A personal reflection: My parents to me: ‘We are citizens of the world’

As the city was celebrating the FIFA World Cup finale at the Showcase Atlanta celebration at Piedmont Park on July 19, Mayor Andre Dickens paid tribute to when Atlanta held the opening ceremony of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games exactly 30 years earlier — to the day and almost the actual minute.

“Today’s a special day for us,” Dickens told the crowd of mainly Spanish fans at Piedmont Park on July 19. “This is the 30th anniversary of the opening night of the ’96 Olympics, when Atlanta was also on the biggest stage in the world.”

As an observer of Atlanta’s history, I’m lucky to have experienced both major global events marking our city’s place on the world map.

But my perspective actually dates back much longer, to growing up in an Atlanta of the 1950s when I knew what it felt like to be a foreigner in a Southern city.

Yes, I am an Atlanta native. My parents, Ike and Nora Saporta, moved to Atlanta in 1948, leaving a war-torn Europe where they had experienced the Holocaust firsthand.

They were rounded up for questioning by the Germans on March 10, 1944, exactly one year after they were married while living in hiding in Athens, Greece. My father managed to escape. But my mother, her parents and her best friend, all Sephardic Jews, were captured and put on freight trains to spend a year at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp until the end of the war.

My parents decided to move to Atlanta, where Papa became a professor of architecture at Georgia Tech. My sister was born in 1952, and I was born in 1955 when Atlanta was truly a parochial Southern town.

Both my parents spoke six or seven languages apiece, and they strongly believed it was important to raise their two daughters with an international mindset.

They spoke French to us at home. And they spoke Greek to each other. They also both knew Spanish, Judeo-Espanol, Italian and English. My father spoke fluent German because he had studied architecture in Germany.

When I was 4 years old, my mother, my sister and I spent six months living in Europe (Greece and France) staying with relatives. I turned 5 in Thessaloniki, where my grandparents lived. We had traversed the ocean on Queen Elizabeth II, because transatlantic jet travel was not yet routine.

When we returned to Atlanta, I started kindergarten a month after school had started. I only knew four words of English: yes, no, me and okay. I was put in remedial English with other foreign students.

I vividly remember walking the streets of Atlanta at the time, speaking French with my parents and have fellow passers-by look at us as if we had arrived from Mars. Speaking a foreign language in Atlanta made us stand out.

The whole time we were growing up, my parents warned us of the dangers of unbridled nationalism. They had seen it first-hand in Europe. The also raised us to believe that we were citizens of the world, first and foremost.

They did all they could to nurture Atlanta’s international roots. My mother co-founded the Alliance Française d’Atlanta school in 1963. It was a way to help spread the French language to people in Atlanta who appreciated European culture.

They also were members of the Goethe German school and cultural organization – a reminder to me that we can still respect and love people from other countries, even if their leaders had sought to wipe out the Jewish race.

We lived in the Burge Apartments, a Georgia Tech high-rise for married students and professors. Whenever international students or visiting professors were coming to Georgia Tech, they would be told to go to the Saportas, because they too were foreign. Our 7th-floor apartment became a United Nations open to people from all over, including Korea, India, Taiwan, Chile, Italy, etc.

My father also set up an architectural practice that welcomed people from around the world. At its height, 11 different languages were spoken at Papa’s firm, representing 17 different countries.

All my life, I’ve been most comfortable traveling in international circles. For many of my summers as an undergraduate and graduate student, I traveled throughout Europe with a backpack, riding on trains on a youth-rail or Eurail pass, staying with relatives and family friends much of the time.

When I started writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in the early 1980s, I squirmed my way into covering economic development and international business. It was a wonderful decade. Delta Air Lines was inaugurating international flights throughout Europe and beyond, the Metro Atlanta Chamber was organizing high-level trade missions. Andrew Young, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was Atlanta’s mayor. And I was able to report on Atlanta’s global evolution, thanks to the AJC.

In 1990, I became the beat writer covering the Coca-Cola Co., arguably the company that really laid the foundation for Atlanta becoming an international city – a role it continues to play.

I also closely followed Atlanta’s quest to become the host city of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, celebrating when Atlanta was designated as the U.S. Olympic Committee’s candidate for the 1996 Games. On many of the international reporting trips I went on, Young was busy making side calls to members of the International Olympic Committee, always pushing our bid to join the world stage.

Atlanta won the IOC bid to host the Olympics in September 1990. I was able to witness how the city adopted a global mantle as it prepared to host the world in 1996. In January 1991, I was named the newspaper’s top business columnist.

I also was a lucky member of the 28-strong AJC team that went to Barcelona to cover the 1992 Summer Olympic Games. We were sent to better understand what was about to happen to Atlanta. Out of Barcelona came the understanding we needed a central place for the world to gather. Centennial Olympic Park was born.

During the Olympics, Atlanta welcomed the world, mostly in an uplifting way. A few early glitches did alienate the international press corps, given transportation and housing issues as well as some insulting remarks from city officials towards journalists covering the Games.

But Andrew Young, who was chairing the Metro Atlanta Chamber in 1996, helped to take the sting out of the moment. In a press conference with the foreign press on the roof of the now-demolished Metro Atlanta Chamber building, Young apologized for inappropriate comments by city leaders.

Young then told journalists that the civil rights movement would never have happened without the national and international press exposing to the world how Blacks were being treated in the South.

Back to my family. When my parents moved to Atlanta, they became involved in the civil rights movement – recognizing the forces of oppression and discrimination.

I was only 8 years old when my parents took my sister and me to walk a picket line in front of Leb’s restaurant downtown because the owner would not allow Blacks to eat there. Across the street, the Klu Klux Klan was picketing in front of Big Boy/Shoney’s, a restaurant that opened its doors to Blacks. We had to cross the KKK picket line to go dine there. I wrote on my paper placemat at lunch “Love Everybody,” and marched with that the rest of the afternoon.

When I was in fifth grade (1966), Spring Street Elementary School became integrated with the families of Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy. That’s how I became best friends with Yolanda King.

Again, I was fortunate to be the daughter of two parents who embraced the world, understood justice and respected people of diverse backgrounds, cultures and nationalities. I knew we were an anomaly back in the 1950s and 1960s.

But what a different city we are today.

It was a sweet turn of history that Centennial Olympic Park resumed its role as welcoming the world during the Fan Fest celebrations during the World Cup. As I think of the bookends of the 1996 Olympic Games and the 2026 World Cup, I fully appreciate how Atlanta has blossomed as a welcoming city to people from around the world.

“FIFA brought the world to Atlanta,” Dickens said at Piedmont Park. “And we reminded the world exactly who we are. Bold, welcoming and always ready for the global stage. Thanks to all of you, we didn’t just meet the moment; we owned it. So, take a bow Atlanta. We did that together.”

Last week’s column: World Cup spotlights downtown and Atlanta’s global flavor