The Dead Still Speak

The Grim is opening the gate and entering Oakland Cemetery located in Atlanta, Georgia. The Cemetery serves as a 48-acre Victorian garden necropolis where the complex history of the South is buried beneath marble monuments and winding paths. Founded in 1850, this historic cemetery contains the stories of both celebrated figures and forgotten souls, revealing the social hierarchies that persisted even in death.

• Original Six Acres contains the oldest graves, including Dr. James Nissen (1850)
• Jewish sections reveal cultural differences between German and Russian Jewish communities
• Confederate Burial Grounds hold nearly 7,000 soldiers beneath a 60-foot granite obelisk
• African-American grounds tell stories of displacement, with graves moved multiple times
• Notable residents include Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind), Bobby Jones (golf legend), and Maynard Jackson (Atlanta's first Black mayor)
• Carrie Steele Logan's grave reminds visitors of her remarkable journey from slavery to founding America's oldest Black orphanage
• Dr. Joseph Jacobs, whose pharmacy served the first Coca-Cola, rests in relative obscurity
• Historic Oakland Foundation continues preservation efforts to ensure these stories aren't forgotten

Visit Oakland Cemetery to experience Atlanta's most compelling outdoor museum where history is layered in the soil itself, and join the Historic Oakland Foundation's efforts to preserve this irreplaceable historical record.

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Episode Transcript

Kristin (00:13):
Good morning and welcome to the Grim.
I'm your host, Kristin.
On today's episode, we'll beopening the gate and entering
Oakland Cemetery, located inAtlanta, Georgia.
So grab your favorite mug, cozyup and let's take a dig into
history.
Each year, more than 55 millionsouls pass through Atlanta,

(00:35):
most of them never setting footin the city itself.
They slip through terminals andconcourses, catching connecting
flights, but not glimpses ofthe streets below.
It's the curse of being home tothe world's busiest airport so
many eyes on the sky but none onthe ground.
And yet, beneath this moderncity of steel and light,

(00:57):
Atlanta's past waits in silence.
That silence is best kept atOakland Cemetery.
That silence is best kept atOakland Cemetery.
Oakland was established in 1850when the city of Atlanta
purchased six acres from AWWooding.
It was to be the newmultiposable cemetery built on
the eastern edge of a young andgrowing city.
That original tract, asouthwest corner of what is now

(01:20):
a sprawling necropolis, is knownas the original Six Acres.
This section holds the oldestgraves in Oakland, with Agnes
Wooding within, buried in theland before it was even
purchased from her husband.
The first person to beofficially interred after the
cemetery was established was DrGritjames Nielsen, a visiting

(01:42):
physician from Virginia.
He died of sudden illness whilepassing through Atlanta and was
laid to rest in 1850.
His is the oldest public markeror still standing in the
cemetery, a lone witness totime's slow erosion To the South
.
The cemetery tells a morecomplex story through the Jewish

(02:03):
grounds, which include JewishHill and Jewish Flat.
Jewish Hill was purchased in1878 by Levi Cohen, president of
the Hebrew BenevolentCongregation, now simply known
as the Temple.
This was the second acquisitionof land by a Jewish group in
Oakland, following the oldJewish burial grounds in 1860, a

(02:24):
small plot nestled in thesoutheastern section of the old
cemetery, jewish Hill, reflectsthe German-Jewish community's
gradual assimilation and theprevailing Victorian culture of
Atlanta.
Stately mausoleums and ornatestatues mark the dead, shaded by
trees and thoughtfullylandscaped areas.
In contrast, the Jewish flatimmediately to the west acquired

(02:48):
in 1892, tells a harder tale.
This section was shared withthe Ha'aveth Vakim congregation,
composed mostly ofRussian-Jewish immigrants.
Their graves are densely packed, headstones rising close
together, an adherence to an oldworld tradition.
Narrow winding paths leavelittle room to walk, as every

(03:10):
inch of earth eventually gaveway to the dead.
Hebrew inscriptions stilllinger in the stone, a sharp
contrast to the German-Jewishgraves nearby, where the
language has already faded fromuse in the 1890s.
Oakland holds more than justcultural legacies it holds the
echoes of war too.
Near its center lies theConfederate Burial Grounds, the

(03:33):
final resting place of nearly7,000 Confederate soldiers, many
of them unnamed.
This area began as atransformation in 1866, after
the city acquired additionalland and the Atlanta Ladies
Memorial Association began theirsolemn work.
At first, graves were marked bywooden headboards, fragile,

(03:55):
impermanent, but in 1890, thesewere replaced with marble
markers, simple and rounded atthe top, like hundreds of
sorrowful eyes staring skyward.
At the heart of this areastands the tallest monument in
Oakland, a 60-foot graniteobelisk dedicated to the
Confederate dead.
Its foundation, made from stonemountain granite, was laid in

(04:18):
1870, the same day as Robert ELee's funeral.
It wasn't completed until April26, 1874, confederate Memorial
Day.
Cold and towering, the Ablessecast a long shadow over the
field of the dead.
Elsewhere, division andinjustice lay buried beneath the

(04:38):
soil.
From the very beginning, theburial of slaves and free
African Americans was segregatedby law and custom.
In 1852, the Atlanta CityCouncil decreed that enslaved
slaves were to be buried at thefar eastern edge of the cemetery
.
This became Slave Square.
But as Oakland expanded, thedead were not left in peace.

(05:01):
Many African American graveswere exhumed, moved once or even
twice until finally laid torest near what is now known as
the African-American grounds, or, historically, the Black
Section.
Here, within a space partiallyenclosed by Circle Drive, paths
were never paved, only linedwith brick and filth-bushed,

(05:23):
crushed limestone.
Paved only lined with brick andfilth-brushed, crushed
limestone, cinders and chert.
In this somber corner stands asingle mausoleum belonging to
Antone Graves, a realtor andeducator.
Other prominent figures alsorest nearby Bishop Wesley, john
Gaines, founder of Morris BrownCollege, reverend Frank Corals,
who helped establish what wouldbecome Spelman College, and

(05:46):
Kerry Steele Logan, who createdAtlanta's first orphanage for
African American children.
In 1866, the city purchasedanother 24 acres of farmland
from Lemuel P Green.
Part of that land, near thesoutheastern corner of the
cemetery, became known as RogersHill, though the origin of the

(06:06):
name remains a mystery.
This area has been sincerenamed East Hill, the final
portion of Oakland to bedeveloped.
Unlike older sections, eastHill is more open, with fewer
trees and more stone walls.
The landscape is broken bygrid-like lines of Monument
Drive and Old Hunter StreetDrive.
The ground rips northward,descending into the pauper's

(06:29):
grounds.
Two comfort stations, longsealed, still haunt the area.
A woman's comfort stationrestored in 2019, sits just
below street level near theConfederate grounds.
The men's comfort station liesnear the African-American
sections, its doors long closed.
East of Belltower Ridge isGreenhouse Valley, bordered by

(06:52):
Potter's Field and theAfrican-American grounds.
Oakland's first greenhouse wasbuilt here in 1870.
Two more then followed in theyears after, but by the 1970s
all had vanished, demolished orleft to rot.
A steam plant and barn remainsilent sentinels of a forgotten
age.
The greenhouse that stands now,gifted by the Buckhead Men's

(07:15):
Garden Club, rises from theruins a steel and glass
resurrection over the bones ofhistory.
Beyond the African-Americangrounds, a sloping green
hillside holds one of Oakland'smost sorrowful secrets
Hoddersfield.
Here roughly 7,500 of Atlanta'smost destitute were buried

(07:35):
Indignant, the unnamed, theunwanted.
Yet archaeological surveys fromthe 1970s suggest they were not
all poor.
Some belonged to the city'slower middle class, buried
without markers, spaced scarcelya foot apart, once marked by
wooden boards, time and weatherdevoured their name.

(07:55):
The field was used until themid-1880s.
Today, a single rectangularmonument stands among the grass,
carved with the words AMemorial to the Citizens of
Atlanta who were buried inunmarked graves.
Floodwaters come here oftenuninvited, catch basins gape in
the hillside and a granite swalecoils like a serpent along the

(08:18):
boulevard's stone wall,channeling runoff through the
graveyard of the forgotten dead.
Channeling runoff through thegraveyard of the forgotten dead
High, and above all, along aridge that bisects the cemetery.
North to south stands Bell TowerRidge, named for the structure
built here in 1899, it once helda chapel that served as a home

(08:40):
for the cemetery sexton.
Before the Bell Tower, atwo-story farmhouse occupied
this very spot, erased by timeIn 1864, during the Battle of
Atlanta, it became theheadquarters for the Confederate
General John B Hood.
Now the Bell Tower housesOakland Visitor Center, its
museum shop and the offices ofthe historic Oakland Foundation.
But the hill it stands on isanything but welcoming.

(09:03):
It's dominated by family plotsof the city's wealthiest graves,
marked by opulent mausoleums,gothic in design and etched with
sorrow and pride.
Here lie Atlanta's elite.
A monument to the city's mayorsalso reside in this section.
28 of them rest beneath theearth within Oakland Cemetery.

(09:24):
28 of them rest beneath theearth within Oakland Cemetery.
Being in the heart of the South, it would seem fitting that the
greatest movie of all timeswriter would hail from Atlanta
and be buried within Oakland'sgrounds.
Margaret Mutter, lynn Mitchell,was born into a city that had
already burned once and into afamily steeped in the lingering
grief of a lost war.
By November 8th in 1900, shewould only live to 48 years old,

(09:49):
long enough to pen a singlenovel that would mythologize the
Old South and break herimmortality.
Gone with the Wind earned herthe Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and a
permanent place in the hauntedcanon of American letters.
But the bright lights of hersuccess cast long shadows.
Beneath the posh veneer ofsociety was a woman shaped by

(10:11):
war, fire, loss and rage, awoman who the past was not the
past but a ghost.
Margaret was the daughter ofEugene Mewes Mitchell, an
attorney, and Mary ElizabethMabel Stevens, a suffragist and
devout Catholic.
From her earliest days shestood at the crossroads of
Southern tradition and rebellion.

(10:32):
Her family tree was tangledwith Confederates, slaveholders,
irish immigrants andwar-wounded men whose stories
never healed On her father'sside, surveyors, soldiers and
settlers.
Her grandfather, russellCrawford Mitchell, fought in the
Confederacy, was gravelywounded at Sharpsburg and later

(10:52):
supplied lumber to rebuild thecity.
Sherman had left in ashes, onher mother's side, the
Fitzgeralds of rural homeplantation, a family that owned,
slaved and preached piety.
In the same breath, hermaternal grandparents, annie
Fitzgerald and Captain JohnStevens raised 12 children and
saw Atlanta rise from the soot.

(11:12):
She was born into wealth, powerand myth, and into a world
still echoing with cannon fireand the moans of Reconstruction.
As a child, margaret lived onJackson Hill in a red and yellow
Victorian house that overlookeda neighborhood known as
Darktown where African-AmericanAtlantans lived and labored.
She was five when the 1906Atlanta Race Massacre erupted.

(11:36):
White mobs, stirred by lies inthe papers, tore through the
city, murdering African-Americancitizens indiscriminately.
Her father, unable to find agun, took up a sword to protect
his family, but the violenceleft behind scars.
The past was not a story toMargaret.
It was a threat waiting toreturn.

(11:57):
Her mother dressed her inboyish clothes after her dress
caught fire and from then on shewas Jimmy.
She rode ponies, told wildtales and believed General Lee
had won the war.
At 10, she was shattered by thetruth that the South had fallen.
The illusion cracked, butlonging remained.
The Confederacy became herobsession and history her hiding

(12:20):
place.
Her mother, whipsmart andunforgiving, raised her with a
sense of duty.
Hiding place.
Her mother, whipsmart andunforgiving, raised her with a
sense of duty, discipline anddoom.
Maybelline Mitchell hissedthreats beneath suffragette
speeches and took Margaret torallies, where she sat draped in
a votes-for-women sash whileblowing kisses to shock
gentlemen.
But her mother's voice wouldsoon fade, far too soon.
In 1919, maybelline died of theSpanish flu while Margaret was

(12:44):
away at school.
Her final message written inshaky script live your own life
and give yourself only what isleft over.
Margaret returned home the nextday too late, before the flu
stole her mother.
War had already stolen herheart, though Margaret had
fallen in love with CliffordHenry, a young lieutenant who

(13:05):
had promised her forever andleft her with a ring.
He was killed in France by anair bomb the same year her
mother died.
The poem found on his body readlike an epitaph for them both.
May those I hold dear know Ihave stood the acid test.
Margaret stood too, but shenever truly rose again.

(13:26):
Raised on war stories, margaretfilled her notebooks with them.
Her childhood was spent nestledin the laps of dying soldiers
and aging Southern women,listening to tales of honor,
ruin and revenge.
These weren't mere memories,they were doctrine.
Her early writings were moreviolent, romantic, tragic.
Her short garvalla Lost Lace,written at 15, pulsed with the

(13:49):
themes of male obsession, sexualthreat and violent redemption,
motifs that would echo in Gonewith the Wind.
She devoured literature fromShakespeare to Thomas Dixon's
white supremacist fiction.
Dixon's virtually racist novelspainted Reconstruction as a
hellish chaos, a myth Margaretfully absorbed.

(14:10):
So fully she dramatized thetraitor with neighborhood
children dressed as a Klanmember, believed it righteous.
These stories shaped not justher imagination but the national
myth that she would later feed.
Margaret became a debutante ofthe Roaring Twenties part
flapper, part firebrand.
She danced scandalously, kissedsoldiers on the ballroom floor

(14:31):
and married Baron Red Upshaw, aviolent bootlegger who drank too
much and hit too hard.
He left her within months.
She divorced him in secret,paid him off and then never
looked back.
Days later she married JohnMarsh, her editor and eventually
her caretaker.
But by then the ghosts wereclosing in.
In 1926, confined by lingeringankle injury and boredom, john

(14:55):
told her to write a book.
She did it in secret.
She poured everything—loss, war, gender, race, love,
betrayal—into the life ofScarlett O'Hara, a Southern
belle who clawed her way througha collapsing world.
Gone with the Wind waspublished in 1936.
Its fantasy of the Old South,burning but beautiful,

(15:16):
captivated America.
It was grief dressed inpetticoats, a love letter to a
world that had never trulyexisted but still haunted the
nation's memory During World WarII, margaret devoted herself to
the soldiers, writing thousandsof letters, sewing clothes and
raising money, but she neverwrote another novel.

(15:37):
Her weapon had already beenfired.
On August 11, 1949, she crossedPeachtree Street with her
husband.
A drunk off-duty taxi driverstruck her down.
She never regainedconsciousness.
Five days later, margaretMitchell died.
Her killer, hugh Gravitt,served only 11 months.
She was buried in OaklandCemetery beneath a modest

(16:00):
headstone near the Confederatedead, the paupers, the forgotten
and the history she refused toforget.
Long after her death, margaret'steenage stories were found Lost
.
Lace In was published.
Her letters of erotica, herrage, her contradictions
resurfaced.
Her memory remains tangled incontroversy, nostalgia and fire.

(16:23):
The world she helped resurrectwas never real, but it was
powerful.
Margaret lived in a house shecalled the Dump.
She was chased by loss, seducedby the past and killed in the
streets of a city shemythologized.
She was Atlanta's ghost andvivid storyteller that never
really left the haunted city tothis day through her writings.

(16:45):
Our next resident, though,couldn't have been more
different than Mitchell, but herlegacy just as legendary in the
city.
Carrie Steele Logan was borninto bondage sometime around
1829 in Georgia, a statesweltering under the weight of
chains and silence.
She was a child of slavery,orphaned before memory, raised

(17:07):
without the comfort of amother's voice or a father's
name.
Her earliest inheritance wasabandonment.
Her first language was the hushof survival, and yet, in the
ash-tinged aftermath of war andloss, she became something
extraordinary a keeper of lostchildren, a matron of the
discarded, the founder of theoldest Black orphanage in the

(17:29):
United States.
Her life was a long walkthrough grief toward grace.
In the blurred years of slavery, young Carrie Barefoot and
Nameless somehow learned to readand write, perhaps in secret,
perhaps under the eye of somerare and passing mercy.
She was just 17 when she becamea mother herself.
Still the child in chains.

(17:50):
That experience, an enslavedgirl holding a newborn and a
world that offered neitherprotection nor pity, etched into
her the fierce understandingthat no one should have to
navigate life alone.
After emancipation, she emergedfrom bondage with scars,
invisible but very deep.
Her freedom came with littlepromise.
She sold homemade candles andcakes in the streets of Atlanta,

(18:13):
survival stitched into everysuite.
Later she found work at thetrain depot, serving as a matron
, among the soot, whistles andstrangers.
Here, among the cinders andsmoke, she began to notice the
others, the children.
They wandered through thestation like ghosts, homeless,
hungry Eyes hollowed with fear.
No mothers, no fathers, nofuture.

(18:35):
She took them in one by oneuntil her home began to overflow
.
But even as her years wore thin, her resolve only hardened.
It's appointed to me.
In my old age she wrote toaccomplish what I have believed
to be great and glorious work,and one that shall live long
after my poor, frail body hasdropped into the dust with sick

(18:56):
came.
And so began the building ofher legacy.
By 1885, carrie had saved enoughto purchase a home for 1,600, a
feat of quite defiance and grit.
In 1889, she formally openedthe Colored Orphanage of Atlanta
, the city's first refuge forBlack children cast aside by the
world.

(19:16):
It was born not out of charitybut out of necessity.
She didn't have the luxury ofwaiting for support.
Carrie raised money in the onlyway she could, through
impassioned speeches and the fewcoins of the kind-hearted.
After her plea to the ConcordBaptist Church in Brooklyn, she
returned with $30.
The Atlantic City Council thenoffered her $500.

(19:39):
The rest came from the wearybut hopeful hands of Atlanta's
rising African-American middleclass and from her own.
By 1892, the orphanage had growninto a three-story brick
sanctuary, raised on a stonefoundation, solid, unshakable,
like the woman herself.
Fifty children could sleepthere, eat there, learn there.

(20:00):
She stole copies of herautobiography to keep the lights
burning.
She named Floyd Crumbly, a manof business and purpose, as this
orphanage's secretary.
Her dream had become a monument.
But Carrie was not alone.
In her later years Her son,james Robert Steele, born in
Bodnage in 1843, stood by herside.
They had moved together toAtlanta after the war.

(20:22):
James worked as a porter, thenbarber, and eventually became an
elder of Bethany AME Church.
He too bore the weight ofsurvival, his life marked by the
echoes of captivity.
In 1890, Carrie married ReverendJosiah or Joseph Logan, a
minister from New York.
But her greatest marriage wasto the work, the holy labor of

(20:43):
loving the unloved.
She died of a stroke onNovember 3, 1900.
She was 71 years old.
Her funeral shook the city,though HR Butler, an eyewitness,
said simply One of the largestfunerals I had ever seen.
All the orphaned children wereout.
Nearly every minister in thecity was present.

(21:03):
Gary's daily Logan was loweredinto the earth at Oakland
Cemetery beneath the weight offlowers and prayers.
Her epitaph, carved into coldstone, reads like a whispered
gospel Mother of orphans, shehath done what she could, but
death simply didn't erase her.
Her orphanage endured.
It lives on today as the CarrieSteele hits home on a campus

(21:26):
beyond the city, shelteringchildren just as she once did
with dignity, discipline andlove.
And in 1998, the state ofGeorgia named her a woman of
Achievement, and a bronze baserelief sculpture washes over
Ashburn Avenue, where the weightof her memory still hangs in
the air.
Carrie Steely Logan was a womanborn into the dark, yet she

(21:48):
carved a beacon from thewreckage of her own suffering.
She built a home from the bonesof the world that had tried to
forget her.
And now she waits in Oaklandamong the dead, while the house
she built continues to cradlethe living.
Beneath the canopy of oaks inAtlanta's Oakland Cemetery lies
a quiet grave, marked not bygrandeur but by reverence.

(22:09):
Here arrives Robert Teer JonesJr, born March 17, 1902, a man
whose hands once held victory,like it held his birthright, and
whose body would later betrayhim with quiet cruelty.
He was called Bobby todistinguish himself from another
.
Robert Jones, a designer ofcourses rather than dreams.

(22:30):
But there would be no confusionin the end, only one, bobby
Jones, etched his name intolegend with such furious
precision, only to vanish from agame he dominated before he
turned 30.
Jones came into the world withfragile health, a boy of bone
and fever.
Proctors prescribed the openair of the golf course as

(22:52):
medicine, and it worked.
What emerged was not merelyhealth, but a storm in human
form.
What emerged was not merelyhealth, but a storm in human
form.
By the age of six he wasalready winning at Eastlake Golf
Club, the place where he wouldplay his final round decades
later, when his legs had alreadybegun to fail.
At 14, he won the GeorgiaAmateur by 18,.

(23:15):
He was paired with Henry Vardenat the US Open.
The press called him a prodigy.
But his blood ran hot.
He broke clubs, cursed himself,stormed off golf courses.
In 1921, at St Andrews, jonestore up his scorecard mid-round.
The town turned its back on him.
He was not yet ready for theweight of the game.
But the anger cooled, the mindsharpened, and from that

(23:37):
tempering came terror for anyonewho faced him across the T.
Between 1923 and 1930, bobbyJones played in 31 major
tournaments.
He placed in the top 10 27times.
He won 13.
He was the only man to everachieve what the world calls now
a Grand Slam.

(23:57):
Not the modern one, but theimpossible original the US Open,
the British Open, the USAmateur, the British Amateur,
all in the cursed year of 1930.
He bet on himself at 50 to 1odds.
Before the season began hecashed the check for over
$60,000, then turned his back onthe competition.

(24:20):
At 28 years old, bobby Joneswalked away from golf.
He called the championship golfa cage and perhaps he knew the
bars were already closing in.
Jones was no common athlete.
He was an engineer, a lawyer, aman who passed the bar.
After three semesters in Emoryhe married Marie Merlone.
They had three children.

(24:40):
He wore the art of decorum likea tailored coat, but in the end
he would become more legendthan man.
He co-founded Augusta National.
Carved from an old plantationland in Georgia, he and Clifford
Roberts dreamed of a sanctuary,untouched, pristine and private
.
They built not only a coursebut a cathedral.
In 1934, the first masters wereheld there.

(25:03):
Jones emerged from retirement toplay, not as a contender but as
a host offering grace.
Even as pain crept closer.
He played there in 1948.
The final round was at Eastlake, the same course where the
child prodigy had first struck aball.
The photograph that day hangsin the clubhouse the last sewing
of a man who could no longerfeel his feet.

(25:26):
In 1948, jones was diagnosedwith syringomelia, a rare
neurological disease that causescysts to form inside the spinal
cord.
The pain came slowly at first,then weakness, then a cane, then
the chair, and eventually hewas paralyzed.
The man who once danced acrossfairways like he was born to
them now moved through the worldonly with assistance.

(25:48):
His last years were spent inslow agony.
The cage he had once escapedthrough retirement had found him
again, this time in the flesh.
He died in 1971 ofcardiovascular disease, ravaged
from within, just three daysafter being baptized into the
Catholic Church.
His widow followed him fouryears later.

(26:09):
His son, robert III, diedbefore either of them, his heart
failing at 47.
The legends about Bobby Jonesoften sound like fables.
In 1925, he penalized himselfwith a stroke for barely moving
his ball.
No one else saw it.
The stroke cost him thetournament.
When praised, he shrugged youmight as well praise me for not

(26:30):
robbing banks.
He was not perfect, but hebelieved in honor like it was
oxygen.
He's remembered with plaques,statues and tournaments the
Bobby Jones Award, the Masters,the Green Jacket, the room in
the USGA Museum.
But perhaps the most honesttribute is this that no other
golfer has ever walked away fromthe top.

(26:50):
No one has ever paid so steep aprice for his brilliance.
A putting green rests near hisgrave at Oakland Cemetery.
Golf balls and tokens fromadmirers litter the ground like
offerings to an old god.
He arose from weakness.
He built beauty from silence.
He swung at the world and won,but the body he had betrayed him

(27:11):
.
The cage closed In the waitingyears of reconstruction of the
South.
As Georgia struggled to risefrom the ashes of war, dr Joseph
Jacobs opened a modestpharmaceutical laboratory in
Athens in 1879.
The South was fractured, itswealth of memory, its cities
haunted by the scent of scorchedearth and lost causes.

(27:33):
But Jacobs was not a dreamer.
He was a chemist, a man ofprecise mixtures and calculated
risks, where he opened theJacobs Pharmacy Company, a
business that would swell to 16locations and become a
cornerstone of the city'srebirth.

(27:53):
A marble soda fountain stoodinside, offering tonics,
seltzers and the whispered ofpromises of relief from the
body's many ailments.
But it wasn't Dr Jacobs himselfwho made history.

(28:13):
It was an accident, a slip ofthe hand.
In a fizz of fate, on May 8th1886, he instructed his soda
fountain manager, willis Venable, to mix a customer's headache
remedy with water, something todull the pain, something bitter
and forgettable.
But instead of still waterVenable reached for carbonated
water and the bubbles danced andthe syrup dissolved.
The first glass of Coca-Colawas served Sweet, dark,
effervescent.
It would become the most iconicbeverage in modern history.

(28:35):
Dr Jacobs held partial rightsto the tonic, but when
approached with the opportunityto invest in its future, he
shrugged I don't want to bebothered with it.
Instead, he sold his claim to aman named Asher Candler,
treating it for a glass factory.
A brittle monument to ashort-sightedness.
Candler would go on to build anempire.

(28:56):
Coca-cola would bleed acrossits borders, flow into every
diner, stadium and war zone.
It would become a global altarto indulgence, addiction and
American capitalism.
And Dr Joseph Jacobs?
His name faded from the bottle,from ads, from the billions.
He's remembered only in passing, as the man who stood at the
edge of a tidal wave and steppedaside A grave decision.

(29:20):
A ghost in carbonation, aphantom of untasted fortune.
They say power leaves a shadow.
In Atlanta, the shadow wasMayor Jackson.
He was born in 1938, southernheat, southern blood into a
family where intellect wasprized and resistance was
generational.
His grandfather was a civilrights titan, john Wesley Dobbs,

(29:41):
a man who lit Auburn Avenuewith gas lamps and fury.
His mother, irene, held adoctorate from France, but
Mayard's father, a Baptistminister, died when the boy was
just 15.
From then on, it was Dobbs'voice, radical booming, that
filled the void.
By 18, jackson was alreadygraduated from Morehouse.
By 30, he was running for USSenate against Herman Talmadge,

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a titan of segregation.
He lost, of course, but not inAtlanta, where his name burned
bright enough to crack open thecity's glass ceiling.
He would not be stopped.
In 1973, at just 35, mayorJackson became the first
African-American mayor ofAtlanta and any major southern
city.
A seismic shift.
Wrapped in a three-piece suit,he unseated Sam Massel and took

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the reins of his city.
Still bleeding from Jim Crow,his elections fractured Atlanta.
African-american pride surged,white resistance sharpened.
He inherited a city withcrumbling infrastructure, racial
tension at a boil and a policeforce that answered only to
itself.
He would bend it or break itinto something new.
His weapon was contracts,budgets, steel and concrete.

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He overhauled the public works,rebuilt the airport and carved
out a space forAfrican-American-owned
businesses in places they hadlong been barred.
Jackson demanded minorityparticipation in billion-dollar
products, not politely, but withfury that rattled boardrooms.
Though Gard called it reversediscrimination, he called it
reparative justice.

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He didn't blink.
The power eats from the insideand Mayor Jackson would learn at
a cost.
Between 1979 and 1981,african-american children began
to vanish one by one.
Thirty of them were just gone.
The streets whispered, parentswailed.
The media then descended.
Jackson supported theinvestigation, but no justice

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would ever come to thosechildren.
Wayne Williams was convicted ofkilling two adults, but the
rest still shadows.
Meanwhile, crime surged acrossthe city.
Atlanta earned a new name amurder capital of America.
Drug wars took root, fed bypoverty and indifference.
In 1979 alone, homicide in thecity rose 69 percent.

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The governor sent in the statepatrol.
Business leaders begged Jacksonto take this chaos seriously.
Some say he did, but others sayhe just blinked.
He fired 900 sanitation workersduring a strike.
Appointed a controversialpublic safety commissioner, took
risks, made enemies, playedchess on a burning board.
His inner circle racketedcorruption, cheating scandal.

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One appointee would later beconvicted of extortion.
Jackson watched his vision blur,and yet he endured.
In 1990, the people brought himback for a second term, a
second chance.
The Olympics were coming totown.
The city's bones would needreshaping again, freeways carved
deeper, parks remade and moneyflooding in the new airport

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terminal would bear his visionand later his name Hartsfield
Jackson.
A colossus of glass, steel andghosts, but old problems
followed him.
Of glass, steel and ghosts, butold problems followed him
Equality, crime and the pressureof a city growing too fast and
too uneven.
Progress has its victims, andAtlanta's sidewalks were crowded
with them.
After leaving office, jacksonreached for the national stage.

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He wanted to lead theDemocratic National Committee,
but the party chose Clinton'sfundraiser instead.
He founded a voter rightsinstitute, built coalitions, but
the party chose Clinton'sfundraiser instead.
He founded a voter rightsinstitute, built coalitions, but
the crown was never his again.
Then his body gave out.
On June 23, 2003,.
At just 65, mayor Jacksoncollapsed at Washington National

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Airport, his heart failing.
A man who had carried theweight of a city died in transit
between flights, betweenmoments.
An airport terminal bears hisname, so does a high school, and
a documentary was made andhonors bestowed, but the man
himself remains difficult,decisive and human.
He was a builder and a breaker,a symbol of pride and a bearer

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of controversy.
He opened doors and sometimesslammed them shut, but he
changed Atlanta permanently.
Many never saw it truly.
At rest Cities.
Don't forget the man who foughtto shape them.
But they don't forgive themeither.
Mayor Jackson lives on inconcrete glass, in grief and in
the whisper of every child whonever came home.

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In the quiet heart of Atlanta'shistoric Oakland Cemetery,
tucked away within the weatheredRossin Vault, lies a woman who
once rattled the very bones ofSouthern's polite society, a
woman armed with not a gun or apulpit, but with a pen, born in
1875 to wealth, status andexpectation.
She could have lived gently,she could have stayed quiet, but

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instead she burned.
Julia Calder Harris was raisedon Peachtree Street Dreams,
educated in finishing schoolsand trained as an artist in
Boston.
But life, as it often does, hasother plans.
Her mother died young, herfather died under what Julia
would later call suspiciouscircumstances, and just like
that she would later callsuspicious circumstances.
And just like that she was leftwith five younger siblings and

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a family name to protect.
Her paintbrushes were packedaway for good.
At 22, she married Julian Harris, son of Joel Chandler Harris,
the famed author of Uncle Remus'Tales.
But Julia had no intention ofbecoming another Southern wife.
In her husband's shadows shejoined him in the newsroom and
by the 1920s Julia and Julianhad pulled everything they had

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to buy the Columbus Enquirer'sson, a small-town Georgian
newspaper that would become,under their leadership, one of
the boldest voices in the DeepSouth.
They went to war not withbullets but with editorials.
The paper exposed localpoliticians who were secret
members of the Ku Klux Klan.
It reported on the lives ofAfrican American residents in a

(35:37):
city that would have ratherignored them.
Julia wrote against lynching,against the cruel leasing system
, and when Georgia tried topounce the anti-evolution laws,
she fought back in print,calling herself a thesis
evolutionist, a woman whobelieved in both Darwin and God.
Needless to say, many weren'tpleased.
Advertisers pulled theirfunding, neighbors turned cold

(36:00):
and then the threats came.
And still Giulio wrote on.
In 1926, the Inquirer's sonreceived the Pulitzer Prize for
Public Service, the first everawarded to anyone in Georgia.
Her husband accepted it andsaid she is unyielding in the
face of injustice and a constantinspiration.
But even awards don't pay bills, and by 1929, the backlash had

(36:24):
bled them dry.
The Harris's were forced tosell the paper.
Still, julia wouldn't stop.
She wrote for the ChattanoogaTimes.
She covered the Scopes monkeytrial in Temesee, one of the
only three reporters fromGeorgia to attend, while her
husband filed direct dispatches.
She wrote essays explaining thescience of evolution to a
frightened, faith-soaked public.

(36:45):
And then the weight of it allcaught up.
By 1938, porth health and along-simmering depression forced
her into retirement.
She retreated from the publicview but she never stopped
mentoring young journalists.
Quietly, persistently, shepassed the torch.
She died in 1967 at the age of91, her voice mostly forgotten

(37:07):
by the public she had onceprovoked.
Her body was laid to rest inOakland Cemetery in the Rawson
family vault, not far from thebones of politicians and
generals whose silence she onceshattered.
She had outlived her husband,outlived her enemies, outlived
the very world she'd helpedchange and death.
Her honors came slowly theGeorgia Newspaper Hall of Fame,

(37:29):
the Georgia Women of Achievement, the Georgia Writers Hall of
Fame.
Too late to hear them, tooquiet compared to the battles
she had fought when it matteredmost.
But maybe that's how it is withvoices like hers Never easy,
never safe and always almostahead of their time.
Julia Culler Harris didn'tbelong to the world of
debutantes and dinner parties.

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She belonged to the front page,to the editorial column, to the
deep, uneasy truth, and shewrote about the people no one
else would.
She stood up when others satback down.
She spoke when it was fareasier and far safer to stay
silent.
And though the ink has stilllong dried, her voice is still
there, buried beneath stone, butnever gone.

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It may be carved in marble, buther legacy, it was carved in
ink.
The gravestones, crypts andmausoleums and warm paths of
Oakland Cemetery are not justmarkers of death.
They're the last survivingfragments of long lives, lived,
vanishing, carved in marble,crumbling in granite.

(38:34):
These monuments speak where thewritten record has long gone
silent.
For many of Atlanta's earliestcitizens, their names engraved
here are the only traces lefttheir stories etched into stone,
their family ties frozenbeneath soil and time stories
etched into stone, their familyties frozen beneath soil and
time.
Here, funerary art is testimony.

(38:54):
Architecture is elegy.
The cemetery's hardscapes, itsiron gates, its winding walkways
, its cracked foundations, isthe very fragile spine of a
city's memory.
Since 1976, the historic OaklandFoundation has now fought at
the slow, inevitable, the quietcollapse of history.
Over the past 46 years, they'verestored 16 acres of this

(39:16):
fading landscape, most notablythe original six acres, bell
Tower Ridge and the hauntedstretch known as East Hill.
Each restoration is a battleagainst time.
Each grave saved is a life.
Remembered is a battle againsttime.
Each grave saved is a liferemembered, but the work is far
from finished.
According to the foundation's20-year master plan, the path

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ahead is steep the completion ofthe historic African-American
burial grounds, the restorationto the southwestern edge of the
old cemetery, the revival ofEast Hill 60% which remains in
various states of ruin.
The revival of East Hill 60%which remains in various states
of ruin is still not finished.
This work is not glamorous, it'snot loud, it's slow, patient
and unending.
The Foundation's Preservation,restoration and Operations team,

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simply known as the Pro Team,tends to this resting place with
quiet hands and watchful eyes.
Cracks are sealed, stones arelifted, what can be restored is,
and what cannot is carefullystabilized so that nothing is
forgotten entirely.
Because Oakland is not just acemetery.
It's a living archive of adying city, and if we don't

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guard it, stone by stone, nameby name, it will vanish beneath
the leaves.
And so the work continues, notjust for today but for the dead
who built this city or for thoseyet to walk among the graves.
The historic Oakland Foundationtoday hasn't just restored the
grounds but also brought to theminto the future with events,
tours and a museum.

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Events like tunes from thetombs, cross crowds from
unlikely guests within andbridge is the gap between past
and present.
It shows that the grounds,although a place of mourning and
remembrance, can also be partof our everyday lives,
appreciated and loved dailyinstead of just for loss and
mourning.
The grave grind for OaklandCemetery was an iced mocha latte

(41:07):
from Green Beans.
For more honorary grinds in thearea, please visit the-grim.
com.
For now, we're closing the gateon Oakland Cemetery.
We hope you enjoyed our diginto history.
If you did subscribe today tojoin us next time when we open
the gate on The Grim.