1950s/Urban South

This exhibit explores life in the 1950s in the Urban South through interactive displays featuring Jim Crow laws and the people in power who vocally and violently enforced segregation. Despite this adversity, African-American Institutions thrived in Atlanta with a a dynamic community network of churches, colleges, schools, fraternal orders, social clubs, and a range of commercial ventures. 

1950s/Urban South Gallery

By the mid-20th century the American South was caught between tradition and change. In the decades following the end of Reconstruction, a “new South” had sprung into existence as commerce and industry gradually replaced agriculture as the cornerstone of the economy.

    Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue District was a hub of black commerce, religion and entertainment; and the institutions of the Atlanta University Center provided African Americans a distinguished higher education.

    The Brown v. Board of Education decision was the first national victory in the legal struggle for racial equality. Several years passed before desegregation would begin in many Southern schools. 

    State and local “Jim Crow” laws mandated a separate but equal existence for non-whites, defining where they could live and work and go to school, how they could eat and drink, use public transportation—and vote. African Americans who broke the rules sometimes faced arrest, but all too often encountered violent retaliation.

    On September 3, 1957, nine students selected to integrate Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas were turned away when Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to block the school’s entrance. The images in Life magazine of federal troops at a U.S. high school jarred the country and brought the emotions of school desegregation into sharp focus.

    Nonviolent protest meant more than resisting the urge to fight back or leave. Training continued until the students and instructors were confident that the protester could withstand any threat.

    When the Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With” was published in Look magazine in 1964, the stark image startled many who knew and adored Rockwell’s nostalgic and humorous illustrations of traditional American life. The shocking and powerful painting evoked Ruby Bridges’ desegregation of the New Orleans public schools in 1960.