Moving Forward, with Georgia on my Mind

I am sitting in my kitchen, our kitchen once again, basking in the glory of central AC after a late-morning run. I’ve been told, by just one person, that there is a distinctly different term for air conditioning down here. I can’t remember what that term is and my Google searches have been fruitless. Perhaps that person was just blowing hot air into my snooty Yankee face.
And it is hot. And humid. As everyone reminded me a billion times while the days ticked away until my move from Boston to Atlanta. But you know what people did not mention? The South’s often-intense summer precipitation. On average, July is the wettest month in Atlanta, both in number of rainy days and inches of rainfall.

As soon as I ventured beyond the District, across the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and into Virginia, the summer storms welcomed me to my new home. A friend and I got caught in a torrential downpour at First Landing State Park, Virginia as we traversed swamps and sand dunes. We may have been soaked, but at least it was hot.

My three-day stay in the Outer Banks of North Carolina was shadowed by storm clouds. I enjoyed the beaches and serenity of Hatteras and Ocracoke Islands all the same.

Since I began my descent from Asheville through the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia, there’s been little but blue sky. I’ve yet to eat a peach for peace, but I did have an excellent peach wheat ale at Argosy in East Atlanta Village.

From Gillette Castle in East Haddam, Connecticut to Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York, from Chincoteague Island to Norfolk and everything in-between, Virginia, I’ve seen more of my country in two weeks than I had seen in years. I barely left New England until I was an adult. I knew more of Southern California than the South.
Now, I am here. I cannot say for how long, only that I live here now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I recognize that Georgia has been and will continue to be a battleground in the American struggle to confront its racism. Founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe, the British colony of Georgia was to be an agrarian utopia, in which slavery was banned, that was governed by empowered, working-class farmers. In 1742, Georgia was invaded by the Spanish, then based in Florida, in what became known as the War of Jenkin’s Ear. Under Oglethorpe’s command, the British forces of Georgia repelled the Spanish and forced the invaders to recognize that Georgia belonged to the British. After encountering financial trouble, the colony was repossessed by the Crown in 1752, slavery was legalized, and the rest is often ugly history.
In 1829, a gold rush brought hordes of white settlers into the state. As white Americans in Georgia sought to seize more of the state’s riches from the Cherokee Nation, the US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, signed into law by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, which enabled the federal government to effectively destroy Native communities in the South. These communities, previously regarded as sovereign nations by the United States, had already begun to assimilate into white American society, as Presidents Washington and Jefferson supported. Despite their cooperation with the United States, the Native peoples of the South were forcibly removed from their land, to march along the Trail of Tears towards Oklahoma.
Much has been made about Sherman’s March to the Sea, in which Union forces burned Atlanta to the ground in autumn 1864. Indeed, this attack on the civilian population and infrastructure of the South must be considered, in today’s context, a war crime. However, in my limited firsthand experience of the South and my somewhat-less-limited education regarding the South, I have observed that Sherman’s March, and “Northern Aggression” generally, is sometimes worn as a wound of pride, a grievance nurtured to shield from difficult questions and hide malignant bias. Sherman’s March may have been egregious, but so was slavery, so is the legacy of white supremacy that continues to this day.
In the early years following the Civil War, the first movement of the Ku Klux Klan rose and was quickly extinguished. Georgia elected its first Black Congressman, Jefferson Franklin Long, who became the first Black Representative to speak on the House floor. In the collapse of Reconstruction, Black Americans in Georgia and across the South were once again disenfranchised, segregated and oppressed.
The second movement of the Ku Klux Klan was born at Stone Mountain, Georgia, only a few miles from Atlanta. Today, there is a carving in the side of the mountain, which depicts Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson as heroic figures. This carving was completed in 1964, the same year that the landmark Civil Rights Act was passed into law. As it is for the Confederate flag, the carving at Stone Mountain is a symbol not borne out of some noble reverence for the antebellum South, but out of the resentment of ignorant white Americans.
There was a plan to install a Memorial Bell atop Stone Mountain in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. It would fulfill his prophetic words in I Have A Dream: “let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia!” The process of installing such a monument seems to have stalled, though a statue of MLK was recently installed on the Georgia state capitol grounds, in the company of Confederate and alleged Ku Klux Klan leader John Brown Gordon and U.S. Sen. Richard Russell, who vigorously opposed civil rights in the Senate.
Atlanta, the capital of the South, is a monumental center for Black Power in America. Black economic power, black political power is rooted here in this city. Atlanta’s cultural influence is oft slept on in the North, but that is a mistake. The city broke LA and NYC’s grip on hip-hop.
Atlanta may also be in the midst of an athletic renaissance. I don’t want to speak much on Super Bowl LI, only to say I believe that had the Atlanta Falcons clashed with any other team besides the New England Patriots, they would have won. I’d also like to see the Falcons’ defeat as a metaphor for our contemporary political crisis. Yes, we lost, but there are more games to come.
I’d much rather talk about soccer anyway. Atlanta United, which played its first game earlier this year, has been enthusiastically embraced by the city in a way that professional soccer teams rarely are anywhere in the United States. That it is happening in Atlanta, Georgia, the South, is a bit of a shock to some. I will say that I have found and frequented more soccer pubs in Atlanta than I ever did in Boston. The energy here is different. Even the Irish pubs here are more charming and welcoming than the ones in bitter cold New England.
As much as I appreciate my hometown and recognize the great advantages I had as a young person in Massachusetts, I got as much out of the place as I could have at this point in my life. Perhaps I’ll be drawn back, maybe to Watertown and Greater Boston, but also perhaps to Vermont, Maine or Western Mass. I cannot say much more except that I am glad to have made the move.
I suppose I’ll have to call it there. There’s no proper way to end this post, because it is merely my first attempt to observe and document my new home. Atlanta, Georgia is changing. I am a part of that change, and I want to be here respectfully and well-informed. Enough from me, time to listen.

