Excerpt:

"There's no question in my mind that since the 1960s, race has been the underlying factor in all of these attitudes against bringing MARTA into the outlying areas," said Ronald H. Bayor, a professor emeritus of history at Georgia Tech and author of the 1996 book "Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta." ''White flight was well underway. People were running away from the desegregation of the Atlanta schools. Some of the opposition was from whites who worried that it would lead to the integration of the suburbs."

Long after MARTA began operating, Bayor said, whites would privately joke that its nickname stood for "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta." Publicly, opponents were less explicit but warned that mass transit would increase crime or diminish property values in the suburbs.

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