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The Bronners of Atlanta: See How They Prosper
| Article
# : |
18562 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
2,502 Words |
| Author
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William Gordon
William Gordon, a retired foreign service officer and
newspaper editor, was a Neiman Fellow at Harvard and an Ogden
Reid International Journalism Fellow. He is currently writing
a book on the transformation of the South. |
When Nathaniel Bronner came to Atlanta in the mid-1930s, he was sixteen years old. His clothes were little more than threads, and his shoes were falling apart. He didn't know it then, but his future was brighter than ever.
Young Bronner found Atlanta a city slum-ridden and segregated. He saw others of his race drink from separate water fountains and ride in the backs of buses and streetcars. He saw the KKK at its sub-Christian best, burning crosses on Stone Mountain--a warning for local whites to mind their own business, and for blacks to stay in their place.
President Roosevelt had just built the nation's first public housing facility, on land near the Georgia State Capitol building. Some of the worst slums in the country were on that land, as many of Atlanta's more than 100,000 blacks, a third of the city's population, could attest.
Nathaniel Bronner had grown up on a farm in south Georgia, one of eleven children and now several years behind in his schooling. Blacks in south Georgia were lucky to get six or seven years of formal education, and what time Nathaniel could devote to his studies and schooling had to be wedged in between picking cotton, gathering hay, or completing any number of other farm-related tasks.
"I did just about everything that was done on the farm in those days. I plowed the fields, gathered hay, and chopped and hauled cotton to the gin. I can remember picking three hundred pounds of cotton a day when I was twelve years old," he recalls.
At sixteen Nathaniel loved the family farm and the rhythm of its work but knew he needed more schooling. "I came to Atlanta to get an education," he says, "the kind I could not get back in the country. I wanted to move ahead and give something back to my parents, who had done so much for me."
Several of Nathaniel's brothers and sisters had preceded him to Atlanta, and when he arrived, they all decided to move into a large house in southeast Atlanta. It's not just that they wanted to share expenses, but even more important to them, they wanted to support each other as family and maintain the kind of life and traditions they had received from their parents and grandparents. One of Nathaniel's sisters had opened a beauty shop on Auburn Avenue; that was how he got his first exposure to a business that would eventually make him one of Atlanta's most successful black businessmen.
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