Ebony and Ivory

After spending parts of three days in Georgia's largest city and the Southeast's commercial and transportation hub, it's interesting to compare perceptions with realities after the fact -- and contrast those with what I know of the place I live.

I speak, of course, of ebony Atlanta and ivory Portland.

I was surprised to realize that we're actually the bigger city because Atlanta just feels bigger: Portland, 550,396 residents, No. 30 nationally in 2007 vs. Atlanta, 519,145 residents, No. 33.

But, of course, Atlanta is more diverse, with 61 pct African American, 33 pct white, 4.5 pct Hispanic/Latino, 1.9 pct Asian vs. Portland's 78 pct white, 6.8 pct Hispanic/Latino, 6.6 pct African American, 6.3 pct Asian. (More on the implications of these numbers down below.)

Aside from having one of the world's busiest airports, Atlanta's major attractions include the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, the Carter Presidential Center, a handful of excellent colleges (Emory, Georgia Tech, Morehouse and Spelman) and professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey franchises. The city hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics, is home to CNN and serves as state capital.

Portland, meanwhile, is known for bikes, brews and the Blazers (our only major league sports team), as well as a lively counterculture, liberal politics and coffeehouses up the wazoo. We've got Reed College and Nike (well, actually it's in the suburbs). Better yet, we're an hour from the mountains and an hour from the ocean.

I could blather on about our similarities and differences. For instance, Atlanta has a surprising canopy of trees but no one would ever mistake that city for being "greener" than Portland, with its progressive building codes and land-use laws. And, make no mistake, anyone visiting Atlanta right about now is going to deal with heat and humidity that is rarely felt in Portland.

What's most striking about Atlanta, I suppose, is both obvious and unremarkable -- and yet fraught with meaning -- in a city where three out of five residents are African American. Everywhere you go, you see black people in jobs and other roles that, in Portland, would be rare:

Hotel desk clerk, restaurant chef (not just the wait staff), store clerks, police officers, National Park Service rangers (Smokey Bear hats and all), news anchors, scientists, lawyers, business people, Geek Squad techies at the electronics stores.

Obviously, part of this is nothing more than reflecting the city's demographics and its long history as a slave state. The more inspiring way of thinking about it is recognizing Atlanta's prominent role in the Civil Rights Movement. Yes, Martin Luther King Jr. grew up here but so did other legendary leaders -- Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Julian Bond, Hosea Williams, John Lewis -- who participated in the Freedom Rides, founded SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and generally pricked the conscience of a nation that had tolerated separate and unequal for far too long.

It may seem utterly ridiculous to comment on black people doing any of thousands ordinary jobs and going about their daily business in a very routine way. But I, for one, prefer to acknowledge the extraordinary courage and unyielding vision that won equal rights for an entire people. If you've only lived in the Northwest, you can't grasp the enormity of that history. Spending even two or three days in Atlanta, you can literally see the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement all around you.

I'm not so naive that I don't recognize that issues of race, class and education continue to separate the haves from the have-nots. At least here, you can appreciate how far we've come as Americans.

Photograph by Flip Schulke/Corbis