Chaney initially held Sunday services in the Senate Chamber, Concordia Hall and the United States Courtroom.

Prior to the Civil War, Unitarian churches were operating in Richmond, Virginia; Augusta and Savannah, Georgia; Mobile, Alabama; Louisville, Kentucky; Charleston, South Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana.

By the 1880s Atlanta was experiencing a building boom and the 1881 International Cotton Exposition brought favorable national attention to the city.

Atkinson subsequently served on the exposition's executive committee with Georgia Governor Colquitt and prominent citizens of the city.

Powell in Atlanta in January 1881, the city newspaper reported that Unitarian services would be held in that state's senate chambers "by the courtesy of Governor Colquitt."

Three years later Atlanta's Universalists joined their fellow liberal colleagues in this church building in what was described as a temporary merger for the duration of World War I.

This merger of local Atlanta Unitarians and Universalists appears to have been influenced by a December 1917 recommendation by the AUA.

Frederic Perkins observed that the two small liberal communities merged and continued together primarily to offset separate weaknesses.

Both churches had exhibited limited growth despite the expansion of Atlanta's population and both had remained dependent on the financial assistance from their respective national organizations.

The Universalist church building on East Harris Street was sold in April 1920 for $20,000 (~$230,481 in 2023) and the proceeds were set aside to assist the newly federated congregation.

The Unitarians may have newly arrived in Atlanta, but the Universalists had long established churches in the rural Georgia countryside and carried their southern traditions into the city.

"It grits our people badly to see a man chewing a quid of tobacco all through service or to see another rise from his seat and spit out the window.

But the sense of separateness was there, close to the surface ready to aggravate the frictions that weakness is apt to engender in a small church.

Isaiah Jonathan Domas, external and internal pressures gave birth to the beginning of the end of the liberal church presence in Atlanta.

Churchill's 1946 declaration that an Iron Curtain had descended across Europe ushered in an era of a global Communist red scare.

Domas's support of Henry A. Wallace and his 1948 presidential third-party candidacy was evidence enough to some church members that his liberal politics were out of step with southern traditions.

Domas's association with the poet and union organizer Don West further solidified his public image as a leftist.

McGill continued, "This fact will cause most of the local Unitarian Church members to fret even more than they are.

[14] This public association with Communism of the Atlanta Unitarian church and its minister did not go unnoticed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

"[15] As the church wrestled with public insinuations of Communist complicity, a real assault on long-standing and fundamental southern segregation policies was underway.

In 1944 the Supreme Court ruling in Smith v. Allwright declared unconstitutional the white-only primary system long used by southern Democrats to restrict minority voting rights.

Four years later, President Harry S. Truman would sign Executive Order 9981, ending segregation in the United States Armed Forces.

An ultra-race conscious minority promptly rushed to the telephone and served notice on those two members of the board with whom they felt they had the most in common that I should be fired forthwith.

"When the Ku Klux Klan threatened our family in the fall of 1947, I was too young to be told and too short to look out the high windows.

Each was full of Klansmen in white robes tilting back their pointed hoods to hunt for motion behind our drapes.

The local newspaper reported the news with an article entitled "Wallacite's Church Votes Negro Ban".

At the October 1950 meeting of the AUA Board of Directors, a recommendation was made and later accepted that both the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association withdraw support from the Atlanta congregation.