The roots of the Atlanta Way can be traced in part to the almost total destruction of Atlanta during the Civil War. The city’s seal bears a phoenix rising from flames alongside the Latin word “resurgens” (“rising again”) and two years: 1847, when Atlanta was incorporated, and 1865, when it was made anew. After the war, Atlanta embraced a post-Southern worldliness, foregrounding economic growth as it tried to distance itself from the region’s history of racial conflict. In an 1886 speech given at a meeting of the New England Society in New York City, The Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady repudiated the Old South not on the grounds of its inhumanity but because it was inefficient: “slavery and agriculture,” he said, “could neither give nor maintain healthy growth.” He sketched a vision of a New South fully incorporated into the nation, leaving the plantation economy behind.
In the twentieth century, businessmen and other well-connected civic actors took on a singular role in upholding the social order. In 1906, white Atlantans — responding to specious reports that black men had been assaulting white women — rampaged through black neighborhoods, killing at least two dozen. Black residents organizing in self-defense were met with another wave of violence, this time in the form of police repression. Attempting to enforce calm, white elites allied with black leaders — ministers, businessmen — who in turn sought to disassociate themselves from the resisting lower classes. “The decision by elite Black community leaders to serve as mediators for white politicians in the immediate aftermath of the massacre laid the template for protecting the city’s reputation and maintaining law and order,” Kayla Edgett and Sarah Abdelaziz wrote in a 2021 Atlanta Studies article. “At the same time it forestalled the immediate racial justice that Black Atlantans demanded, especially working-class and low-income residents.” The bonds formed between community leaders — white and black elites — would prove useful in dealing with violent racial conflict, at the same time as they set an exclusionary precedent: discord in the city could be taken care of behind closed doors.