Moving Africans (and Others) Rapidly Through Atlanta

I am staying in Atlanta's own International Hostel, having arrived yesterday evening after a day of airline travel. I had hoped to avoid the airlines on my trip across the East Coast, but to get to Atlanta I found there simply was no practical alternative. The bus from Washington would have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen hours; Amtrak's Crescent service was similar. I would have preferred to take the Crescent, but it was, believe it or not, sold out. Maybe the romance of the rails is making a comeback in America. So in the end, I hopped on a plane.

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Down south, they quip that if you want to go to heaven, you have to change planes in Atlanta. The city's massive Hartsfield Airport is one of the main hubs in America's hub-and-spoke system of airline travel, and it does seem at times as though everything passes through Atlanta on the way somewhere else. The exception to this appears to be trips actually to Atlanta, for to get to the city of Margaret Mitchell and Martin Luther King, I was forced to go by way of O'Hare in Chicago.

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I touched down in Atlanta at 7:30 last night, grabbed my bags, and headed to my hostel. Although Atlanta has a reputation as a driving city, I was easily able to reach my hostel on MARTA, Atlanta's subway and bus system. Since the 1970s, Atlanta has been what in America is known as a majority-minority city--meaning that a majority of its residents are now people of color. MARTA is underfunded, some suspect because its users are overwhelmingly African-African. A local joke has it that MARTA, which actually stands for Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, stands for Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.

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Oddly, then, on my trip in, I noticed that the other passengers were a diverse racial mix. I sat next to a couple of men from India, and there were several white passengers in my car. I guess I'll have to take more trips on MARTA to see if the joke really reflects reality.

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I don't know how much use I'll make of MARTA, though, since my hostel is conveniently located within an easy walk of most of the major attractions in Atlanta. So far, I am more pleased with this hostel than the others I've had the pleasure of staying at, for the simple reason that my room is on the first floor and I was not forced to drag my gargantuan suitcase up three flights of stairs to my room.

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Today, I am off to the Varsity, to the sacred site where Margaret Mitchell's mind first conceived Scarlett O'Hara, and eventually the Temple, the synagogue bombed in 1958 due to is involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

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More on Atlanta later.