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This Georgia street name may be gone with the wind

A suburban Atlanta traffic signal is flanked by signs for Tara Boulevard and Old Dixie Road at an intersection in Jonesboro, Ga. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Errin Haines Associated Press
A suburban Atlanta traffic signal is flanked by signs for Tara Boulevard and Old Dixie Road at an intersection in Jonesboro, Ga. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)

JONESBORO, Ga. – The street names in suburban Atlanta’s Clayton County pay homage to the Old South and the Lost Cause: Robert E. Lee Drive. Old Dixie Highway. And Tara Boulevard, named for the plantation home in “Gone With the Wind.”

Now, in a move that encapsulates the county’s changing racial demographics, some residents want to rename Tara Boulevard for the civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.

“We need to get off that plantation mentality to honor a woman who changed America like few Americans could,” said Bob Hartley, a black man who is the leader of the group of about eight residents asking the Clayton County Commission to make the change.

Tara Boulevard, of course, was inspired by Margaret Mitchell’s grand Southern novel. Mitchell based the 1936 book on Civil War stories told by her great-grandfather, who lived in Clayton County.

Parks, who is credited with starting the modern civil rights movement in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., died three weeks ago.

Getting rid of Tara Boulevard is a good idea to Bill Perry.

“The wind done gone,” the 75-year-old black man said with a laugh. “I am praying that they will change it.”

If Tara Boulevard is renamed, it will be another visible symbol of the demographic shift in Clayton County, which has long been white and rural and is now mostly black and suburban.

Clayton County’s population nearly doubled between 1990 and 2000, and blacks now make up nearly 57 percent of the county’s quarter-million people. Last year, the county elected its first black sheriff, district attorney, solicitor general and commission chairman.

Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell, who is black, said Parks’ memory should be honored but with something bigger than a road.

Shaun Jackson, who is white, grew up on Tara Boulevard and said there has been too much change in his hometown already.

Daniel Mulkey, a white man who lived in Jonesboro for 47 years before learning Thursday where the road he has traveled so often got its name, said it makes no difference to him whether they change it or not. He said people in Clayton County generally get along, and he warned against letting the road become a divisive issue.