An All-Embracing City

In order to get from the Hartfield Atlanta airport to the campus of Emory University it is necessary to pass through Freedom Park. I had no idea why Freedom Park was called Freedom Park but I surmised as I was in the State of Georgia (the South) that it had something to do with the civil rights movement. So I turned to my daughter who I would have guessed had a greater knowledge of black history and the civil rights movement than I did (except that she did attend Garden City High School) and said Why is Atlanta significant in black history? She had no idea. I said Wasn’t Martin Luther Kings’s church here? To which she responded Wasn’t it in Alabama? And then I said Was Freedom Park the Freedom bus ride thing? And she said Maybe. What was clear was we didn’t know nothin’ about black history---to the point of embarrassment.

When I first headed to Atlanta almost 3 years ago I expected to see a disproportionately large non-Caucasian population. That was not the case. I saw no difference at all from the composition of New York—specifically Roosevelt Field Mall. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how the lines of ethnic, religious and sexual orientation blur and overlap. Atlanta is an all-embracing city.  It is filled with a myriad of people---many transplanted from other regions of the country as well as different nations in the world. Southerners are not that easy to find.  It is as if all the visitors who attended the 1996 Olympics decided to stay and plant roots. And just as Manhattan is not the seedy crime ridden dwelling today that it once was, so too is Atlanta. Atlanta is a nice place to be.

When I got off the plane at La Guardia after my Atlanta trip I checked my new emails. One had been sent from Kara. It was a concise reading from the New Georgia Encyclopedia (God knows what the old one said) about the significance of Atlanta to the civil rights movement. I learned the following: Martin Luther King was born in Atlanta. His grandfather was a minister there, and then his father, and then he. King’s first ministry was in Birmingham Alabama (Kara was right) and then later he moved his ministry to Atlanta (I was right too). The freedom rides originated in Washington DC but its hub was Atlanta.  And Freedom Park is called Freedom Park because the Martin Luther King Center is located there as well as the Carter Center as well as other artsy type park things.

But most interestingly-- Atlanta, back in the days of segregation and the civil rights movement, called itself “the city too busy to hate.” Maybe that is why today Atlanta is so seemingly tolerant and diverse. It’s a cultural thing—just like Philadelphia is “the city of brotherly love.” Atlantans appear to be of the opinion that they have better things to do than be racist, homophobic, or religiously intolerant. I do not know for sure. But if I were to leave my Garden City bubble for the duration I think I could be happy in Atlanta. If people are too busy to hate it means they wouldn’t hate me either—a Catholic Yankee with an Italian background. Some Garden Citians are less embracing.