November | 2014 | History Sidebar

Thanks for your witness and devotion to justice — Rev. Nibs Stroupe, Oakhurst Presbyterian Church (Decatur, Ga.), Oct. 21, 2014.

After almost four years in Georgia, I am back in the Washington, D.C., area. Back home. The Georgia experience was one of incredible professional and personal growth. We lived and worked in a place where Old South racism mixes in a toxic civic cauldron with New South neoliberalism. Structural racism and privilege permeate all levels of Decatur, Georgia, society from city hall to city streets.

Decatur’s residents have shed their white hoods and replaced them with social media accounts and middle class respectability, PR firms, and false choice urbanism. For me, it was a rare opportunity to go from being an unwitting participant observer in a gentrifying neighborhood to an advocate for economic and racial equity.

The Decatur experience was transformative. I will use what I learned to be better: a better historian, better citizen, and better person. This week I began that journey on a walk with Rev. Jeffrey Thames, founder of Hope Restored, Inc., a Silver Spring, Maryland, nonprofit with a mission to work with the homeless and to open up the pipeline from incarceration back into the community.

http://youtu.be/LDEYc0iH5YQ

Last month the I put together a photo essay on a gentrifying Atlanta, Ga., neighborhood for the National Council on Public History’s History@Work site. The essay combines photos from Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood with places from Nathan McCall’s 2007 novel, Them.

I compiled the photos after developing a self-guided bicycle tour of the area depicted in Them. My friend, Nedra Deadwyler, read the post and decided to create a community engagement opportunity using the business she founded earlier this year, Civil Bikes. Nedra’s business combines history, sustainability, and urbanism. According to her website,

Civil Bikes is not your average bike touring company–Civil Bikes envisions itself as a member of a larger community. For this reason Civil Bikes hosts fun and progressive programs to promote biking, social dialogue, and the arts.

I was honored after Nedra read my Them essay and she decided to incorporate my informal tour into her programming. Check out Civil Bikes and keep an eye out for the book discussion and tour later this year: