The story of downtown Atlanta as a place that matters — not just economically but morally — begins on October 19, 1960, at the Crystal Bridge snack bar inside Rich's department store.
Lonnie C. King, a student leader at Morehouse College, had spent weeks planning a coordinated protest against segregated lunch counters in downtown Atlanta. On that October morning, he convinced Martin Luther King Jr. to join. When the demonstrators were refused service at the Crystal Bridge, they moved upstairs to the Magnolia Room. Fifty-one protesters, including Dr. King, were arrested under Georgia's anti-trespass law.
It was Dr. King's first night in an Atlanta jail. He refused bond. The arrest caught the attention of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, who — at the request of Mayor William Hartsfield — intervened to secure King's release. The episode became a defining moment of the 1960 presidential campaign and cemented Atlanta's place at the center of the national civil rights movement.
The Expansion
The sit-ins did not end at Rich's. The protests expanded across downtown to approximately ten restaurants, including lunch counters at Kress and McCrory's department stores, dining facilities at the Georgia State Capitol, and the cafeteria at Atlanta City Hall. The campaign was strategic, targeting the places where segregation was most visible and most personal — where a person could be denied a cup of coffee because of the color of their skin, in a building they were otherwise welcome to shop in.
The breadth of the protests mattered. By hitting multiple locations simultaneously, the students made it impossible for the city's business and political leaders to treat the action as an isolated incident at a single store. This was a movement, and downtown Atlanta was its stage.
The Ground Beneath the Redevelopment
Sixty-five years later, the blocks where the sit-ins took place — the stretch of south downtown between Five Points and the railroad gulch — are undergoing their most significant transformation since the civil rights era. SoDo Atlanta LLC's acquisition of 53 buildings across the district has brought construction crews and renovation plans to the same streets where students walked into arrest and changed the country.
Steve Hullinger, writing for GPB on the anniversary, draws the connection explicitly: the buildings being redeveloped in South Downtown are not just old commercial structures. They are the physical sites where Atlanta's moral identity was forged. The question of what gets preserved, what gets renamed, and what gets told on the walls of new restaurants and residential lobbies is not an architectural question. It is a question about what this city remembers and what it chooses to carry forward.
Original reporting by Steve Hullinger, Georgia Public Broadcasting, February 13, 2025.