of a white residential area. When African Americans moved into a neighborhood, many whites believed that property values would automatically plunge, which was a self-fulfilling prophecy as so many homes went on the market at the same time as whites fled first West End and then Cascade Heights, Adams Park, and most of the rest of southwest Atlanta. Real estate agents stirred up racial tension and benefited from the commissions they earned when fearful homeowners sold their properties, often at a loss, in order to escape the area. In an infamous 1962–63 episode that came to be called "the Peyton Road Affair", Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen responded to residents' fears of blockbusting by directing city staff to erect barricades on Peyton Road and Harlan Road to restrict access to Cascade Heights, thus preventing African-American homeseekers from getting to the neighborhood from Gordon Road (now MLK Drive). He took the action at the urging of white residents of southwest Atlanta (in particular, one of his high-level employees who lived a short distance from Peyton Road). After the barricades went up, December 18, 1962, the incident quickly drew national attention. The barrier was compared to the Berlin Wall and nicknamed the "Atlanta Wall". Some newspapers in other parts of the country questioned Atlanta's motto "the City Too Busy to Hate". The walls were torn down when, on March 1, 1963, a court ruled them to be unconstitutional. White homeowners fled the neighborhood after the barricades were removed. By the end of July 1963, only 15 white homeowners remained in Peyton Forest. By the late 1960s the Cascade Heights neighborhood was predominantly African-American but, in spite of the fears of some whites, little had changed in Cascade except the color of the residents. In the 1970s, the area became home to many of the movers and shakers in the city's African American community and it remains so today. It is, in many ways, a mirror of the much-vaunted white neighborhoods in northwest Atlanta, with notable celebrities in residence, several gated communities, and flanked by two golf courses. Notable people Notable current and former residents of Cascade Heights include: Maynard Jackson (1938–2003), the first African American mayor of Atlanta Former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin Former UN Ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young John Lewis (1940–2020), civil rights leader and congressman Baseball legend Hank Aaron (1934–2021) Benjamin Mays, Ph.D. (1894–1984), president of Morehouse College from