What GEORGIA Looked Like Before Everything Changed

Описание: Discover the forgotten Georgia when Atlanta had only 330,000 people, cotton was still king, and rural courthouse politics dominated a deeply segregated state that was genuinely the Deep South.

Before the Olympics and suburban sprawl, Georgia was fundamentally different. Cotton plantations in Black Belt counties worked by sharecroppers under the same system since Reconstruction, the county unit system giving 121 rural counties more power than Atlanta despite tiny populations, Jim Crow laws mandating separate everything with inferior facilities for Black Georgians, textile mill towns like Columbus and Rome employing whites while excluding Black workers, paper mills in south Georgia processing pine forests with their distinctive sulfurous stench, Herman Talmadge dominating politics as a pragmatic segregationist from 1948-1981, Auburn Avenue as the business center of segregated Black Atlanta, the 1961 University of Georgia integration crisis when Governor Vandiver threatened to close the school, the March 1960 Atlanta sit-ins by college students beginning to break segregation, and courthouse squares where farmers gathered on Saturdays. This was Georgia when the rural past held enormous power over the present.

#Georgia #AtlantaHistory #JimCrow