{"product_id":"where-peachtree-meets-sweet-auburn-the-saga-of-two-families-and-the-making-of-atlanta","title":"Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta","description":"\u003cp\u003eThere is an intersection in Atlanta where two worlds meet; where the architecture changes dramatically  the texture of the buildings reflecting two histories  separate and distinct. It is a crossing of two boulevards for dreamers in the South  white and black. On the one hand  there are the gleaming sky scrapers of Peachtree  the street where Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell once lived and later met her tragic death; and on the other  there are the Reconstruction-era churches of Auburn Avenue  where Dr. Martin Luther King  Jr.  once preached and where his bier is now entombed inside a crypt with the epitaph \"Free at Last  Free at Last  Thank God Almighty Im Free at Last.\" The contrast between these streets hearkens to a time when boundaries were imposed by law  by segregation; this roughing of borders provides lingering evidence of a history and a city only recently joined. Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn explores the social  political and spiritual growth of this city and defines its racial conscience. It is the biography of Atlanta as told through two of its most prominent and elite families - one white  one black - as they ascend over five generations on opposite sides of a segregated city to produce the two most controversial mayors of the New South: Ivan Allen  Jr.  and Maynard Jackson. This is a story about family  race relations and the evolving South. Gary M. Pomerantz explores Atlantas transformation - from its founding as the railroad center Terminus in 1837 to the ashes left by Gen. William T. Shermans Union troops in 1864 to its role as center of the civil rights movement during the 1960s to its selection as the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics. Atlantas history represents one of the most stark  dramatic examples of racial interdependence of any American city. The Allens and the Dobbses  two Southern families who have lived in Atlanta for nearly a century  offer a vehicle to understand the rise of Atlanta as the definitive symbol of the New South. Both families contributed to this great work  providing hours of interviews during the past five years and aiding the research with exclusive letters  journals and photographs that date to the Civil War  when the Allens were aristocratic slave-holding members of the Confederacy in east Tennessee and the Dobbses were slaves in north Georgia. Their worlds were shattered by the Civil War and their families fortunes took flight at the turn of the century when patriarchs Ivan Allen  Sr.  and John Wesley Dobbs arrived in a bustling  rebuilt Atlanta.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44946442780725,"sku":"ByrdShop_0684807173","price":44.72,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780684807171.jpg?v=1769949232","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/where-peachtree-meets-sweet-auburn-the-saga-of-two-families-and-the-making-of-atlanta","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}