My Atlanta

Thursday evening, 17 February, Atlanta:

The round, glass Westin building reflects the golden setting sun and nearby brick towers glow in alpenlight.  The clear sky is rosy around the edges, sunset reflecting from gathering fog and pollution.  

Other than a huge blister on my right foot, the day was good.  We walked, we saw, we didn’t get run over by maniacal Atlanta drivers.  Being large enough to do serious front end damage serves as a deterrent.  

We just returned from our second walk today, a stroll down Auburn to Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, and the tombs of Martin and his wife, Coretta.  

Along the way, we ran into Lester, a thin, tall Black man with several missing front teeth and a black Georgia State sweatshirt.  Joining our walk, he gave a well-scripted narrative of the oldest Black neighborhood in Atlanta.  Lester lamented the fact that most people dash down the street to the MLK sites without paying attention to the community and its history.  That history included competing funeral homes, both founded by Afro-American women, a variety of shops founded and run by Black entrepreneurs early in the twentieth century, an insurance company, and a dilapidated ribs restaurant (the Rib Shack) with origins beyond the thirties.  We passed several shuttered jazz and blues clubs that continued featuring nationally known Black musicians into the seventies and eighties.  We crossed under the freeway that, like Sherman’s march to the sea, split and devastated the community.

The MLK National Historic Site was closed, but we wandered the grounds, visiting an oversized but lifelike Gandhi sculpture, and a civil rights memorial walk featuring shoe prints of Bishop Desmond Tutu, Bill Clinton, Rosa Parks, Sidney Poitier, Thurgood Marshall, and sundry others.  Bill Clinton and I have the same sized feet, besting Lyndon Johnson, Maya Angelou, and Carl Stokes easily.

Martin and Coretta now dwell in white marble in a long reflecting pool that needs some repair.  Several leaks spread across the walkway.  Located across from the Historic Site and the new Ebenezer Baptist Church, the setting is quiet and serene.

Our volkswalk gave us the best of central Atlanta: From the gold-domed Georgia State Capitol (1889) to Turner Field (the grounds are a memorial to the baseball gifts of Hank Aaron) and the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics, back to the Capitol and to Olympic Centennial Park.  Here we left the trail to walk down Forsyth to the Greyhound station and claim our Discovery Pass and verify Friday’s departure for Tallahassee.

Our hotel, the Quality Hotel, was two blocks off Peachtree and two blocks from a Marta stop, with direct rail to/from the airport.