Not Yet Gone With the Wind

THIS SUMMER I paid $2 to tour a restored plantation in Atlanta. White girls in puffy pastel hoop skirts fluttered around the giant Master's mansion, answering questions about the European art and furnishings.

I had expected to find a sign or exhibit, some concrete acknowledgement that once blacks were enslaved there, bound up and put down there. And I expected the sign to say that was bad. But there was no sign, only a small marker near some small shacks. "This is where the slaves slept," it read.

The only indication of what slavery might have been like was an overweight woman, whose job it was to swelter next to an authentic kitchen house fire, hanging out the door to cool herself on a 100 degree day.

In Atlanta, plantations were things to be proud of, legends to glorify. So much so that exclusive condominiums were given names like "The Plantation" or "Plantation Heights." This was one small aspect of a larg problem in Atlanta--a lack of racial respect.

I GREW up with strong belief in Black cultural identity and in integration, fostered by a father who worked for the Urban League and later as an affirmative action consultant. In my home state, Minnesota, there weren't many minorities to integrate, so I hoped to see what it was like to live in an integrated city with 66 percent Blacks during my four months in Atlanta.

Before I left, friends had described Atlanta as a progressive city for Blacks. They were right: Blacks hold political office and are integrated into the upper levels of business. Without question, there is a proud Black cultural and historical establishment. But the freedom at last really only lasted until the end of the workday.

Outside of the office and the classroom the city wasn't integrated, and people didn't want it to be. Most cultural and historical places I visited after work drew either whites or blacks, seldom both. And when I did see an integrated place, Blacks were with Blacks and whites with whites; I could count the mixed groups I saw on one hand.

I was the only white on the crowded bus to work, and one of the few on the new, efficient subway system. The Paul Simon Graceland Tour, despite its amazing Black South African performers, drew an almost completely white audience. Both Blacks and whites visit the Six Flags amusement park. But during a day there I saw only two mixed groups. It was the same at the city's Lenox Square shopping mall.

A friend who attended an integrated high school said he was friendly with Blacks in class but never associated with them after school. They lived too far away, he explained. In fact, the city residential areas are pretty much split by an invisible set of railroad tracks, the North side for whites, the South for Blacks.

But wider than this geographic separation is a gulf of distrust. White friends could not fathom why I wanted to go to Black areas. Neither could Blacks, once I got there. When I asked a Black street peddler to break a dollar for bus change, his boss warned him, "Don't give change to no white girl."

AT THE END of the summer, I attended a speech by the rabid Black nationalist and Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan. After a very personal frisking, I found that I was one of three white spectators in a crowd of 3000. I had expected to be outraged by some of Farrakhan's usual anti-Semitic rhetoric, but there was none that day.

I agreed with some of Farrakhan's indictments of the historically white power structure and his call for Black economic power. When Farrakhan lashed out at Mayor Andrew Young for having attained power without using it to help Blacks at the bottom, the mostly middle-class audience cheered.

Farrakhan was right to deplore the fact that there are two disparate and separate Black worlds in the city. While some Blacks attain top jobs, virtually all of the lowpaid ones, cleaning floors to cashiering at Arby's, are done by Blacks.

The segregation of this Black lower-class was clear to me when I visited Spelman College, a prestigious Black women's school, and the adjacent Moorhouse College for men. I saw the manicured yards and red brick buildings of Harvard, parking lots packed with Porsches and BMWs, and students in designer outfits.

But these campuses form a fortress against the surrounding West End neighborhood. Spelman is shielded with barbed wire and 24 hour guard posts. The Spelman student I was with couldn't stand to see the gathering of Black teens on a nearby street corner; they had no ambition, she said.

After learning about the South and civil rights in school, I was thrilled to finally be able to meet Black women climbing high on the ladder of success.

But it pained me to know that many whites in the city have not yet come to appreciate such things. And that many Blacks and whites do not yet see the need to spend time together, even when they aren't forced to by law.