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 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 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.