|
The capital of Georgia, Atlanta was one of the first targets of Black post-Civil War migration, and by 1870 Blacks constituted almost half of the city's residents. Jim Crow laws and violence, especially lynching, were the order of the day. In the midst of this atmosphere, Booker T. Washington delivered his controversial Atlanta Compromise speech, which urged Blacks to accept the status quo and seek economic security before attempting to achieve social or political equality. Such conditions did not stop the growth of a Black middle class centered in local churches. The city became home to Black colleges and universities, including Atlanta University and Morehouse and Spelman Colleges. But conditions remained difficult for Black residents, and in 1906 ten thousand whites assaulted Black downtown residents. The city had become the headquarters, by 1923, of the reborn Ku Klux Klan, which numbered fifteen thousand members locally. After the second World War, the legislature and the federal government eased some voting regulations, and Blacks took advantage of this to organize and agitate for change in the 1950s. At about the same time the Nation of Islam was strengthening its presence in the South, and as early as 1956 Malcolm X had delivered lectures to some two hundred NOI members and had established the Nation's Temple No. 15, the first in the South. Segregation remained a serious problem in the city, and by the 1960s, college students began to employ sit-ins and more confrontational methods than their elders had used. Although Malcolm ridiculed these methods, reflecting the position of the Nation, by 1963 he came to believe that the Nation and the young political activists in the South should be working together.
|
