By 1920, the city of Atlanta had long struggled with its white supremacist reputation, and its newspapers were fighting to present the city's obsession with white heritage in a positive light. The growing popularity of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial throughout the South, as well as Atlanta's reputation as the national home of the revived Ku Klux Klan, caused problems for the city's racial image. In 1921, the Atlanta Constitution began to attempt to present a new vision of Atlanta's relationship to race, emphasizing the city's growing diversity. Integral to that vision was the launching of a new weekly column written by the city's black leaders, in which they discussed the city's black intellectual and cultural events. At the same time, reporting on federal anti-lynching legislation from Atlanta's white newspapers illustrated their racist failure to adequately represent black perspectives. By 1936, the growing popularity of Gone with the Wind threatened to reveal white newspapers' need to appeal to white supremacist readers, but white newspapers ignored and mocked-sometimes even outright denied-the growing popularity of white supremacist activities in and around the city, attempting to focus on the novel's representation of white heritage instead. In the shadow of World War II, as more racially progressive voices were beginning to be heard throughout the nation, Atlanta's white newspaper editors and journalists, already struggling to bridge the growing divide between competing economic interests, found themselves trying to straddle white and black readership interests as well. This gave Atlanta's black newspaper editors and journalists the opportunity to advocate for the advancement of Atlanta's black community. By 1940, all of Atlanta's newspapers found themselves wielding powerful anti-Nazi rhetoric to promote a more racially moderate and, ultimately modern, vision of Atlanta, attempting to recast the city as an enemy to both racism and fascism. By the late 1950s, the city's editors and reporters were so good at framing Atlanta's struggles with racial and religious tolerance, that even when the city was rocked by the bombing of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple, few questioned Mayor William B. Hartsfield's claim that the perpetrators must have been from outside the city. This is the story of how Atlanta's newspaper industry was able to reshape the city's national reputation from the home of the Ku Klux Klan to a "city too busy to hate" in the span of only forty years.
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