An Unexpected Day of Reckoning
“Good Trouble” Finds Me
In Atlanta for a conference in early March, I added a day to my trip to hang out with my friends Courtney Cowart and Jim Goodmann, so that I could walk in the footsteps of John Lewis. It seemed fitting to visit the district that John had represented, especially now that the Library of Congress is piloting the Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative.
I had no idea that Courtney, a native of Atlanta, had her own family history with the civil rights movement. Driving through downtown Atlanta, she tells me that her dad had been an executive at Coca-Cola for 45 years as it grew from a business housed in a sugar warehouse into a global conglomerate. During that time, he and other executives in the white business community joined forces with black business leaders, and together they turned Atlanta into an economic powerhouse. As the Vice Chairman of the Democratic Party in Georgia, Lawrence Cowart also took a disheartened and discouraged Andrew Young out to lunch and convinced him to run again for the 5th District Congressional seat.
Courtney also told me that her mom, as President of the Atlanta Chapter of the League of Women Voters, had gotten to know Coretta Scott King while doing some organizing in the Old 4th Ward. They became good friends, often traveling together to attend marches. So as we…
