Word: rurals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Along with cities like Houston, Richmond and Birmingham, Atlanta epitomizes the New South. An industrial, modern, rapidly changing urban complex, Atlanta seems at once foreign to, but trapped within the rural Old South. Not as much a pearl of the Renaissance languishing in a medieval sea as some of its boosters like to imagine, Atlanta is more a cacophony of modernity occasionally pierced by the strident monotone of its feudal past. McGill calls his city "a fly caught in amber...
...late fifties, when the South was preparing to close down its schools in protest against the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision, McGill's daily front-page columns were avidly read and misread by both Southern racists and Northern liberals. To the grasseaters of rural Georgia he was a "race-mixer" and worse; former governor Eugene Talmadge referred to him as "Rastus McGill." To the liberals he was the South's single beacon of rationality; they were apt to overlook his claim that "this was never a question of being for integration or against...
Georgia now has 11 Negro legislators, McGill notes, more than any other states except Michigan and Illinois. All but one of the eleven come from Atlanta, where the influx of blacks from rural areas and the exodus of middle class whites to the suburbs have left the city with a 43 per cent black population. McGill claims that within about four years Atlanta will very likely have a Negro mayor...
...rural South, McGill admits, has come along much more slowly. Coercion and overt oppression are still the rule in the rural Georgia which sent restaurant owner, axe-handle distributor, confused and frightened Lester Maddox to the statehouse in 1966. And the Wallace phenomenon, he concedes, is a very serious and dangerous malignancy. "Wallace speaks the new 'Magnolia Mouthwash.' He doesn't use the old words, just the new words, the code words," McGill explains...
...first primary is May 7, in Indiana, a conservative state whose rural lower half is as southern as Mississippi. Roger D. Branigin, the most popular governor in the state's history, controls the amazingly powerful party organization. The leading paper in the state, the Indianapolis Star, buries news of Kennedy and McCarthy deep in stories headlining Branigin's latest support from county leaders. Branigin entered the primary as a stand-in for Johnson, and polls showed him leading Kennedy and McCarthy. After Johnson's withdrawal, he decided to stay in the contest, probably to hold his state for Humphrey...