicago, Detroit, New York – places with better opportunities.

Now that pattern is in full reverse, with our native sons and daughters returning, among the tidal wave of newcomers to Atlanta. What happened? It is remarkable.

The modern city offers the best of American freedoms, social and economic. Our airport cements us as the capital of the region, an advantage foreseen by our civic leaders. Our universities continue to attract great minds from across the world. Our weather makes people never want to go back to snowy, dark winters. But even those are not the controlling factors – other cities have those factors too.

In a land long pilloried by more civilized parts of the country as hateful and ignorant, in a place without hope, we learned to live together in a better way. Maybe we had no choice – it can be perceived like that. The forces of hate were certainly at work here. How did sophisticated companies arise, largely without organized labor? Inch by inch, with trust. How did Black home ownership arise? Block by block, with endurance. We became greater than the sum of our parts, than the missteps of our history.

Say what you like, but Yankee (i.e., anybody not from here) know-how helped refine the city. Hispanic labor helped construct it. And an ample supply of hardworking, resourceful Southerners formed the backbone of it. Without our sense of building up something from nothing, it would never have happened.

Sure, other cities have our amenities and more – great stadiums and concert halls – but they also have dominant industries such as finance and entertainment, vital and high in brain function but not always responsive to the common good. Today, Americans wonder whether it is worth staying in another city where everyday inconveniences outweigh the greater cultural benefits. Atlanta has been so livable precisely because we never felt entitled to much and because we’re as surprised at our own success as anyone else – and because we don’t want to go backwards now.

So what’s the magic formula? As with most things, at closer examination, it is not magic. It is an unbreakable determination of people to live together as one, a Southern phenomenon, an American archetype, but really an enduring spiritual belief. “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” asked the biblical disciple. Perhaps our long-haunted South arrives in the present with Atlanta at its fore, having finally confronted the demons of America’s past without fear.

The country is warping in the heat of change, but Georgia has held fast. Our governor parried a withering assault on democracy coming from the highest power in the land. That took guts. When a Black child dies senselessly at the hands of another Black child, our Black faith leaders march not for some abstract social justice but to invoke decency, because children should not be dying. That takes self-respect. And people across the spectrum, buffeted by COVID-19, inflation, and everything else, refuse to accept injustice as a way of life. We have all the national problems, but the South has always been a peculiar place.