Deep Roots Together

In 1917, Rosalie Andrews, a 15-year-old African-American girl, boarded a trolley in downtown Atlanta. She deposited her 15 cents and sat down in the front seat next to the motorman.

“You can’t sit there,” he said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“You can’t sit there in that seat.”

“Why not?”

“Because colored folks sit in the back,” he told her.

“When did they start doing that?” she asked.

The motorman scratched his head. “Where are you from?”

“Marietta.”

“Oh,” he said. “That accounts for it.”

Her story is retold in Cobb County, Georgia and the Origins of the Suburban South: A Twentieth-Century History by Thomas Allan Scott. Andrews, who grew up at her grandmother’s home in Marietta, frequently took the Marietta trolley into Atlanta, sitting next to the white motormen and chatting the entire way.

She had known these people well, she recalled, and they had known her. It was the closeness of the Marietta community, in her opinion, that made the difference, and although she lived in segregation, she did not become aware of it until that day in 1917.

Her story is indicative of the peculiar, sometimes subtle race relations in the South from the end of the Civil War up through the 1970s.

This subtlety is well described by another anecdote: , who is originally from New England, is a Catholic priest and pastor of the in Marietta. He describes his first encounter with Southern race relations when he was assigned a parish in Fairburn during the 1970s.

“I was amazed at how adept people were at dancing around the racial line,” he said. “I would be in the grocery store, and there would be two women–one black, the other white–and they would be chatting and getting along like two girls swinging together on a garden fence. Yet the whole time there was a line between them. Both of them knew where it was, and neither one would cross it.”

“I had seen racism in the North,” Reilly added, “but there it was obvious; it was clumsy. They would fight; they would hate one another openly. But in the South, they had it down to an art form.”

Many historians suggest that race relations in the South actually became worse after the Civil War. In cotton belt counties that had depended on large plantations with numerous slaves, the post-war population of freed blacks easily exceeded that of whites. Perceiving this as a threat to the social order, white Southern legislators cracked down on African-American civil liberties in order to maintain dominance. Fear of vigilante justice, especially the lynch law, further restricted the activities of supposedly free blacks.

Race relations worsened even further around the turn of the century, as increasing numbers of both races left the failed agrarian economies of rural Georgia and migrated to towns and cities seeking jobs. Scott believes that this resulted in more interaction between the races where neither knew the background or character of the other. This lack of familiarity fostered suspicion and mistrust, which in turn led to animosity.

Cobb County may have escaped this deeper racial divide on two fronts: Firstly, Cobb had never been a large cotton-producing county and had therefore been home to fewer slaves. Most of Cobb’s slave population lived in the City of Marietta and were more likely to have worked closely with the families they served.

Secondly, cities like Marietta were never as transient as Atlanta. Although Marietta has had steady growth since its creation, it did not experience the huge turn-of-the-century migration that Atlanta did.

As a result, blacks and whites in Cobb County tended to have deep roots stretching back together. Even today, it is not unusual to meet a lifelong Mariettan whose ancestry here goes back over a century. A number of Marietta’s “founding families” are still prominent in Cobb County today.

This is not to say that Cobb or Marietta was a haven away from racial division. Journalist Steve Oney, writing in And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, describes Marietta in 1915 as being “thoroughly unreconstructed.” The “Jim Crow” laws that were passed in the rest of the South were fully in effect here, and for African Americans accused of crimes in Cobb County, justice largely depended on how well connected they were to influential whites.

Nevertheless, Rosalie Andrews saw a clear distinction between Marietta and Atlanta in terms of her treatment as an African American.

“It never dawned on me that I was black until I went to Atlanta,” she said. “How blessed I was to live in a town of love and friendship. [But] if you want to be ostracized, go across the [Chattahoochee] River.”