Civil Rights
After Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, plans for an interracial celebration in still-segregated Atlanta were not initially well supported by the city's business elite until Coca-Cola intervened.
J. Paul Austin, the chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, and Mayor Ivan Allen summoned key Atlanta business leaders to the Commerce Club's eighteenth floor dining room, where Austin told them flatly, 'It is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner. We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Co. does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Co.' Within two hours of the end of that meeting, every ticket to the dinner was sold. —Andrew YoungHowever, Coca-Cola has also faced allegations of racial discrimination in its employment practices, and faced a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit regarding this in the early 2000s.
Read more about this topic: The Coca-Cola Company
Famous quotes by civil rights:
“... two great areas of deafness existed in the South: White Southerners had no ears to hear that which threatened their Dream. And colored Southerners had none to hear that which could reduce their anger.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 16 (1962)
“A mechanism of some kind stands between us and almost every act of our lives.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 3, ch. 2 (1962)