Smyrna Crazy City Limits in the 1960s.

Harold Smith

Last night we went to the Marietta Museum of History to hear Mr. Harold Smith speak about the history of Smyrna.  Mrs. Smith knows just about everything about Smyrna, Georgia, and has plenty of true little humorous stories to complement  the history facts.

Harold has written three books about the History of Smyrna.  One is an Arcadia Book (the beige local history books)

It was a good talk. 

One of the the slide show presentations was a map of Smyrna of years ago,  The map has a very strange shape.  It has long arms and fingers and little islands.  By islands I mean there were little neighborhoods not  part of Smyrna but was completely surrounded by Smyrna..  The residents of these  sections could not leave their non-Smyrna area to go any place without going into Smyrna.  The same was true for the arms and the fingers city limits borders.   Harold didn't mention the reason for the strange city limit borders, but I will.

The reason it was like that  was  because the islands and between the fingers were black neighborhoods.    I  remember in the late 1960s the politicians bragged that they did not have any black residents. 

That was something they thought was something to be proud of, to have a lily white city.  Give me a break.