Atlanta Up Close; A Journey Into Black History
In Madison, for example, a visit to the Old Madison Cemetery, on Central Avenue in the downtown, turns up, in the Confederate section of the cemetery, the gravesite of an Unknown Colored Hospital Attendant.
In Athens, in the old downtown black commercial district, the Morton Theater, a turn-of-the-century brick vaudeville house now undergoing a renovation, once was host to everyone from local blues players to Duke Ellington to concert pianists.
In Macon, on Pleasant Hill, is the childhood home of the singer Little Richard, a modest wood-frame house at No. 1437 Woodcliff. On a vacant lot nearby was his father’s rib shack; this is where Little Richard got his start.
Here is a world nearly forgotten by a generation born after integration in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It is a world nearly lost by urban renewal projects that, more often than not, meant the tearing down of old buildings in black neighborhoods and paving over them.
My route took me through Atlanta and into four towns that are on Georgia’s Antebellum Trail, towns that, through one quirk of fate or another, escaped the War (in the Old South, there is only one war, the Civil War) with the in-town mansions of its planters still standing. There was Madison, ”the town that Sherman refused to burn” on his march to the sea; Athens, the home of the 203-year-old University of Georgia; Eatonton, which has produced both Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus books, and Alice Walker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book ”The Color Purple,” and Macon, a genteel city that has given birth to many black entertainers, athletes and religious leaders.
