From Aubern Street - where Martin Luther King Jr was laid to rest next door to his Ebenezer Baptist Church - the multistorey spires of downtown Atlanta gleam on the skyline a mile away like a shining 21st century citadel of economic success. New investments worth $34 billion in the last five years have created 400,000 new jobs, more employment growth than in the entire European Community.
Andrew Young, Mayor of Atlanta and former US Ambassador to the UN, was a close associate of King and was at his side moments after he was gunned down. So while Young likes to 'kind of brag a little' about Atlanta's achievements, he understands the struggle that went into them.
Above all, he says, this city 'may be the only place in the world where we honestly had a prayerful revolution.'
Mayor Young was speaking to 250 people at the opening banquet of a Moral Re-Armament conference held in Atlanta in June to examine the type of moral foundations needed 'to bring the world safely into the 21st century'. He recounted how King and those in the civil rights movement almost always began their actions with prayer. Likewise, when solutions came, confrontations 'ended with a prayer of reconciliation' with those same people and businesses who had tried to keep blacks out.
'There was a common religious heritage; says Young, 'and Atlanta is thriving today essentially because the leadership dared to take on those changes out of a sense of a moral commitment.'
Export
Indian journalist Rajmohan Gandhi - grandson of the Mahatma, from whom Martin Luther King drew his philosophy of non-violence - responded to' Young's remarks by urging Atlanta 'to export its stirring story to the four corners of the world'. At a time when 'members of the human race are doing terrible things to one another, what God has used you all to achieve encourages us all'. Mayor Young replied, 'I know what has happened here can be exported because we imported so much from Mr Gandhi's grandfather.'
Gandhi is well aware of what that 'prayerful revolution' has involved. He was last in Atlanta almost 30 years ago, during the height of the civil rights struggle. He was there as part of an interracial cast of the musical The Crowning Experience, which portrayed the story of Mary McLeod Bethune who, born of slave parents, rose from picking cotton to become adviser to two American presidents.
The black-owned Atlanta Daily World, just prior to the recent conference, carried an account of that 1958 visit: 'In the tense aftermath of Little Rock, some 11,000 attended the two performances in the civic auditorium, one of the few places open to black and white. Sixty plain clothes policemen, mingled with the crowd, prepared for an explosion. The Jewish owner of the Tower Theatre approached the Moral Re-Armament cast and offered them his theatre, without any colour bar, for as long as they could fill it. The play ran for four months without incident.'
Judge Jack Etheridge, Assistant Dean of the Emory University Law School where the recent conference took place, remembers The Crowning Experience. 'It was at a time when we were going through some of the worst moments with respect to integration,' he said at the opening reception while introducing Mayor Young. 'It is not too much to say that it was pivotal.'
