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for construction or expanding chemical, ammunition, and shipbuilding industries in the region. And the surge of growth that started then has yet to abate. Per capita income has continued to rise -- though it still lags [illegible] behind the national level; -- millions whose fathers worked on hardscrabble farms now have decent factory jobs, and there has been a constant, dramatic movement from marginal rural areas to metropolitan centers.

Now, for the first time in its history, the South has developed cities of distinction, the nerve centers that any society needs for advanced economic and intellectual activity. I challenge you to name for me a more dynamic city in America today than Atlanta, unless it be other Southern metropolises like Houston or Miami. Think of the hotel where we are today; it is but the newest→ example of the wave of imaginative urban architecture that has come to this city. "No other city of the region," one economist noted 14 years ago, "occupies or duplicates Atlanta's role as the spark plug, catalyst, generator, service center, financier, clearing house, trading point, policy maker and pace setter for the South's new economy." What he said then is even truer in the 1970s. In 1935, the total deposits in Atlanta's banks were $200 million; by 1960, they were $1.6 billion, and when I last checked in 1972, they were $4.4 billion. In the 1920s, Georgia financier Ernest Woodruff had been obliged to go to New York for the $25 million he [illegible] needed to buy Coca-Cola; since 1970, a syndicate of the Atlanta banks has loaned Delta Airlines alone $520 million.

I don't want to belabor the point of [illegible] change in the urban South, and Atlanta in particular, but I think you would be amused to know that John Gunther, at the end of World War II, could work up no greater praise for Atlanta's economy than to note that "its pace is almost as quick as, say, that of Rochester or Akron." In a 1945 Saturday Evening Post article, George Sessions Perry described Atlanta as "a hot-bread, boiled-greens, fried-chicken-and-gravy town" with a [illegible]