Today the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on racism in Decatur, Ga. (AJC article is behind the paper’s paywall.) The article was published seven months after I emailed and texted Atlanta and Decatur reporters and bloggers about black men being racially profiled by Decatur police during a summer 2013 “crime wave.” None of my emails or texts received replies.
iMessage, David Rotenstein to Creative Loafing news editor Thomas Wheatley, July 18, 2013.
Decatur, Ga., resident Don Denard was stopped by Decatur police officers for “walking while black.” After having his racial profiling complaint dismissed by a Decatur Police Department internal investigation, Denard and his friends and supporters went to city hall. The video embedded above was compiled from the February 18, 2014 session.
Recommended reading:
Sidewalks: we’re lucky that we have them. Just ask people who live in America’s sprawling suburbs and some of the Atlanta, Ga., region’s new cities. Author Jane Jacobs considered them essential to the urban fabric. Sidewalks move people, connect places, and they are key, wrote Jacobs, to healthy neighborhoods and cities. Although Atlanta’s Candler Park neighborhood is connected by sidewalks as old as the neighborhood itself, they don’t always work well because many stretches have been damaged by vehicles and roots or have not been well maintained.
Damaged sidewalk, Atlanta’s Candler Park neighborhood. Photo by author.
Source: U.S. Census.
I was putting together a PowerPoint for my program on gentrification in Decatur, Ga.’s Oakhurst neighborhood and I added this chart. Decatur has lost more than 50% of its African American population since 1980. According to data posted on the City’s website (unconfirmed), the latest (2013) breakdown of the Decatur’s demographics have it at 74.1% white and 19.5% black. In 2010 it was 78.3 white and 21.7 black. In three years, Decatur lost an additional 2.2 percent of its African American population while gaining new residents of different ethnicities.
… we continue to attract a diverse population with a wide range of age groups, racial backgrounds and economic levels. — City of Decatur website
Since 1970 most of the city’s African Americans have lived in the Oakhurst neighborhood. This chart graphically illustrates gentrification’s replacement power.
© 2014 D.S. Rotenstein
2020 Update: This blog post was expanded and published in 2019 in the Journal of American Folklore as, “The Decatur Plan: Folklore, Historic Preservation, and the Black Experience in Gentrifying Spaces,” Vol. 132, No. 526 (Fall 2019), pp. 431-451. The University of Illinois Press created a multi-media complement to the article: https://jaf.press.uillinois.edu/526/.
“The Plan” is deeply embedded in Washington, D.C., urban lore. According to Washington author Harry Jaffe,
“The plan” is a persistent conspiracy theory among many blacks in the District. It assumes that whites have had a plan to take back the nation’s capital city since the advent of home rule in the 1970s, when the city started electing blacks to local office. The white power structure is bent on moving blacks out and whites in, and it will always control the levers of power.
The Washington “Plan” is easily dismissed as contemporary conspiracy theory that dates to 1979. Academics, journalists, and pundits generally agree that despite demographic changes to the city once dubbed “Chocolate City,” there is no systematic plan to relocate Washington’s black residents beyond the District limits.
Decatur-Dekalb News, 1960.
Although Decatur, Ga., has never had an African American “power structure” despite having a whole two African American city commissioners in its 191-year history, longtime black residents believe that Decatur does have a “plan” to eliminate them from the city’s ranks. Like Washington, the demographic data support popular observations that Decatur’s black population is declining. And, like Washington, that trend is easily explained by market forces and gentrification. Continue reading
October 2013 wasn’t the first time the Decatur, Ga., City Commission heard pleas from residents of the gentrifying Oakhurst neighborhood to halt the disintegration of their community. In February 2003 another group of Oakhurst residents asked the City Commission to “have their backs.”