A week or so ago, our president called John Lewis and his congressional district in Atlanta “in horrible shape and falling apart (and not to mention crime infested).” I was enraged. Not only had he attacked John Lewis, a civil rights icon and Atlantan hero, but he also attacked Atlanta. MY Atlanta. The place where I grew up. Growing up, all I wanted was to move away from Atlanta. It was too sprawling, where you had to use a highway to get anywhere if you weren’t in the heart of the city. In Atlanta, if you don’t live ITP (in the perimeter), you lived in your car, commuting anywhere. Traffic patterns are so well known that you knew that if you left 15 minutes later, it could end up taking you 30 minutes longer to get home.
And Atlanta is hot. Not just warm, like a lovely 70 degrees, but hot. By the time it’s April or May, the sun beats down almost aggressively. It gets hot enough that it’s almost like the sewers boil—you can smell it, warm, drifting up, mixing in with the smell of honeysuckle. You worry that your dog’s paws might burn on the asphalt.
Atlanta was not where I wanted to be.
But it is not in horrible shape and falling apart. It’s a hub of culture, of business. It’s new and old money. It has pockets of severe poverty and extreme wealth. Atlanta is a city of character that is a lot of things at once. Atlanta creates artists. Atlanta is trap and rap and hip hop. Atlanta is diverse, with a large African American community, Jewish community, a LGBTQIA+ community, and more. Atlanta is killer Indian food in Decatur and Antico’s pizza by Tech. It’s listening to your favorite band play at the Tabernacle while you dance with everyone else in the crowd, unable to stand still. It’s getting a King of Pops and walking around the Peachtree farmer’s market, petting dogs of people you don’t know but who will introduce themselves, and their dog. It’s sitting by the pool, feeling your body melting off of you in July. It’s complaining about MARTA.
Atlanta is still seeing a racial line, of knowing where most black people live and where most white people live. It is living in one part of town knowing you will never understand what it’s like to live in another. Atlanta is angry. Atlanta is people telling you racism is over while the Klan meet at Stone Mountain. Atlanta is far from perfect. But Atlanta is always pushing, always becoming a new version of itself.
Atlanta is a ridiculous hubbub in the heart of the South, full to the brim with paradoxes.
Atlanta is a wonderful place.
I appreciate Atlanta for its heat and its sprawling self, because the heat grounds you, the highways isolate you. There’s something humanizing about that, that makes every moment feel more real, more potent. There’s a reason people sing about Atlanta—you go and you hear the music of the city. The trumpet of the car horns, the rhythm to the way people speak, the melody in the air, changing, changing.
Don’t tell me Atlanta is falling apart. Atlanta is rising up.