Atlanta Had Two Cities. The Government Photographed Both (1936–1943)

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Walker Evans · Atlanta, 1936 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

It starts in March, nineteen thirty-six, with Walker Evans. A barber shop in the Black district: two chairs, towels on the arms, newsprint on the walls.

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Walker Evans · Atlanta, 1936 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Evans filed his street views under three-word captions. This one: people and houses.

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Walker Evans · Atlanta, 1936 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Frame houses along a dirt street, porches sagging toward the fence line.

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Walker Evans · Atlanta, 1936 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The same district from the corner. Wood houses, wood porches, wood fences — most of Atlanta was still a wooden town.

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Walker Evans · Atlanta, 1936 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

From above, the rooftops run to the horizon, two households to a roof.

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Walker Evans · Atlanta, 1936 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A wagon in the street, houses shoulder to shoulder. Evans called this a view in the quarter.

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Walker Evans · Atlanta, 1936 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

And his most famous Atlanta subject: twin frame houses under the movie billboards, new faces smiling over the old porches.

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Walker Evans · Atlanta, 1936 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The Cherokee Parts Store, garage work lettered across the front, tires stacked to the roof. The automobile had arrived in the quarter before the pavement did.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Three years later, Marion Post Wolcott came through before sunrise. Her caption: domestic servants waiting for the street car on the way to work, early in the morning. Mitchell Street.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The women board at the front. They are riding across town to cook other families' breakfasts.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

She shot the corner again and again that morning — coats and hats, handbags, the same patient distance down the track.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Where the ride ended: a kitchen. Wolcott's caption identifies the woman only by her work.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

At the Henry Grady Hotel she photographed a porter carrying bags to a car — and wrote his race into the caption: a white porter. In Atlanta, that was the exception worth noting.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A salesgirl, fashionably dressed, her caption says. Downtown employed white women by the thousand.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Quitting time outside Regenstein's department store.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The awning ran the length of the block — parcels, gloves, delivery trucks at the curb.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Outside the city she photographed a filling station, and put the station's own phrase in quotation marks: cherished customer — a Black driver buying gas.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The wider frame: a Model A at the pumps, the attendants watching the camera.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A crowd watching baseball on open ground, a truck factory behind the outfield.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Spectators sitting on the bare clay. No stands, no fence — the game came to the neighborhood.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

At a cotton mill she photographed what her caption calls the tornado fence, boards nailed high around the yard.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

And a mill village house: company-built, one story, near the line out of town.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Back in the district below the skyline, the caption stayed the same: slums.

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FSA negative LC-USF34-051266 · Atlanta, ca. 1939 · Library of Congress. View the original.

One untitled negative from the same reel shows the city's front pages from February, nineteen thirty-nine, pinned to a stone wall. The Constitution: white-robed raiders abduct six Atlantans. The Journal put one abduction on Peachtree Street.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Then Wolcott drove out of the city, and the captions change subject: eroded land, south Georgia, near Atlanta.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A day laborer standing at the gully that used to be a field.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Her caption for this one: part of the household goods of a day laborer whose house was burned.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Gullied land and pine trees, a few miles from the city limits.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Farmland between Atlanta and Greensboro — plowed, planted, and washing away.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A Black farm community on the same road. The cotton economy was failing under everyone standing on it.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The people the land let go camped at the city's edge. Two families who traveled together, repairing stoves and stalls and houses — any odd jobs, the caption says.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Their children, at the tent.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Horse and mule traders from Atlanta, set up temporary in the pines.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A mule comes down the ramp of a stock truck. The animal trade ran out of the city, into the country.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Another family moving from place to place through the southern regions, their goods spread under the trees.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

An Atlanta mule warehouse sent camps like this one into rural Georgia for several weeks at a time, selling mules to farmers who could no longer come to town.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A tent, a truck, a family — the whole operation.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The New Deal's answer was a warehouse. The Farm Security Administration ran a depot in Atlanta where the machinery of Georgia farming came to be saved.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Georgia, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A forge, run by one man in overalls.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Painting a crank-car with spray guns.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Repairing a tractor sent in from a client farm.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Welding an axle straight.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A crane the caption calls a shepard, hoisting a tractor off the truck that brought it.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The woodworking shop, window light across the benches.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

And the office that kept the books on all of it.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Outside sat the trucks that were past saving, kept for parts.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Fort Benning, Ga., 1940 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

December, nineteen forty. These men all came from Atlanta — off the WPA rolls at Stone Mountain, down to Fort Benning to build army barracks. Tent space in a backyard cost two dollars a week.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Fort Benning, Ga., 1940 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

One of them, Paul Knight, lived in this trailer. Another told Wolcott that some men worked seven days a week while others got none, and that the government ought to know.

R070
Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

In nineteen forty-one, Jack Delano loaded Kodachrome an hour east of the city. Nothing in this chapter is colorized. Cotton was still chopped by hand.

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Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains, Greene County. Rented, because the people working it could not buy it.

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Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

A child in the row with the grown-ups, holding a hoe.

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Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

The family stretched across the field, red clay to the tree line.

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Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

Going home after an afternoon of chopping, under a storm sky.

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Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

And the land itself, in color: erosion the width of a house, cut down to the clay.

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Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

The gullies ran orange and white where the topsoil had already gone downriver.

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Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

A farmhouse still standing at the rim.

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Jack Delano · Georgia, 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

A corn field under big weather — the country that was draining into Atlanta, one family at a time.

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Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

And a Saturday afternoon: a family going to town by mule and wagon, the clay road red under the wheels.

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Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

Delano photographed the wagon three times as it passed him in the road.

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Jack Delano · Greene County, Ga., 1941 · Library of Congress · period color. View the original.

Nineteen forty-one, and the mule is still the family car.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

In March, nineteen forty-two, Arthur Rothstein carried his camera into Atlanta University — the center of Black higher education in the South, two miles from the district Wolcott photographed. He spent most of his visit with the nursery school.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

He also photographed the painter Hale Woodruff at his easel, mid-brushstroke.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Two boys sharing a seat, dressed for the camera.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A teacher leads her class in a ring game.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Washing hands before lunch, two at a time at the sink.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Lunch at low tables, napkins folded.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The caption on frame after frame reads simply: nursery children.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Upstairs, students at the long tables of the library.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The stacks, aisle lights burning to the far wall.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A zoology professor and his student at the microscope.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A zoology student working alone at night.

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Arthur Rothstein · Atlanta, 1942 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

A chemistry student at the bench. Every ambition in these rooms ran against everything else in this film.

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John Vachon · Atlanta, 1943 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The file closes in March, nineteen forty-three, with John Vachon and the war. Jim Bishop and Joe Crow, truck drivers, hauling freight out of Atlanta.

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John Vachon · Atlanta, 1943 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Joe Crow, in his company cap.

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John Vachon · Atlanta, 1943 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

At the wheel, southbound. Atlanta was becoming what it is now: the place the roads go through.

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John Vachon · Atlanta, 1943 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

The last frames are shot at night, a driver's face lit by the dash, enroute to Atlanta.

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Marion Post Wolcott · Atlanta, 1939 · Library of Congress · AI-colorized. View the original.

Seven years, five photographers, one city. The negatives are federal property — which means they are yours, free, at the Library of Congress. If your people were in Atlanta then — the streetcars, the mills, the university, the camps — say so below. Someone in these frames is somebody's grandmother.