Description

A magnificent piece of writing a beautiful tapestry of prose in which the stories of two of Atlantas most celebrated families have been woven densely into the history of the city itself The New York Times

The Intersection of Peachtree Street historically the residential and commercial street of Atlantas white elite and Sweet Auburn Avenue the spiritual main street of Atlantas community mirrors the often separate but mutually dependent worlds of whites and blacks in this Southern city In Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn Gary M Pomerantz traces five generations of two familiesthe Allens descended from slave owners and the Dobbses from slaves These families produced the two most influential mayors of the modern South Ivan Allen Jr and Maynard Jackson Jr

Through hundreds of interviews and five years of painstaking research Pomerantz shows how the families rose to social economic and political prominence But he also demonstrates how their interesting lives paralleled the shifting relations between Atlantas blacks and whites as the city grew to become the capital of the New South It is a representative story of the transformation of a city and the entire south