That '70s Atlanta Show

Atlanta City Councilmembers Michael Julian Bond, Kwanza Hall and C.T. Martin will host a collection of historic photos by photojournalist Boyd Lewis for a week-long exhibit in the atrium of Atlanta City Hall from 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday, July 9  through Friday, July 13, 2012.

The free exhibition will focus on the key figures in 1970s Atlanta whose names now adorn city street and historic markers.

“This will be a fun exhibition. I'll be on hand every day to give a living history tour of the photos – the back story, as we say in good old Hollywood,” Lewis said in a press release.

Boyd Lewis, who currently lives in California, was a journalistic fixture in Atlanta from 1969 through l977. He was first hired in Atlanta as a reporter for The Atlanta Voice in 1969. He was such a fixture that one of the city’s civil rights leaders, the late civil rights giant John Calhoun, gave Lewis a nickname that stuck, “The white boy with the black press.”

And for six years, he was. Lewis spent three years as news editor of The Atlanta Voice before Jesse Hill hired him to write for The Atlanta Inquirer for another three years.

“Boyd Lewis’ photos tell an important story about our city’s history, one that many newer Atlantans today aren’t familiar with," Councilmembers Bond, Hall and Martin said in a joint statement. "His display is not only our story, it is America’s story of social evolution. The 1970s was a decade when Atlanta came of age. It is very befitting that this display is exhibited at Atlanta City Hall, a place Boyd, through his work, knew well.”

The collection will include the late Maynard H. Jackson from vice mayor through first administration; Julian and James Bond in office and at home, father and uncle respectively of Councilman Michael Julian Bond; and the late Leon Hall, father of Councilman Kwanza Hall.

It will also showcase the late Joseph E. Boone and members of the Metro Summit Leadership Conference; Ethel M. Matthews, Father Austin Ford and Gene Ferguson of Emmaus House;  the late Coretta Scott King and family and King Center; SCLC and NAACP figures; Wyche Fowler and the late Ivan Allen; Johnny Johnson and Model Cities; the late Q.V Williamson, first black member of the Atlanta’s Board of Aldermen since Reconstruction.

Also included are photos of the late Rev. William Holmes Borders; the late Hosea Williams; the late Ralph David Abernathy; Dr. Joseph E. Lowery; C.T. Vivian; Dorothy Cotton and various demonstrations at City Hall and more.

The exhibit will change from time to time over the five-day run of the show. Atlanta City Hall is located at 55 Trinity Avenue, S.W. in downtown.

Born in 1944, Boyd Henry Lewis, Jr. worked in East Tennessee and in Meridian, Mississippi before he was hired in 1969 to work at The Atlanta Voice and in 1973 at The Atlanta Inquirer. Lewis also worked as a free lance photographer landing photographs in Time, Newsweek and other major publications throughout the country. 

During his illustrious career Boyd Lewis wrote a regular column for the city’s hippie newspaper, The Great Speckled Bird, and later worked in radio with Atlanta’s NPR affiliate, WABE.  Lewis covered the Wayne Williams trial for NPR and later went on to become a news writer for CNN before leaving Atlanta in 1997 for Los Angeles and a teaching career.  

Lewis plans a donation of a substantial number of his civil rights era photographs to the new Atlanta Center for Civil and Human Rights.