Population Changes

Atlanta, Georgia first saw citizens in the 1850s as the population went from 0 to 2,572.¹ Atlanta’s population steadily grew for over a century, surpassing Savannah’s total population in the 1880s. Savannah is Georgia’s oldest city, and its population had been growing since the 1800s; however, in just 40 years of its establishment, Atlanta was able to grow larger in population than Savannah. This likely was aided by the significant influx of people coming to Atlanta during the Civil War as it was a major railroad center in the South. From the 1850s-1870s, the population grew from 2,572 to 21,789.² This is a significant increase in population, and these years align with the Civil War, taking place from 1861-1865. Atlanta’s population continued to steadily increase until the 1970s when the city’s facade of the “city too busy to hate” began to break down. Atlanta saw an increase in crime during the 1960s-1980s, and it gained international recognition as the “murder capital of the world.”³ From the 1970s-1990s, Atlanta’s population began to decrease from 495,039 in the 1970s to 394,017 in the 1990s, resulting in the loss of 100,000 people counted in the population in just around 30 years.² The loss in population might also be attributed to the white flight movement that occurred during the mid-1900s as upper-class white people began moving out of the city and into the suburbs right outside of Atlanta to escape the integration of Black people into the once all-white neighborhoods. These fluctuations in population can clearly be connected to specific moments and events in history that often are associated with civil rights and the integration of Black people into society.

1. U.S. Census Bureau and Erik Steiner, Spatial History Project, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University. [↩]
2. U.S. Census Bureau and Erik Steiner, Spatial History Project, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University [↩] [↩]
3. Paul Mokrzycki Renfro, “‘The City Too Busy to Care’ The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Southern Past, 1979–81,” Southern Cultures 21.4 (Dec 2015): 47. [↩]