The Nation: New Day A'Coming in the South

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Farther downtown on Peachtree, another youth community holds sway. Boutiques and head shops, long hair and beards, communal living and radical politics set the residents of the counterculture's Southern headquarters off from their contemporaries at Uncle Sam's. Although resistance to the hippies has resulted in periodic crackdowns along "The Strip," the community has emerged with its own self-help alliance to provide social and medical services to the permanent and transient members of the neighborhood. The hip community is now so firmly established on the city's scene that Mayor Massell dropped in on a recent "People's Fair" in nearby Piedmont Park. Massell's ingenuous explanation: "I'm people, aren't I?"

But there is a darker side to Atlanta, the hint of a Potemkin village that masks the same patterns killing cities elsewhere in the nation. Whites are fleeing to the suburbs, leaving behind an inner-city population that is 51.3% black. Unemployment among the marginally skilled blacks of the ghettos is three times that of the city's whites. Although it boasts one of the world's busiest airports and a rail network that feeds the Southeast, Atlanta's commuters creep bumper to bumper in rush-hour traffic unrelieved by mass transit. Within minutes of downtown is bucolic countryside—but Peachtree Creek and the Chattahoochee River are badly polluted. Inexorably, Atlanta moves toward repeating the environmental and demographic mistakes of older cities. Neon and tacky developments push the city's fringes across the landscape, and unified planning is just getting under way.

The Harvest in the Schools

Progress has its aesthetic price, too.

Poet James Dickey is a former Atlanta resident who has fled rather than pay it. Only 25% of today's Atlantans are natives, and Dickey feels alienated from them: "The most valuable thing about the South was its sense of community. This is slowly disappearing with the onslaught of industry and the change it brings. There are restless, nomadic people coming to the South. There is a loss of grace, of leisure. Things will go and never reappear."

As has been the case throughout history, the destinies of white and black Southerners are inextricably interwoven. Slave and master, cracker and freedman, suburban executive and street-wise ghetto hustler have all been disfigured by racism. The emerging South is now facing that ancient whirlwind in its schools.

The legal framework that propped up, then demolished dual schools is rote to Southerners: Plessy, Brown, Alexander, and last month's busing decision Swann. Georgia was the first Southern state blanketed with a statewide court order to dismantle its separate school systems. Elaborate evasions were constructed at each step and today, though desegregated on paper, circumventions continue. Private academies were established by parents who could afford to buy segregation. Some public schools integrated their enrollments, but not their classrooms: a favorite dodge is segregation by sex, thus, an all-girl history class drones through the same material that an all-boy class covers in a room down the hall.