Another thing happened. I think you had genuine racists in Atlanta, who
were nevertheless intelligent people, making no pretense of liberalism.
And they knew they had a problem to deal with. In Ivan Allen's book,
Notes on the Sixties, he tells a story which is
extremely significant to me for that whole community. He says that when
his father, who had established this big business, office supply
company, and who had been president of the Chamber and everything, when
Ivan Allen, Jr. took over as president of the Chamber of Commerce, part
of his father's marching orders were, "Look, we've done a good
job in
Page 7 our generation. There's one problem we've
ignored, though. And I suspect your generation will have to face that.
That's the race problem." And he says it, you know, we've been
side by side with blacks, yet we've acted like they didn't exist. We've
never treated them right, you know. And I place a great stock in the
kind of, say, the legacy one receives from his ancestors. And I think
that Ivan Allen, because of that kind of charge from his father, was
probably the figure in moving Atlanta's white community forward. Now,
you also had another thing that Durham doesn't have, I think, and that
is Coca Cola as a corporation doing business all over the world. And
I've always sensed a kind of sophisticated internationalism amongst Coca
Cola's executives, that you just don't find amongst the average southern
businessman. They've been selling Coke all over Latin America, Africa,
Asia. They've got bottling plants in Russia now. And they're extremely .
. . that lent an extremely cosmopolitan power center to the Atlanta
area. When Ivan Allen took his charge to the Chamber of Commerce and
started talking about integrating Atlanta, you know, everybody was
shocked. And he spells it out in his book. Everybody was shocked, until
Mr. Woodruff of Coca Cola leaned over and whispered, "Ivan,
you're right." And then it was voted unanimously, you know,
just on the basis of three words from the president of Coca Cola. He had
been to school with . . . I mean, he and the presidents of three of the
five major banks had been high school buddies. And so when Ivan Allen
and Coca Cola get together and decide that the white community needs to
move, there's a personal tie with the power structure there, to make
things move in the white community. At least on things like keeping
schools open. In terms of facing up to integration of public
accommodations. Of the acceptance
Page 8 of black
candidates. I mean, Ivan Allen's endorsement of my candidacy, that made
it possible for me. . . . Otherwise, the business community would have
been putting millions of dollars behind my opponent. They didn't really
support me, but neither did they really support my opponent. They sort
of played it both ways, really.