Georgia - Day 13 - back to Atlanta for the day

High Falls State Park, Jackson

Wednesday, 5 April 2023

At one of the pet shops, I had bought collars and name tags for the kittens.  Bucky had shown me how very possible it is that I could lose one of them, and since my previous cats have seemed to like their collars, I thought these would too.

Well, sort of.  Jimmy seemed to like his, but Bucky took his off almost right away and used it (with the attached bell) as a new toy to play with.  That breakaway collar they put on cat collars obviously works well.

  

today's route -
included both the I-75 line and the squared one to the left

Even with both yesterday and today,
I missed most of greater Atlanta (population 5.5 million).

We left the campground before 8:00 because I had several places to see today.  Starting with a recycling dropoff center I'd found at Jonesboro, which was the reason for the squared route on side roads.

Part of the drive was in very heavy fog, enough for electronic highway signs to warn people to slow down.

On the radio I heard that Atlanta is the world's busiest airport.  Since all Delta flights seem to stop there no matter where they're going, and Delta is one of the largest US airlines, I'm not too surprised by that.  DFW ranks as #2, which is a little odd since it's the hub for American Airlines, even larger than Delta.  

I got lost in the town of Lovejoy (I think), and while I was lost I stopped for gas at $3.19/gallon.

The Jonesboro/Clayton County recycling dropoff accepted everything except plastics that weren't bottles - so I got rid of my glass that Columbus wouldn't accept.

From there I was supposed to head towards I-75, except nobody bothered to post a sign saying where eastbound folks could make the turn.  I had to keep driving till I found a place to turn around - and there was a nice big sign for westbound folks.  

Driving into Atlanta, I passed a turn for Porsche Avenue, which made me curious enough to look it up.  Atlanta is actually the North American HQ for Porsche and they do indeed make cars here.

Maybe their example is the reason everyone on the highway was going much faster than the speed limit.  If I'd had any confidence that I knew where I was going, I wouldn't have minded going faster just for safety's sake, but I just did my best to stay out of the way.

I was aiming for part of the campus of Emory University.  Because I was curious.  The movie Denial is one of my favorite movies (the good guys win).  It's about the defamation trial Deborah Lipstadt had with a Holocaust denier.  In Deborah Lipstadt's book about that experience, she described more than once the very generous treatment she'd received from Emory, where she was (and still is) a professor.  Other academics were stunned by Emory's generosity because, they said, it was so outside the norm.

Then I learned that Emory is the location for the main office of the CDC.  Clearly these people don't mind supporting controversial points of view.  I looked the school up online and learned that it was founded in Oxford, GA, in 1836 as a Methodist Episcopal school; it relocated to Atlanta in 1919 because of a land grant from the founder of Coca-Cola; in 1953 it became co-ed.  US News consistently ranks it highly in several categories.  I rank it highly because of it being on a list of schools with students graduating with the lowest amount of debt (even long after they're paid off, the pain of paying back student loans still lingers).

This was somewhere else I got lost, but at least it was an attractive area.  Today, just as I found yesterday, I had to deal with the serious hills in Atlanta.  Much more than in Austin, TX, for instance, which prides itself as being by the Hill Country.  

Google's directions, for instance, claimed I could take a road that turned out to be not a road but an entrance to a parking garage.  I turned around at the Emory Nursing School (ranked #2 nationally) and tried another route to the CDC.  As I guess I could have figured, the entry is by a guarded gate, so I kept on going.  But here's a photo I found online of part of their building.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

I managed to find a Kroger on the way back to the main part of town, and we stopped there for groceries, a walk for Dext, and an early lunch.

I'm beginning to understand why Southerners speak of the Civil War as if it were almost in their lifetimes: Georgia, at least, is jam-packed with historical markers describing obscure skirmishes and people.  Here are 2 of the many I passed today.   https://www.hmdb.org/Battle-of-Atlanta-Began-Here  and   https://www.waymarking.com/Rice's-Brigade

At the top of a hill looking toward a small part of Atlanta's extensive skyline.

From there I went on to the Martin Luther King National Historical Park.  This park includes quite a few buildings, because King was born here, and he and his father preached at a local Baptist church.  So the park includes those buildings and the burial place for Dr. and Mrs. King, as well as the displays at the National Park Service's Visitor Center.

During this trip, I've visited quite a few sites that included sometimes extensive information about MLK, and in comparison, what they had here seemed almost skimpy.  But there were still some things here I wanted to remember - and I can only hope my photos come out clear enough in this process (the lighting and the displays weren't too photogenic).

Here's the entrance to the park.

see photo enlargements below

This is the photo you can see above,
of King and his 2 oldest children.

This photo of King and his daughter
is on the other side of that brick pillar.

The walk from this entrance included stones engraved with quotes from MLK.  I've enlarged these as much as I can in hopes you can read them, though you might try making them even bigger.  Between the bright sun and the shading trees and the reflections on the stones, well, I'm just not a good enough photographer to do any better than this.

Near the entrance to the center was a tribute to Gandhi, who was such an enormous influence on MLK's life and work.

I couldn't understand the center's arrangement of its exhibits, so what I've done here is basically clumps of information in a more or less chronological order.

The atmosphere of segregation:

This is the caption for the photo below.

The looks on these children's faces remind me of the song from South Pacific: "You've got to be
taught to hate and fear . . . ."

The influence of Gandhi:

Non-violent protest in the US:

First time I've seen this photo of the result of the Montgomery bus boycott: an empty city bus.

The lower of these paragraphs is the caption to the photo below.

Even in this fuzzy reproduction, you can see the letter opener
stuck in MLK's chest: it's the short thing that seems right under his chin.

For most of the first half of his life, MLK lived in the shadow of his famous father.  It was especially
difficult for him when he began to preach at the church where his father was a pastor.  Interesting,
these father/son dynamics - see, e.g. Carl and Rob Reiner.

This is the caption for the photo below.

Note that most of the attention is on the white guy who has joined the Black folks in the sit-in.

Other concerns:

I was surprised not to see much of anything about MLK's Poor People's Campaign, which he came to regard not only as a worthy cause but also as a significant focus that would unite both poor whites and people of color.

caption for this photo is below.

The day before MLK's death.
This caption says the US Marshall is serving a court order prohibiting the march they'd planned, so I don't know why these folks looked so happy.  It's an odd photo, which is why I'm including it.

That night, MLK gave his famous "Mountaintop" speech.

Many people (including me) aren't aware this list of rights
was included in King's "Mountaintop" speech.

At about 6:00 PM the next day, he was killed.

In this photo, he's just been shot.

Carrying his wounded body downstairs at the motel.

A few days later, Mrs. King led the march in her husband's place.

And finally, this piece from MLK's famous letter from the Birmingham jail:

After leaving the visitor center and giving Dext yet another walk, I tried to follow Google's directions to some Atlanta barbecue.  Of course I got lost, though that worked out okay as I passed both Morehouse College and Spellman College, both historically black institutions of higher learning.  Morehouse was founded in 1867 for men and Spellman in 1881 for women.  They seem to be very urban schools with nice brick campuses.

And I finally found it - Anna's BBQ, considered one of Atlanta's best barbecue joints.   (See photo farther below.)

On the way back we passed the turn to Stone Mountain.  I'd heard of its existence, but its main claim to fame, as I'd heard it, was a carving on it of several Confederate leaders.  That didn't sound like enough of a reason for me to waste my time.  I found this article, though, that seems to be trying to present a more nuanced view of the place, including a lot of its history.   https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/Stone-Mountain

On the way back to the campground on I-75, I had a terrible time staying awake.  If I'd come across a rest area, I'd have stopped for a bit.  But there wasn't anything, except to be glad that, though we had heavy traffic, it was nothing compared to the miles of stopped traffic on the northbound side.  We finally got to the campground (in one piece) by a little after 4:00.  As tired as I was, I was truly grateful I didn't have to fix dinner.

With the half-rack of ribs, I got 2 sides (collards and baked beans), 2 corn muffins and a bowl of BBQ sauce.  It was all included in the price.  Everything was very tasty indeed and I'd be happy to go back on any future visit to Atlanta.