Over the course of the 1960s, as student activists became ever more strident and white businessmen responded in kind, the political coalition that had once held them together seemed dangerously close to falling apart. Black Atlanta became embroiled in a generational conflict that threatened to push the two sides ever farther apart. Meanwhile, the white business elite found itself increasingly at odds with its longtime political allies, and increasingly tempted to join forces with the segregationists it had helped suppress for the better part of two decades. The sit-ins thus represented more
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