Because the city of Atlanta (not yet the capital of Georgia) rose from the ashes of the Civil War; its devastation thanks mainly to General Tecumseh Sherman, it is often called by very ‘old timers’ the City of ‘Phoenix’. (It has no more to do with Arizona than I with F. Scot Fitzgerald.)

Yet, this Southern city of less than 2,500 population in 1850 grew over the decades to become a thriving metro-populace of nearly 600,000 people, due primarily to its location on the map, and the home of countless American companies — such as Delta Airlines and the CDC, Home Depot, Walmart, the Gallagher Corp. — and many, many more.

It was not always so. Atlanta began in 1915 as the home of the KKK. (The first organized Klan, as an example, after the Civil War, in 1870, was in Pulaski, TN. More on that later.)


Starting in 1921, the KKK adopted a modern business system of recruiting (which paid most of the initiation fees and costume charges as commissions). It was then that Stetson Kennedy, my mother-in-law’s half-brother, an uncle to me, the free-lance writer and journalist, decided to phone them up and join.


But he hated the organization with its rapid growth at a time of prosperity, the social tensions of urban industrialization and vastly increased immigration; its membership having abundant growth most rapidly in the cities, and its spread out of the South, going primarily into the Midwest and West.

Continued Saturday, Jan 3, 2015, as SUPERMAN PT. 11



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