The Problem of the Color Line: Atlanta Landmarks and Civil Rights History
From the Georgia State University website:
"While participating in our workshop in Atlanta, you will visit the sites where Civil Rights history was made. We have assembled a group of nationally known scholars who will share stories of the Civil Rights movement that reshaped the city, the region, and the nation. You will learn how to use Atlanta's historic sites to bring the Civil Rights Movement alive to your students.
"It was here in Atlanta in 1895 that Booker T. Washington delivered his 'Atlanta Compromise' address at the Cotton States and International Exposition. Eight years later in The Souls of Black Folk, Atlanta University professor W. E. B. DuBois predicted that the 'problem of the Twentieth Century [would be] the problem of the color line.' When Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on Auburn Avenue, a racial divide relegated African Americans to a second class status. Dr. King grew up to challenge the color line and make Atlanta the capital of a Civil Rights Movement that ended legalized segregation in America.
"Workshop field trips will take you to Piedmont Park where Booker T. Washington delivered his 'Atlanta Compromise' address and to Atlanta University where W. E. B. DuBois penned The Souls of Black Folk. Workshop scholars will lead you in the footsteps of Dr. King as he played in his childhood home, attended Morehouse College, pastored Ebenezer Baptist Church, and now is buried on Auburn Avenue with his wife Coretta.
"The historic landmarks that you will visit reveal the history of a segregated society and the struggle to dismantle it. The gold-domed Capitol building is where Jim Crow laws were passed and where African Americans protested their passage. The Fox Theater bears the imprint of the color line, with separate entrances, seating, and rest rooms for black and white theater goers. The downtown Rich's Department Store and City Hall are facilities, once segregated, which still carry the imprints of their Civil Rights battles. The roots of resistance to the color line began on Auburn Avenue, the historic heart of the African American business, civic, and religious communities, and on the Atlanta University Center campuses where students organized sit-ins and demonstrations in the 1960s. Atlanta has memorialized these events at the sites where Civil Rights history was made."