Irmalee Davis ignored her husband’s complaints and frequented Atlanta’s dance halls at all hours of the night. Hattie Harper publicly accused the city relief officer of demanding sexual favors and threatening to ruin her reputation. Flossie Nealy won fifty dollars from the city council for undisclosed “damages.” Annie Parr and Mae Parkman wore overalls and caps and visited the bars of Decatur Street disguised as men. Nellie Busbee told Atlanta Chief of Police James Beavers to “go to hell.” Mrs. Allen demanded that her social worker not return unless she brought pain medicine for Allen’s aching back and a new...

In 1887, Atlanta adopted a new city seal. The city council voted in that year to replace the old city seal, a locomotive engine, with the image of a phoenix rising out of the ashes of destruction, symbolizing the triumphant revival of a city virtually destroyed at the end of the Civil War. Beyond that, the phoenix also symbolized Atlanta’s expansion beyond an economy based merely on commerce and transportation to a more diverse economy that by the turn of the century would include industry, finance, administration, service, and tourism. With a population of only twenty-one thousand at the close...

In 1903, Atlanta’s Journal of Labor, a weekly newspaper and the premier voice of organized white labor across the state, began a celebration of women connected to the city’s federated white trade unions. Two images of white women appeared in these photographs and stories: the union wife and the working girl. The former were a part of “a body of noblewomen, who have thrown their consecrated efforts with their husbands, brothers, and fathers, in the great labor movement.”¹ Not paid laborers themselves but instead the backbone of the working-class family, these married women directed their efforts toward maintaining a home,...

According to press reports, a black man raped Annie Laurie Poole on a rural road near her home south of Atlanta on the last day of July 1906. In the middle of August, Mrs. Richard Hembree claimed to have fended off a different black man’s aggression using her hat pin. In another rural community outside of the city limits, Ethel and Mabel Lawrence alleged an encounter with a “tall, slender and very black negro,” who beat the young white women severely. Mittie Waits supposedly met a would-be attacker in a wooded area nine miles from Atlanta but scared him off...

In the winter of 1905, a brutal storm hit the Southeast. Snow and ice, a rare occurrence in Atlanta, blanketed the city for a full week. While a few cheery ice skaters enjoyed themselves in Piedmont Park, the storm forced businesses and schools to close; downed communication, electrical, and transportation systems; and caused widespread misery among Atlanta’s poorer populations, whose shabby housing and meager incomes offered few resources for dealing with the storm.¹ Joseph Logan, a young Atlanta lawyer, hoped to organize the various and often overlapping charity efforts being extended to storm victims through the creation of a citywide...

During the winter of 1907, the Atlanta Georgian published an editorial describing an Atlanta woman, “young, beautiful and of noble character,” who suffered from consumption. This white widow worked as a sales clerk in a department store to support her child from “a brief but happy marriage.” When she became “too ill to continue working,” the article read, she could only sit and look “with despairing eyes toward her baby.” In language remarkably similar to that used by welfare agencies to describe the “virtuous mother” of the 1900s, the editorial highlighted a mother of much dignity and respectability, able to...

In 1918 Mrs. S. A. Christian filed for divorce. During six years of marriage, she, like most married women of the time, had done “all of the cooking and housework” and, in her mind at least, “treated [her husband] as a loving and devoted wife should.” She also helped the family financially, running a boardinghouse and saving enough to open a small grocery store on Decatur Street, Atlanta’s bustling corridor of working-class life. On August 1, 1918, according to Mrs. Christian, her husband flew into a rage and chased her out of the store. She fled to Athens, Georgia, fearing...

Rose Hickey came to Atlanta from Boston in 1919 as a union organizer for International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). During the Atlanta telephone workers’ walkout in the summer of that year, Hickey, at the urging of the local operators, became the primary leader and organizer for the strike. Her work as an aggressive and creative organizer, negotiator, and speaker earned her the respect of the strikers, Atlanta’s trade union leaders, and the local press, despite the failure of the “hello girls” to achieve union recognition from Southern Bell. After the strike, the IBEW hired Hickey to act as the...

In the summer of 1932, Atlanta police arrested Angelo Herndon as he picked up his mail from a local post office.¹ Police targeted Herndon, an African American and a known Communist, because he had led a peaceful, integrated demonstration by the city’s unemployed only days earlier. They waited to bring him into custody, however, until they could capture him with physical evidence of his radicalism. In Herndon’s mailbox police found that evidence, confiscating Communist literature, including copies of the Daily Worker. Using a state law from the 1830s, prosecutors charged him with attempting to incite insurrection and overthrow the government...

From the failed attempt in the 1850s to locate the state capital in the city to the successful bid to host the Centennial Olympics in 1996, Atlanta has consistently manifested what residents referred to as the “Atlanta spirit.”¹ It is this brash self-confidence that makes the city fascinating to study. Atlanta’s nineteenth-century boosterism focused almost exclusively on economic development. During this era, Henry Grady and other New South advocates proclaimed Atlanta the “Gate City,” inviting commerce, finance, and industry to enter the South following the Civil War. While most Atlantans remained faithful to this earlier booster creed as the city...