Race relations would not have been calm without the willingness of both "sides" to negotiate, not fight. The explosion of wealth that built Atlanta's skyline and turfed the lawns of her suburbs would not have occurred without robust capitalism - and huge grants of taxpayers' money secured by City Hall from the federal government. The airport would not have become the travel hub of the South without Mayor Hartsfield's sense of "airmindedness" in the early days of commercial aviation, when he saw Atlanta as the gateway to the south east while barnstormers still flew biplanes. Yet that is not so.In almost every instance, I've found that the cliches about Atlanta mask a far richer truth - that, for all of the city's good fortune, it could not have risen to become the foremost metropolis of the American South without the hard work, hard-headedness, forward thinking, bluster and occasional sheer brilliance of its leaders, black and white. Atlanta's history is a tale of clever, ambitious men and women who exploited their natural advantages while leaders in other Southern cities failed to do so.Time and again during the past half-century, Atlanta's pathfinders have managed to pick the right fork in the road. It was a safe bet that some reporters would discover, after brief tours of the downtown streets, that there were "pockets of poverty in the shadows of gleaming skyscrapers", and they might conclude that Atlanta's brightly burnished image was a fraud.

An army of journalists would be arriving to see if Atlanta lived up to her boasts, and there was no telling what boxes they would open and what surprises would jump out. His personal integrity disarmed many of his critics, but, in an uncomfortable number of instances since then, juries were finding some of the city's other black officeholders guilty of acts of corruption. Was the black civil rights leader Julian Bond right? He'd once said, half-jokingly, that the good government reforms of the post-Watergate era were a bane to the black community because they slammed the door on old-fashioned graft at the precise moment when blacks were poised to take advantage. The "talented tenth" had become a talented half, but what of the rest? Was the black political elite gaining any ground for those left behind in the government housing "projects"?As I packed Craig's robe back into its keeping place, I thought about the approach of the summer Olympic Games in 1996 - an event with the potential to certify Atlanta for ever as the international city it has long claimed to be. The grandest mansion in town, the Swan House, had been built by a cotton broker - a financier - not a planter. White Atlantans had sentimental feelings for the Confederate past, but they had a far greater yearning for Yankee capital.Everyone remembered Henry Grady's 1886 declaration of a New South, where sharecroppers were ready to leave the farms and work for good wages in factories built by northern industrialists.

Few recalled that the idea had originated with Benjamin Harvey Hill, a Georgia politician and orator who travelled north to New York City's Tammany Hall in 1866, just a year after the war ended, and proclaimed: "There was a South of slavery and secession - that South is dead. There is a South of union and freedom - that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour." Had he spoken those eloquent words, in effect, for money?Finally, what verdict will historians return on the 20-plus years of black political rule in Atlanta? In 1973, a rotund, eloquent lawyer named Maynard Jackson won election as the city's first black mayor. Atlanta had not existed, and so it had become necessary (in 1837) to invent her. Couldn't it be said that the very same forces were at work in the air age? How much of Atlanta's glory was deserved, and how much of it derived from the centrality of the city's airport? The old joke, that to get to heaven or hell you had to change planes in Atlanta, was not so funny if it reduced Atlanta's exalted position to that of a regional switching station.And what of the "power structure", that self-ordained group of powerful white businessmen who ran the city during its golden era after World War II? Were they really so enlightened? Or did a local cynic have it right, that their legacy was merely "a triumph of Babbittry over bigotry?" The city, inexorably associated with the courtly, hoop-skirted, antebellum glories of the Old South by the book and film Gone With the Wind, was in fact nothing of the sort The nearest cotton field was 20 miles to the south Tara was fiction. Yet, to a sceptic, Sherman's gesture was really little more than a gentle way of saying that Atlanta owed its being to an arbitrary act of topography. Sitting on the first stretch of level ground south of the Appalachians, the city had begun as an inevitable nexus for the railroad cars that clacked back and forth from the Tennessee valley to the seaports of the Atlantic coast, trading crops for finished goods. But remember, the same reason which caused me to destroy Atlanta will make it a great city in the future."Many years later, the story became a favourite of Ralph McGill's.

The celebrated editor of the Constitution in the Fifties told it over and over, as an explanation for Atlanta's remarkable flowering. "Young man," he said, "when I got to Atlanta, what was left of the Confederacy could be roughly compared to your hand. Atlanta was the palm, and by destroying it I spared myself much further fighting. Sherman reached over, took Howell's hand and turned it palm up. "The town will be gone in 40 minutes."During his stay, Sherman granted an interview to Clark Howell, a young reporter from the Atlanta Constitution, who asked him why he had destroyed the city.

It was an unseasonably warm day and quite a few citizens had gathered outside the railroad depot. Their mood was one of edgy, brittle humour, as if they were torn between old bitterness and the newer exhilaration of greeting a celebrity "Ring the fire bells!" a man shouted as the train pulled in. How much of that bounty was due to virtue, I found myself asking, and how much to blind luck?One of the instructive episodes of Atlanta's early history, now nearly forgotten, was the day William T Sherman made a return visit to the city he'd burned to the ground during the Civil War. The old general arrived back in town on the afternoon of Wednesday, 29 January, 1879, at the invitation of the city fathers. Modern Atlanta was built, in large part, on the amazing grace of its race relations in the pivotal decades after World War II. In the grand phrase of its longtime mayor, William Hartsfield, Atlanta was "a city too busy to hate". It escaped the riots and ugliness that engulfed so many other Southern cities in the Sixties, and the rewards were enormous: rapid growth, corporate and individual wealth, a profusion of cultural amenities, the arrival of major league sports, recognition as the unquestioned capital city of the region.