Atlanta, city, capital (1868) of Georgia, U.S., and seat (1853) of Fulton county (but also partly in DeKalb county). It lies in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the northwestern part of the state, just southeast of the Chattahoochee River. Atlanta is Georgia’s largest city and the principal trade and transportation center of the southeastern United States. It is the core of an extensive metropolitan area that includes 20 counties and cities such as Decatur, East Point, and Marietta. Pop. (2010) 420,003; Atlanta–Sandy Springs–Marietta Metro Area, 5,268,860; (2020) 498,715; Atlanta–Sandy Springs–Alpharetta Metro Area, 6,089,815.

History

Atlanta owes its existence to the railroads, the routes of which were determined by geography. Lying as it does at the southern extremity of the Appalachian Mountains, it became the gateway through which most overland traffic had to pass between the southern Atlantic Seaboard and regions to the west. In 1837 a spot near what is now Five Points, in the center of the present-day city, was selected for the southern terminus of a railroad that was subsequently built northward to Chattanooga, Tennessee. The location was known first as Terminus and then as Marthasville; in 1845 it was renamed Atlanta for the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Several other rail lines had converged on the city by 1860.

During the American Civil War (1861–65), Atlanta became a supply depot, a site of Southern war industries, and the keystone of Confederate rail transportation east of the Mississippi River. It was thus the prime military objective of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s invasion of Georgia from Chattanooga, known as the Atlanta Campaign. Sherman inflicted heavy casualties on Confederate forces during the Battle of Atlanta, on July 22, 1864, but the city did not fall to his Union troops until several months later, on September 1. It was then converted into a military camp. On November 15 Sherman departed Atlanta on his devastating March to the Sea, but not before much of the city had been burned.

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During Reconstruction (1865–77), Atlanta was a center of federal government activities in the South. It was the site of the convention that drew up the Georgia constitution of 1868, and under the Republican state administration it became the state capital (chosen permanently by popular referendum in 1877). Atlanta also experienced some racial desegregation during Reconstruction, but the subsequent introduction of Jim Crow laws, particularly in the 1890s, separated Black and white residents across the city.

During this time, Atlanta came to epitomize what was considered the spirit of the “New South,” having risen from the ashes of the Civil War and become an advocate of reconciliation with the North in order to restore business. This spirit was dramatized by three Atlanta expositions: the International Cotton (1881), the Piedmont (1887), and the Cotton States and International (1895). At the last one, educator and reformer Booker T. Washington made a historic declaration, referred to as the Atlanta Compromise, in which he argued for what his critics called an “accommodationist” philosophy of race relations: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Racial discrimination and segregation have shaped Atlanta throughout its history. During the first half of the 20th century, one of the most important places for Black Atlantans was Auburn Avenue and the neighborhood around it. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was born and raised there, and the area is today the location of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park. Among the sites within the park are King’s childhood home, Ebenezer Baptist Church (where he and his father preached), the crypt at the King Center where King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, are buried, and the building that was the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The park reflects the important role that Atlanta played in the American civil rights movement during the 1950s and ’60s.

In 1973 Atlanta became the first major city in the South to elect an African American mayor, Maynard Jackson. His election came a decade after a previous mayor had built a barrier, sometimes called Atlanta’s Berlin Wall, that was intended to prevent Black residents from moving into a white neighborhood. (It was removed after a court ruled it illegal.) That mayor, Ivan Allen, subsequently endorsed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and pushed an image of Atlanta as “the City Too Busy to Hate,” a motto still debated decades later. At about the same time, Ebony magazine declared Atlanta the “Black Mecca of the South,” a label that has persisted and is also still debated.

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Atlanta itself is relatively small but is surrounded by a sprawl of low-density suburbs sustained by freeways built after World War II. The metropolitan area experienced a postwar population boom during the 1950s, and its residents more than doubled between 1980 and 2000, from two million to more than four million people.

The contemporary city

Atlanta is still the focal point of an important network of rail lines and interstate highways. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, 10 miles (16 km) southwest of downtown Atlanta, is one of the world’s busiest airports. The city’s first mass-transit rail line opened in 1979, and by the early 21st century the rail system had expanded to include several more lines. Streetcars were reintroduced to the city in 2014. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) oversees the area’s public transportation.

Atlanta remains the financial and commercial capital of the Southeast and is its most important distribution center. Printing and publishing, high-technology industries, telecommunications, airline services, military and government services, and banking and insurance are supplemented by industries producing aircraft, beverages, automobiles, electronics and electrical equipment, chemicals, processed foods, and paper products. Major companies with headquarters in Atlanta include UPS, the Coca-Cola Company, and Delta Air Lines; Home Depot is based near the city. The television news network CNN is also located in Atlanta.

Atlanta is a major educational center, with dozens of degree-granting institutions in the metropolitan area. The city has a prestigious consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), notably Morehouse College (1867), Spelman College (1881), and Clark Atlanta University, the latter formed in 1988 by the merger of Atlanta University (1865) and Clark College (1869). Others schools include Emory University (1836), Georgia Institute of Technology (1885), Georgia State University (1913), and Oglethorpe University (1835).

Atlanta is also the chief medical center of the Southeast and is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a division of the federal Department of Health and Human Services. It is also the focus, more broadly, of federal government activity in the Southeast and is the headquarters of the Sixth Federal Reserve District.

Among Atlanta’s notable buildings is the Georgia State Capitol, completed in 1889. The Peachtree Center is a complex of hotels, offices, and shops at the heart of downtown. The Woodruff Arts Center, which opened in 1968, includes the High Museum of Art and hosts the Alliance Theatre company and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Centennial Olympic Park was built for use during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.

Atlanta is home to a number of professional sports franchises, two of which moved to the city during the 1960s, while Ivan Allen was mayor. Major League Baseball’s Braves relocated to Atlanta from Milwaukee in 1965, and the National Basketball Association’s Hawks moved there from St. Louis in 1968. In 1974 Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium was the site of Hank Aaron’s 715th career home run, which broke a nearly four-decade-old MLB record. (The stadium was demolished in 1997.) The Falcons of the National Football League began playing in the city in 1966. Other professional sports teams are the Atlanta Dream of the Women’s National Basketball Association and Atlanta United FC of Major League Soccer.

The Atlanta History Center campus includes a museum, historic homes, research facilities, and an exhibition, opened in 2019, that houses the Cyclorama, a huge painting dating from the 1880s that depicts the Battle of Atlanta. The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum displays artifacts from Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and the adjoining Carter Center, founded by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, is a human rights organization. The house where novelist Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind is preserved.

After Outkast’s breakout in the 1990s, Atlanta became home to a uniquely Southern take on rap that put it at the center of hip-hop in the United States. The annual festival known as Freaknik drew major hip-hop artists to the city, along with tens of thousands of college students. First organized as a picnic in the 1980s by local HBCU students, it evolved into a spring-break street party notorious for its excesses. It had ended by 2000.

Spike Lee, who was born in Atlanta and graduated from Morehouse, and Tyler Perry, whose production company is located in Atlanta, are among the notable Black filmmakers and TV creators connected to the city. Donald Glover’s TV series Atlanta, which aired in 2016–18 and 2022, was filmed primarily in the city and provides a vivid representation of Atlanta and its people. Atlanta’s chapter of the professional organization Women in Film and Television advocates for women in the entertainment industry.

Atlanta is also home to museums of science and of natural history as well as ballet and opera companies, the latter based in a performing arts facility completed in 2007. Annual events include a dogwood festival, in April, and a jazz festival, in May. The National Black Arts Festival, which is based in Atlanta, organizes events throughout the year.

J.E. Luebering The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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American civil rights movement, mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery. Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s broke the pattern of public facilities’ being segregated by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865–77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

Abolitionism to Jim Crow

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence. Nor were they included among the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens, generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights—such as the right to own land or serve on juries—were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called “free Blacks” endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation. Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement (see slave rebellions), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means—protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements—to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (center), with other civil rights supporters lock arms on as they lead the way along Constitution Avenue during the March on Washington, Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963.
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Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement. His autobiography—one of many slave narratives—and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country’s founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling—by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories—ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country’s political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party. Lincoln’s victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860–61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property. After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery (Thirteenth Amendment) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons (Fourteenth Amendment) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves (Fifteenth Amendment). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction, white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the “Jim Crow” system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

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The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote. With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights (see woman suffrage).