The Wall in Atlanta

...And dissatisfaction is certain to grow as municipal services, such as fire and police protection, show signs of becoming impaired...

...And since the barricaded streets funnel into Cascade Heights, it is assumed that the real intention behind putting up the Wall is to insure the racial exclusiveness of the middleclass white community...

...Undeniably, the Wall has brought the city's racial elements into juxtaposition—eyeball to eyeball, as it were, and it doesn't look as if any of the parties involved are likely to do much blinking...

...As may well have been expected, the building of the Wall outraged Atlanta's Negroes, almost all of whom interpret it as a racial insult...

...The Mayor, on the other hand, is wary of being taken as a captive of the Negro voters...

...True, the Wall does have a certain nuisance effect...

...Unless some maneuver of great sagacity is speedily forthcoming from City Hall, the situation can only worsen...

...With only two exceptions, all the people involved were white, and all were traveling toward Cascade Heights...

...The political powers which plucked Allen out of the relative obscurity of his officefumishings business and groomed him to succeed the well-known Bill Hartsfield as the city's mayor are privately annoyed over "Ivan's Wall...

...The SCA and its sympathizers bought up roughly $200,000 worth of property in the buffer zone between Cascade Heights and Gordon Road...

...C. M. Smith, a young dentist who is the incoming president of the Atlanta NAACP, and the Reverend J. A. Middleton, pastor of a large West Side church...

...This deliberately created buffer, the SCA reasoned, would permanently halt the southward expansion of Negroes even if the Peyton-Harlan area were "lost...

...During one 30-minute period of the first day Peyton Road was closed, for instance, I counted eight delivery trucks, a fire battalion cruiser, a school bus, two television repair trucks and 64 private automobiles (one bearing a physician's caduceus) halted by the Wall and forced to detour...

...lying adjacent to a large Negro community, their homes were not of much interest to white buyers...

...From the grand estates near Peachtree Road in Buckhead, where the wealthy whites live, to the manicured lawns of the splitlevel haciendas along Collier Drive in Crestwood Forest, which is the favorite address of the burgeoning Negro middle class, the pride of being an Atlantan is universal...

...There is plainly something about a wall that people don't seem to like...

...At preliminary hearings, both suits were continued...

...A minister devoted his entire sermon to "that veritable abomination of abominations—that Wall set among you by the Devil...

...The Wall will remain, Allen continues, "until people are willing to sit down and work out a sane agreement that all people can live with...

...Now ain't this some hell in Atlanta...

...For while almost 40 per cent of the population of Atlanta is Negro, only 16 per cent of the city's housing is available to Negroes...

...And to complicate matters further, a wealthy white landowner opened his property holdings in the disputed area to bidding between Negroes and whites, with the result that within a matter of days a single parcel increased in value from $65,000 to $105,000...

...he increased the number of Negroes in the police department, upgraded some that were already in, and gave all Negro officers the power to arrest white offenders...

...Already there have been complaints about the disruption of postal and commercial delivery services...

...Today the Wall is widely lamented in Atlanta, even in the Mayor's own bailiwick...

...Actually, the Peyton-Harlan whites had little choice...

...The sum raised by the SCA, however, could not compare with the combined resources of a number of established Negro real estate firms, operating jointly as the Empire Real Estate Board, which were interested in acquiring houses in the transitional area for their continually growing list of clients...

...He does not exactly know what to do with it...

...and 2) even if they did not, the Negro's thrust for Lebensraum has already burst across Gordon Road three miles further west, and is slowly but steadily arching southward and eastward to meet the western fringes of Cascade Heights...

...Despite the strenuous objections of Negro citizens that they were in need of "living" and not "dying" space, Atlanta's Board of Aldermen adopted the proposal...

...The property, of course, was automatically removed from the Negro market...

...In twin suits filed in the Fulton County Superior Court and the Atlanta Municipal Court, they have been joined by several white plaintiffs in challenging the constitutionality of the ordinance under which the barriers were erected, and in petitioning that they be removed on the grounds that they constitute a public nuisance...

...White citizens share this feeling, and they openly refer to the Wall as "Ivan's Folly," or "the Mayor's Egg...

...There are two reasons for this: 1) the low-income whites in the transitional area want to sell their houses in the inflated Negro market...

...yet neither does he quite know how to get rid of it, since he himself has caused it to come into existence...

...Not only did Allen fail to act against this measure, but, in his own words, he made it his own...

...and the competition for housing presents an attractive market for whites willing to sell their homes...

...Ultimately, the Mayor's unhappy stratagem is doomed to futility...

...The crisis that led to the building of the Wall began when several whites in the Peyton-Harlan area listed their homes with Negro real estate dealers, an indication that they were willing to sell to Negroes...

...To be sure, he respects the Negro vote and wants to retain it, but the suggestion that municipal policies are subject to review at ANVIL'S headquarters on Auburn Avenue — a suggestion strongly urged upon the public from some segregationist quarters—leaves him a bit cold...

...C. Eric Lincoln, author of The Black Muslims in America (1961), leaches at Clark College in Atlanta...

...But above all the barricades present even greater problems to the white people who must live behind them...

...Eugene Patterson, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, is of the opinion that "the most merciful suggestion that can be made to the architects of this folly is that they go out there quietly and take it down...

...and he has arranged for the city soon to have its first Negro firemen...

...In fact, it was only after the city's conservative businessman developed a "social conscience" midway in last year's campaign against arch-segregationist Lester Maddox that the powerful Atlanta Negro Voters League gave him its hesistant but solid support...

...To discourage selling to Negroes —and to provide "relief" in cases where the desire to sell was dictated by necessity—the white residents of Cascade Heights organized themselves into the Southwest Citizens Association...

...The Committee is co-chaired by Dr...

...In his first year in office, Allen succeeded in having the dual register for city employers abandoned...

...In fact, the Mayor's action has left the Negro West Side fairly thumping with chagrin and resentment...

...But Mayor Allen, in his first showdown with the Board, vetoed the measure...

...We are so busy building Our-Great-City-of-Atlanta," Hartsfield used to say, "ain't nobody got time to hate nobody...

...Ironically, the proposed cemetery was to be for Negro occupancy, which was taken by Atlanta's Negroes to be the only possible condition of entry into Cascade Heights...

...It took a lot of work to get Allen elected mayor...

...In another move aimed at countering the influence of the SCA, the leading Negro protest and political organizations (including ANVIL) have placed themselves under a unified directorate called the AllCitizens Committee for Better Community Planning...

...Still, ANVIL, as the Voters League is inevitably called, has never been truly satisfied with the depths of the Mayor's late-blooming "liberal tendencies...

...The streets, Peyton Road and Harlan Road, are about a mile apart, and are the only ones within approximately two miles which link two important residential sections of West Atlanta: Grove Park, an allNegro community lying north of Gordon Road (a major east-west artery servicing both communities...

...The preposterousness of the city government's behavior was rather vividly expressed in the exasperation of a Negro maid who found herself trapped on the "white" side of the Wall after a long day in a kitchen in Cascade Heights...

...and Cascade Heights, an all-white, middle-class section lying about three miles south of Gordon Road...

...The adults, however, were not so lucky: There was no way to get the cars and trucks through except to make a five or six mile detour...

...It is particularly resented that Cascade Heights has been favored with so extreme a procedure, since the community voted heavily in favor of segregationist Maddox in the Mayoralty election...

...And the student Committee on Appeal for Human Rights— which, along with the SNCC was largely responsible for the desegregation of downtown Atlanta two years ago—has served notice on the Mayor that "no less than 1,500 students are prepared to demonstrate for the restoration of freedom and dignity in Atlanta...

...But either Atlantas Mayor Ivan Allen does not read Frost, or if he does His Honor has not taken the poet's homily to heart...

...Moreover, to go from Gordon Road to any area south of the Wall it is now necessary to detour through Cascade Heights—a community which hardly welcomes outside traffic, especially if it is Negro...

...And the possibility that the racial problems Atlanta has handled so well for so long may now be allowed to get out of hand is of no little concern to, among others, the commercial and civic interests of the city who look forward to hosting a world's fair in 1966...

...The Mayor has not yet publicly mentioned who these parties are, except that they are "both white and Negro...

...Amid a prolonged chorus of amens, he admonished his flock to "Let your votes be your trumpets and march ye to the polls and blow...

...It lies between Cascade Heights and Gordon Road and, along with several hundred acres of woodland known as Peyton Forest, constitutes a "buffer zone" against Negro expansion into the more exclusive white community, it is this area which has been cordoned off...

...Thus, part of the Negro citizens' sense of outrage comes from the notion that not only has the Mayor insulted them, but he has also sullied their city's national image...

...Between these two racially discrete communities there is the Peyton-Harlan area, a predominantly white community now undergoing a transition from white to Negro...

...The children on the school bus climbed over the barricade and walked the remainder of the distance home...

...An ordinance enabling the city to put up the barricade passed the Board by a 12 to 1 vote, and by noon the following day the Atlanta Wall was a reality...

...In any event, the Mayor has a Wall on his hands...

...It is against this background that Mayor Allen, in an obvious effort to remove any equivocation from the integrity of his office, let that integrity be seriously compromised by letting himself become a party to a universally hated symbol of oppression—a wall between men...

...The Negro community has seldom been more incensed...

...At a mass meeting where the Wall was the topic of discussion, a trim young school teacher made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that, "Since apartheid has come to Atlanta, we had better petition 'Mayor Verwoerd' for pass cards lest we be arrested going to and fro among the white folk...

...For now the SCA introduced a new proposal: to barricade Peyton and Harlan Roads...

...While shining up their trumpets against the next election, the Negroes have also gone to court...

...One man who lived just inside the Wall told me that since it was put up he and his wife have had to drive an extra 26 miles each day to drop their children off at school and to get to their jobs...

...This, though, Mayor Allen does not seem prepared to do...

...Finally she exclaimed: "Well, Lord Jesus, dear Jesus...

...The people of Atlanta are proud of their city's cultural and academic institutions, its beautiful homes, its traditional sophistication in dealing with racial problems and its overall cosmopolitan atmosphere...

...During the quarter-century that Hartsfield was in office, Atlanta's Negro leadership and City Hall had developed a kind of entente cordiale which enabled the city to get through its racial problems with relatively little pain and even less publicity...

...Nor does it seem to matter who builds it, or why, or what color the people are in front of it, or behind it...

...The barricades," he maintains, "are necessary to stabilize an artificial, unnatural condition created by unscrupulous parties...

...So far, it has refused the Mayor's overtures to negotiate as long as the barrier continues to stand...

...Meanwhile, back at the Wall the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee keeps a round-the-clock vigil under a flaring "torch of freedom...

...It wants the Wall down, and it wants it down now...

...To counter this threat, the SCA, led by a young Lockheed Aircraft Corporation management analyst named Virgil Copeland, sought to persuade the city government to rezone a large tract of land north of Cascade Heights and south of Gordon Road for a cemetery...

...Atlantans who would recoil in genteel horror at the unsophisticated braggadocio of a Texan will tell you without batting a Southern eyelash that the only people not in Atlanta are those who are trying to get there...

...It is actually closer to a barricade or, more precisely, two barricades built of heavy wooden crossbars bolted to iron stanchions anchored in the pavement of two streets on the city's West Side...

...Negro umbrage derives less from the inconvenience the barriers represent —"the white people want to sell and we are going to buy"—than it does from the sheer audacity of City Hall to "wall off any section of Atlanta...

...Climbing from her battered station-wagon to get a clearer look at the Mayor's handiwork, she began to shake her head in sad disbelief...

...Negroes who wish to buy homes in the transitional area do not want to be isolated from the larger Negro community north of Gordon Road...

...And the group is hypersensitive to any signs of regression...

...and his veto was sustained by an aldermanic vote of 11 to 4. The Mayor's problems, however, were far from over...

...The Committee immediately initiated a "selective buying campaign" in the West End shopping area where some of the residents of Cascade Heights have businesses, and where, it is alleged, the SCA'S financial backing originates...

...Negro leadership is in unanimous agreement that the Wall does indeed constitute some rather concrete instances of "hell in Atlanta...

...The so-called "Atlanta Wall" is not really a wall in the strict sense of the word...