The Smithian

They…met in the first grade and were discovered in the early 1990s at the Greenbriar Mall in Atlanta by Jermaine Dupri, who molded them into the first commercially successful teen-oriented hip hop act. Mr. Kelly died on Wednesday after being found unresponsive in his home in Atlanta. He was 34…Mr. Kelly’s mother, Donna Kelly Pratte, said he had been using cocaine and heroin before his death.

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art: Kelly, on the right.

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art: Goldilocks (2011) by Tamara Natalie Madden (acrylic and mixed media on canvas)

I was made aware of the odd mix of gain and loss when I went back to Atlanta to see my beloved grandmother. She told me not to hold change between my lips while groping for a pocket to put it in—“That might have been in a nigger’s mouth.” Once, when she took me to Mass, she walked out of the church when a black priest came out to celebrate. I wondered why, since she would sit and eat with a black woman who helped her with housework. “It is the dignity—I would not let him take the Lord in his hands.” Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe—that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the Lord in his hands. It is the dignity. This is the thing that makes the South the distillation point for all the fugitive extremisms of our time, the heart of Say-No Republicanism, the home of lost causes and nostalgic lunacy. It is as if the whole continent were tipped upward, so that the scattered crazinesses might slide down to the bottom. The South has often been defeated. Now it is defeating itself.

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…a torch of black Christianity was passed to a…minister, scholar and son of Atlanta, who was born five years after Dr. King’s death, the Rev. Jonathan L. Walton…Mr. Walton took on the position of Pusey minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard…Mr. Walton’s appointment…forms part of a generational transition in the African-American church. Ministers and theologians who came of age during the civil rights era are being supplanted by those, like Mr. Walton, 39, of elite universities, the diversity movement and hip-hop culture.

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Atlanta

As minority bus ridership rises, the racial stigma against the transportation form compounds. When Atlanta launched its Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) system in the 1970s, some hissed that the acronym stood for “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.” Today, though 78 percent of MARTA riders are black, many black residents still struggle to access the city bus lines, which fail to stretch deep enough into the sprawling black suburbs. (One critic has characterized the lingering problem as “transportation apartheid”). And the racial stigma against buses lingers even in lines that have not yet been built and boarded. When a new bus route was charted through a white Tempe, Arizona, neighborhood a few years ago, neighbors complained that the line would attract serial killers and child rapists. Also: “bums,” “drunks,” and “Mexicans,” who the commentators feared would soon be “drinking out of our water hoses.”

more from “Race, Class, and the Stigma of Riding the Bus.”

Many things are illegal — murder, rape, driving while impaired, selling drugs — but simply living in a country without proper documentation does not make a human being any more of an “illegal” than a driver without a license. People are not “illegals,” and we will not be defining them that way.

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What do you do when the cops you work for are dirtier than you are?

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From the airy, light-filled check-in area, visitors will pass…into a series of…light-filled atriums—the architecture makes much use of skylights, windows, and soaring ceilings—with a mezzanine lined with restaurants, shops, and seating. Other design features include floors of granite sourced from the world’s quarries, an enormous chandelier, and an…array of glass discs suspended from the ceiling programmed to light up and change color in coordination with plane departures.

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Visually speaking, Atlanta’s new international terminal kicks ass.

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