Georgia (state)

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Economic Growth During World War II and the 1950s

From the Civil War to the mid-20th century, Georgia was one of the poorest states in the Union; the only states as poor were other Southern states. Indeed, during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt made a speech in Georgia declaring the South to be “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” In 1940 the average Georgia family earned only 57 percent as much as the typical family nationwide. The American entry into World War II in 1941 began the economic revival of Georgia and the South. Military bases were created or expanded near virtually all sizable Georgia towns. Federal dollars poured into the region to build airplanes, ships, and munitions for the war effort. Suddenly there were more good jobs at decent pay than Georgians had ever known.

A good example of the economic impact of the war is the Bell Aircraft Company, which converted Marietta from a sleepy town to a booming industrial center. Bell built a plant in Marietta in 1942 to build B-29 bombers for the war effort. A town of about 8,000 in 1940, Marietta became the home of a business employing almost 29,000 workers, and at much higher wages than Southerners were accustomed to earning. With a large number of men off fighting, a significant part of the workforce consisted of women. Despite Southern customs of segregation, Bell also provided some opportunities for blacks. Although the Bell plant closed at the end of the war, it was reopened by Lockheed Corporation in 1950 with the outbreak of the Korean War. In the 1990s, Lockheed continued to be a major employer, relying primarily on government contracts.

When the war ended, soldiers returned home to households with much more spending money than in the past. By 1950 the average Georgia family income was 70 percent of the national average, and Georgians continued to narrow the income gap during the next several decades. National corporations, noting the healthier economy of the South, established regional headquarters in cities such as Atlanta. The availability of air conditioning made the hot, humid Southern summers less of a deterrent to Northerners. The war also improved the training of Georgia’s industrial workforce. A number of Northern industries moved south, attracted by the large labor pool, low wage scale, lack of unions, low taxes, and favorable climate. National migration patterns began to reverse. For decades many of the South’s brightest young people had deserted the region for the greater opportunities of the North. By the mid-1950s more whites were moving into Georgia each year than were departing, and by the mid-1970s the same was true for blacks. Moreover, those arriving tended to be better educated and skilled than those leaving, so that the net gain for Georgia was large.

Some sluggish older industries became more dynamic as they moved to the South. For example, for more than 100 years, carpet manufacturers had made beautiful, high-quality woven rugs in Northern plants. The floor coverings were so expensive, however, that only the affluent could afford wall-to-wall carpeting. The typical prewar house had a hardwood floor because wood was cheaper than carpets. But in the Dalton area of north Georgia, local entrepreneurs in the 1940s built machines to produce carpeting by a new, cheaper technique called tufting. After they discovered in the 1950s that durable, inexpensive rugs could be made with nylon thread, the carpet industry experienced unparalleled growth. Within a generation of the war’s end, United States home builders had virtually stopped installing hardwood floors, and wall-to-wall carpeting was nearly universal. In the late 1990s north Georgia continues to be the center of the world carpet industry.

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The Civil Rights Movement

The transformation of the South’s economy was coupled with an even more remarkable alteration of society in the area of race relations. Black soldiers returning home from World War II were often in the forefront in demanding change. In general, young people were no longer willing to tolerate the indignities their parents had suffered. Soon the white politicians found themselves confronted with a movement demanding an end to racial segregation and discrimination.

In 1946 a federal court knocked down Georgia’s white primary law, a device to ensure white control of party machinery. That February the vote of Atlanta blacks made the difference in sending to Washington a white liberal, Helen Douglas Mankin, the first Georgia woman elected to Congress. Police departments began to hire black officers, first in Savannah in 1947, then in Atlanta the next year; at that time, however, black police were only allowed to arrest fellow blacks.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 decided, in Brown v. Board of Education, that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Soon Georgia blacks filed a number of cases in federal courts to force public schools and colleges to abide by the Brown decision. In January 1961 two students, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter, forced the University of Georgia to open its doors to black students. That fall, following a federal court order in the case of Calhoun v. Latimer, the Atlanta public schools began to desegregate. Over the next decade the tradition of segregated education was fundamentally altered.

The civil rights movement in the United States was centered in Atlanta, which was the home of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In March 1960 black college students in Atlanta, and soon other Georgia cities, began holding sit-ins at segregated restaurants, lunch counters, parks, and churches. The nonviolent protests also included marching, picketing, and occasional boycotting of stores. While demonstrators were usually met with hostility, they sometimes got results. In Atlanta, for instance, business leaders feared the negative publicity the city received when it arrested or harmed peaceful demonstrators. Progressive mayors such as William B. Hartsfield and Ivan Allen, Jr., had worked hard to build Atlanta into the commercial and transportation center of the South. They advertised Atlanta as “the city too busy to hate.” By 1961 they were willing to end segregation at lunch counters and negotiate with civil rights leaders on other reforms.

At the same time, many Georgia politicians in the 1950s and 1960s engaged in massive resistance to integration of public facilities. Following Brown v. Board of Education the state threatened to cut off public funding to any school that integrated. In 1956 the state flag was changed to include the Confederate battle flag. For some this was merely a way to honor the memory of the brave soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, but for others it represented resistance to federal attempts to change the racist laws and customs of the past. In 1964 Congress passed a civil rights act that ended segregation in public places. Lester Maddox became a folk hero to some whites by closing his Atlanta restaurant rather than admit black customers. Two years later he was elected governor. While his record as governor was more progressive than his image, he nevertheless symbolized a defiant Georgia that stood outside the national mainstream.

In 1971 Maddox was succeeded by a man who projected a much different image—Jimmy Carter. In his inaugural address Carter said something that Georgians had not heard a governor utter since Reconstruction. The achievement of the civil rights movement in transforming attitudes was apparent when Carter announced: “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over. Our people have already made this major and difficult decision, but we cannot underestimate the challenge of hundreds of minor decisions yet to be made.” Carter went on to call for equal opportunity for all. Five years later, he was elected president of the United States. Carter himself has often credited the civil rights movement with making it possible for statesmen from the Deep South to ascend to the presidency. He represented a new generation of Southern leaders who no longer had to defend segregation and thus could appeal to the majority of Americans outside the region.

Carter was perhaps correct that the majority of Georgians, sometime in the 1960s and 1970s, stopped trying to defend segregation and white supremacy. A change in practices, to some degree, led to a change in attitudes. Yet a backlash against the civil rights movement was also apparent. The integration of the Atlanta public schools, a high crime rate, high taxes, and the high cost of housing, were contributing factors to white flight, the movement of white residents from the city to the suburbs. Atlanta went quickly from being a majority-white to a majority-black city, encircled by a ring of white communities. In 1968 Georgians were so disenchanted with both the Democrats and the Republicans that they cast their presidential ballots for third-party candidate George Wallace of Alabama, the onetime symbol of Southern resistance to school integration.

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Modern Georgia After 1970

Georgia in the last quarter of the 20th century has continued to be a place of contrasts and contradictions. On one hand it is a state of remarkable promise, an economic powerhouse with a thriving economy. On the other hand it remains a state with immense social problems, where opportunity is often far from equal for those in rural areas or inner cities.

Atlanta has continued to symbolize modern, progressive Georgia. As far back as the 1920s, visionary Atlantans promoted the development of the city’s airport as the key to future growth. Following World War II, as air traffic increasingly supplanted passenger trains, the Atlanta airport grew into one of the nation’s busiest. The end of segregation allowed Atlanta in the 1960s to become the home of major league sports teams, first in baseball, then football and basketball. In the 1970s blacks rose to political power. In 1972 Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King’s chief lieutenants, became the state’s first black congressman since Reconstruction, and he was elected from a majority-white district. The next year Maynard Jackson became Atlanta’s first black mayor. When Carter became president, he named Young to represent the United States at the United Nations, where the former civil rights leader gained international influence.

The most visible example of modern Atlanta business leadership has been Ted Turner, who inherited a small outdoor advertising company and turned it into a communications empire, first through a cable television station, Turner Broadcasting System (TBS), then through the Cable News Network (CNN). In the meantime Turner became owner of two of the town’s sports teams, the Braves and the Hawks. While CNN carried Atlanta’s name abroad, state and local leaders put much money and energy into attracting foreign companies to the Atlanta area. In large part due to Atlanta’s success in becoming an international city and to the prestige throughout the world of leaders such as Carter, King, and Young, the Georgia capital was able to attract the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. The event was held during July and August 1996. The Olympic Games were generally considered a success, despite some logistical problems and a still-unsolved bombing that killed two people.

While Georgia has grown in prosperity, it has also experienced with the rest of the South an amazing political transformation away from one-party rule by the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party generally dominated state and local politics in Georgia after Reconstruction. Successful candidates in Democratic primary elections were often assured of winning office. However, the perceived liberalism of the national Democrats on race issues was part of white Georgians’ alienation from the party.

The South’s economic recovery produced a more affluent, better educated population, with more people living in suburbs. These voters tended to identify with the Republicans’ commitment to low taxes. They favored limiting the growth of federal welfare programs, and they considered the Republicans to be more pro-family than the Democrats.

The Republican Party became important in presidential politics in the state in the 1960s. Republican Barry Goldwater carried Georgia in the 1964 presidential election and that same year Howard (“Bo”) Callaway became the first Republican elected to Congress from Georgia since Reconstruction. In the 1968 presidential election Georgia supported George C. Wallace of Alabama, the candidate of the ultra-conservative American Independent Party. Republican Richard Nixon won Georgia in the 1972 presidential election. In 1976 Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate and a former Georgia governor, carried both the state and the nation, becoming the first native Georgian to win the presidency. In the 1980 election, however, Georgia was one of only six states to support Carter. In that election, Republicans achieved their next major breakthrough in Georgia. Mack Mattingly defeated Georgia’s senior U.S. senator, Herman Talmadge. Georgia went for Republicans Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George Bush in 1988 but supported Democrat Bill Clinton of Arkansas in 1992. Although the Republicans lost their Senate seat in 1986, they won it back in 1992 with the election of Paul Coverdell. Greater success came in 1994 when Republicans captured 7 of Georgia’s 11 seats in the House. The Republicans not only seized control in Georgia, but for the first time in 40 years gained national control of Congress. Georgian Newt Gingrich, who helped mastermind the Republican takeover, became Speaker of the House.

In 1995 the state’s U.S. congressional districts were redrawn for the second time in three years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the 11th District, which had been gerrymandered to produce a black majority, was unconstitutional. The 11th had been redrawn in 1992 to link black communities after the U.S. Justice Department told Georgia it was not in compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The high court, however, disagreed with the Justice Department and held that race could not be used as a predominant factor in drawing district boundaries. In 1996 the court upheld Georgia’s new districting map, which reduced the number of majority-black districts from three to one. Despite the redrawing, Georgia’s three black U.S. congressional representatives all won reelection in November 1996.

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Georgia at the Millennium

Toward the end of the 20th century Georgia was growing much more rapidly than the nation as a whole. The state added a million residents in the 1980s, then another 723,000 between 1990 and 1995. Georgia’s 1995 population was approximately 7.2 million, making it the tenth largest state in the nation. People in other states and countries obviously found Georgia to be an attractive place to live: In the first half of the 1990s about 360,000 more people moved in to the state than moved away. The black population at mid-decade was growing slightly faster than the white population. Some 28 percent of Georgians had black ancestry, compared to 13 percent nationwide. By 1994 per-capita personal income in Georgia was 93 percent of the national average, while in the metropolitan Atlanta area it was 109 percent.

These positive indicators, however, masked the fact that not everyone participated in the good times. Georgia in the 1990s had one of the worst records of any state for the percentage of births to teenage and unwed mothers. The infant mortality rate in 1993 was 10.4 per 1,000 live births, compared to 8.4 per 1,000 nationwide. Twenty-nine percent of all Georgians age 25 or older lacked a high school diploma in 1990, compared to 25 percent in the rest of the country. The gap between whites and blacks was especially great. In 1989 per-capita income for Georgia’s black population was only 51 percent of that for whites, almost unchanged in 20 years and very close to what it was before the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, as the century comes to a close, Georgia is much closer to national norms than it once was.

The history section of this article was contributed by Thomas A. Scott. The remainder of the article was contributed by Truman A. Hartshorn.

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