Alexander: architect of modern Atlanta | www.myajc.com

As a dive-bombing Marine aviator in World War II and as a citizen activist campaigning for racial equality, Atlantan Cecil Alexander is accustomed to combat.

Certainly he came close to death many times flying 62 missions over the Pacific. But it was accompanying Mayor Ivan Allen as he waded into an angry mob of black protesters in the gritty Dixie Hills housing development that jumps out in his memory.

He recounts the 1967 scene in his new memoir “Crossing the Line.” The Dixie Hills residents were outraged that a white police officer had shot and killed a black man and wounded a boy. Allen tapped Alexander to accompany him on a peace-keeping mission, with the assistance of a lone security officer.

“I compare it to my first dive-bombing mission,” said the 95-year-old Alexander recently, during a conversation at his Buckhead home. The difference: as an aviator he had machine guns. “I think I was more scared in Dixie Hills.”

If he was scared, he didn’t show it. Nor did Allen, who remained at the housing project until past dawn the next morning, meeting with residents and listening to their complaints.

Alexander’s admiration for Allen is evident in his book, which reads like a history of modern Atlanta. But Alexander has admirers of his own.

One day this month Andrew Young, former Atlanta mayor, former U.N. ambassador and stalwart civil rights champion, stopped in at Alexander’s gabled New England style house, to pay his respects and to add some footage to a documentary his film company is working on called “The Making of Modern Atlanta.”

via Alexander: architect of modern Atlanta | www.myajc.com.