I recently took a group of public history students to the Black history exhibits in the redeveloped Beacon municipal center in Decatur, Georgia. Ever since the space opened in 2015, I have described it in conference papers and articles as “Black history under glass.”
It is a sanitized, flattened version of the city’s Black history that does great violence to the city’s history and the people who made it happen. Much of the single story told in the Beacon exhibits derives from the experiences of one person: a tokenized African American woman who made significant civil rights contributions to the city and who became a controversial figure after serving in city government.
The students who accompanied me on the visit earlier this month have been working with a church congregation that was founded in Decatur in the 1860s. It was the oldest Black church congregation in the city before it was displaced in the 1990s. Though their grant-funded project has been widely reported by multiple Atlanta media outlets, it has received no coverage in Decatur-based media (blogs or city publications).
Antioch A.M.E. Church digital history project screen capture. The website is a rich archive of textual, visual, and oral history primary materials.
Their work, and the stories of the multiple generations of church members with whom they have been working, are some of the notable erasures in the Beacon exhibits. They are erasures first brought to my attention in calls and emails I began receiving after the exhibits opened. Many lifelong Decatur residents who grew up in the razed and erased Beacon community contacted me to tell me that the exhibits didn’t tell the their community’s entire story. They were angry that it privileged the story of a single individual, whose experiences didn’t match their own.
Beacon Community story map. Beacon Municipal Center, November 2019.
In the discussion with the public history students, I asked them what they thought was missing from the exhibits. One woman pointed to a graphic illustration of the erased community (a map with historic photos and text panels) and she asked where all the pictures were. Through her work with the historic Black congregation, she and her colleagues knew that there were photos of sites indicated in the map, yet they weren’t represented.
Detail from the Beacon Community story map. The exhibits were completed after the former Antioch A.M.E. church building was demolished. The map doesn’t include a photo of that building or its pre-urban renewal predecessors and it incorrectly tells visitors that the church “is now located on Atlanta Avenue.”
The City of Decatur boasts that the Beacon exhibits, “Preserve the history of the Beacon community and … honor its spirit.” Hardly. The exhibits are another act of racial violence in a city with a long history of racism and anti-Semitism. If the erasures are so evident to undergraduate history students, I wonder what a public forum comprised of former Beacon residents that fully represents the community’s long and rich past might tell city leaders about its cosmetic effort to erase decades of racism.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
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