Day 10, January 15, Atlanta, Georgia

The greater Atlanta area — which includes 28 counties and municipalities — is 100 miles across and has 5.1 million people. Population density is pretty low for a big city because it’s not confined by any natural barriers, such as mountains or the sea. Downtown Atlanta follows a similar spread-out pattern. Cranes are working everywhere to construct new high rises, and while there are two primary clusters — downtown and midtown — two or three miles apart, you also see very tall buildings all by themselves here and there. This belt of high rises is like a smile with a bunch of missing teeth. Our hotel, the Regency Suites, is in midtown. This morning I took a walk around the neighbourhood and found an older street with very big homes just east of the hotel. Two days ago, we drove through the Buckhead area north of midtown. It also has very large homes on massive lots. That is the charm of Atlanta. You have a slightly rolling landscape, with big trees and lots of little parks. Neighbourhoods are cut into this topography, and the city goes on and on.

We met today with the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. Their city is the business and economic hub of the southwest U.S. — a role it has served for 200 years. During the Civil War, the Union army took Atlanta and burned it to the ground, knocking out a major Confederate hub. That is how the Atlanta Flames (now the Calgary Flames) hockey team got its name. Atlanta’s airport, Hartsfield-Jackson, is now the busiest in the world, with 89 million passengers last year. (About 65 per cent of travelers do not leave the airport, they just change planes and keep going.) Atlanta is headquarters for Coca-Cola, Home Depot, UPS, Delta Airlines, AGCO and many other companies. Atlanta was fourth in fDi magazine's ranking of the “top North American cities of the future.” Chicago ranked first. Interestingly, Toronto was second and Montreal was seventh.

What we have not seen of Atlanta is its poor areas. Our van driver, Gerard Baptiste, says the southwest parts of Atlanta proper have high poverty and high crime. The area around Atlanta University, which has a largely a black student body, is “infested” with crime, Gerard says. “These people are stuck,” he says. But at the same time, he says Atlanta can be a very good city for black people. It’s called “Black Mecca” for the opportunities afforded to bright and ambitious African Americans. There are affluent black neighbourhoods with million-dollar houses. The current mayor is black and so were the four mayors before her. Mayor Shirley Franklin gets great respect from the chamber of commerce for her pro-business views.

Gerard our driver moved to the U.S. from Haiti in the late 1960s. His father was an agronomist, which was his ticket out of revolution-torn Haiti. The family arrived in New York right around the time Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.

When Gerard was older, he volunteered for the army because he knew he was going to get drafted. After serving in Thailand during the Vietnam War, Gerard returned to New York City, got married, then moved to Dallas. New York was pretty rough and the time, and he wanted to get out. About 20 years ago, his wife — who worked with IBM — got a transfer to Atlanta. They have been living in Black Mecca ever since.

Ronn Francis, one of our guides, grow up in New York City — Harlem — in the ‘60s. He said the civil rights movement was a bigger deal in the south than in New York City. When I asked Ronn about Martin Luther King Jr., Ronn said he connected more with the words of Malcolm X. Rather than preach non-violence, Malcolm X wanted African Americans to stand up and defend themselves — “by any means necessary” — in response to an unprovoked attack. Malcolm X was shot and killed in 1965, apparently by someone from within his own muslim movement.

Supper tonight…

Members of the Georgia Council for International Visitors hosted a meal for us. The council is a diverse group of about 200 Georgians who coordinate visits from people such as us Canadians. Every other month, they have supper at a different restaurant in the city and invite official "international visitors" who are in Atlanta at the time. We went to a Persian restaurant. I sat beside a woman whose mother came from Winnipeg. She said if the Republicans win the next election, she’s moving to Canada. (I don’t think she was serious.) Her husband runs a company that sells forestry equipment and he has been to more places in Canada than I have. A woman sitting across from me told of her narrow escape from her native Iran in the mid 1980s. She and her husband told the border guards that they were just going for a holiday in Turkey, but she had all her personal documents in her boot. The guards asked her to take off her boots, but at that moment her baby son started crying and screaming. The border guards said don’t bother with the boots, just go on through and help that screaming boy. I also met a man who works as a Chinese interpreter. I asked if he would write my name in Chinese characters. He had trouble because the closest sound to Jay starts with a “J” sound but rhymes with “high.” It means “house.” This meal wrapped up our time in Atlanta. We fly tomorrow to San Antonio.