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Impeccably researched and compassionately told, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn follows five generations of Allens and Dobbses from their arrival to their eventual leadership of the city. The extended metaphor of the intersection of Peachtree Street, the bastion of the old-line white leaders of Atlanta, and Auburn Avenue, the spiritual and commercial heart of the black community, emphasizes the irony that, until well into this century, the two streets represented the parallel universes of the racially segregated city.
The progenitors of the two clans arrived in Atlanta in the mid-1890s: Ivan Allen, Sr., son of a Confederate cavalryman, came to seek his fortune; John Wesley Dobbs, son of Georgia freedmen, came to seek an education. Their descendants, Ivan Allen, Jr., and Maynard Jackson, Jr., the crown princes of political dynasties trying to work together toward a common goal, met on the political playing field.
Both Allen and Jackson served as mayor of the city, with Jackson holding the distinction of being the first black mayor of a major Southern city. Both held office during critical periods of racial turbulence and change-Allen from 1962 to 1969, and Jackson from 1973-1981, and again in 1990. In the decades of their leadership, AtlantaÕs blacks and whites struggled first to integrate as a society and then to form a united front in a competitive, commercial capital.
For those readers whose knowledge of Atlanta begins and ends with Gone With the Wind, Pomerantz's history of this most shamelessly self-promoting Southern city is a fascinating study.
Against the backdrop of Atlanta's civic ambition, the story of the Allens and the Dobbses, families who defined the controversial city as it, in turn, shaped the two political dynasties, is a saga of the New South.
Anna Garris Goiser is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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