Opie Shelton, vice-president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce; and 25 owners and managers of Atlanta's leading department, variety, and chain stores to come to an agreement of the full desegregation of downtown stores and lunch counters. On his first day in office, he ordered all "white" and "colored" signs removed from City Hall and desegregated the cafeteria. This was the first of many steps he took to advance integration. Allen authorized black Atlanta policemen to arrest whites, hired the city's first black firefighters, and quickly put Atlanta ahead of every other city in the South as far as hiring black workers for positions "other than the most menial jobs". He painstakingly negotiated agreements for the accommodation of African Americans at 18 private and public facilities including hotels, swimming pools, and restaurants. Many Atlanta restaurants and other public facilities desegregated by mutual agreement between their owners and Mayor Allen before the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By January 1964, 14 major Atlanta hotels and motels had publicly pledged to accept reservations regardless of race."I wasn't so all-fired liberal when I first moved into City Hall", Allen wrote. "But when I saw what the race-baiters were doing or could do to hold back the orderly growth of Atlanta, it infuriated me and eventually swung me to the extreme end opposite them". Despite his claims to have been committed to integration one of his first actions was to erect a fence to separate a black neighborhood from a white neighborhood. In the face of criticism Mayor Allen refused to take it down until a court order forced him to. The event was known as "Atlanta's Berlin Wall" or "the Peyton Road Affair." In 1966, a riot broke out in Summerhill, a neighborhood south of the Atlanta Stadium, when a white police officer shot a black resident. Mayor Allen rushed to the scene of the riot, climbing a police car in an attempt to talk to and calm the crowd. He toppled from the car, uninjured, when the crowd repeatedly rocked the vehicle. Afterwards, he walked the streets – refusing to wear a riot helmet as the police did – urging the black residents to "please go home." "This is a good city", he shouted. "Help keep it that way, and go home". In his 1973 autobiography, The River of No Return, Cleveland Sellers a leader in the Student Nonviolent