Facebook screen capture, February 27, 2018.
For many Americans, Danny Ingram isn’t a familiar name. But to the military LGBTQ community, Danny is family. The former army sergeant was a leader in the nationwide effort to overturn Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and he lived in Decatur, Georgia’s Oakhurst neighborhood since a 1990s gentrification wave attracted a large number of gays and lesbians to buy homes in the neighborhood. Yesterday, Danny posted on Facebook that his former Fayetteville Road home had been demolished.
Danny’s former home had been built in 1925 and it would have been a comfortable part of any historic district because of its architecture. The 19 years that Danny lived there gave the property its associational significance with LGBTQ history. I first met Danny when I was well into interviews for my book on gentrification in Decatur. In April 2014, I interviewed him in the home that was demolished.
Danny is a Decatur native. He attended Emory University and after the army he worked at Georgia Tech before retiring in 2016. After achieving the rank of sergeant, Danny was one of the first people discharged under President Bill Clinton’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Danny became an active member of American Veterans for Equal Rights (AVER), eventually becoming the organization’s president. His picture meeting President Barack Obama is one of the first images people see when visiting the organization’s website.
Danny Ingram shaking hands with President Barack Obama. Credit: aver.us.
Though my first meeting with Danny was in April 2014, I first was introduced to him in October 2013 when he made a passionate statement to the Decatur City Commission in a hearing about enacting tree-cutting and single-family home demolition moratoriums.
“I strongly support both moratoriums,” Danny said October 21, 2013. Though he was sympathetic to the teardown moratorium, Danny focused his testimony on the trees. “There is a very serious problem of deforestation and air pollution in this city. Trees go a very long way to fixing the problem of air pollution,” he said.
Most people speaking before government boards tend to nervous or boring — it’s an unfamiliar venue and public speaking is an art form. Danny’s statement about the harmful effects of gentrification that night was artful, to say the least.
I have lived on Fayetteville Road for 20 years in that neighborhood known as Lawnhurst – oh, excuse me, Mini-Mansionhurst. No, sorry – Oakhurst. It’s called Oakhurst. [laughs from audience]
It’s called Oakhurst because we value trees there. We have an arboretum tree walk there. We have three urban forest restoration projects there. It is a great place to live. If you live in a place called Lakeview, you do not drain the lake in order to make more room for houses.
If you live on Hillcrest, you do not get rid of the hill in order to put more houses there.
And if you live in Mountainview, you do not get rid of the mountain in order to make more room for houses there.
I live in OAK-HURST and I want to continue to live in OAK-HURST.
I strongly support both moratoriums.
Danny loved Oakhurst when he first moved there and he loved the Fayetteville Road home. He was attracted to the house and to the neighborhood. “It was my first house so I liked the yard a lot,” he told me in 2014. “That was probably the main thing.” And then there were the trees. Oakhurst was off the beaten track and there were lots of trees.
I asked him about the changes he was seeing in his street and the neighborhood. The significant number of teardowns and the deforestation, both gentrification hallmarks, bothered him I asked him which bothered him more. “Both. The combination,” he replied. “It’s really the combination because they go hand in hand. They want to tear down the little house, build a great big one. And in order to build a great big one, they frequently want to cut down the trees as well.”
In our 2014 interview I asked Danny how long he planned to stay in Oakhurst. He thought that he had two or three more years there. “When I retire I’ll probably move. Because it’s almost at a point where it’s too good not to sell,” he explained. “I can get so much for the property now why not buy something brand new where I don’t have to paint, I don’t have to worry about the plumbing, I don’t have to worry about the roof, you know. And not have to work in the yard or whatever.”
I then asked him what his prospects were for the house after he leaves.
“Oh they’ll tear it down,” he said.
In 2016, Danny moved to Texas to live with fiancé Eric Alva, a Marine veteran who was injured in the Iraq War and who also became a nationally-recognized human rights activist. The pair married in 2017.
I have written a lot about how gentrification in Oakhurst has erased black bodies and virtually all evidence of the black experience in the neighborhood (as well as the rest of Decatur). As the growth machine churns through more homes associated with the 1990s gentrification phase that brought many people from the LGBTQ community to Oakhurst, it is also erasing evidence of that important period in Decatur’s history. Though each of the homes associated with the people who lived in them cumulatively tell a story about the neighborhood’s history, Oakhurst, Decatur, Georgia, and the nation lost a valuable link to LGBTQ history with the demolition of Danny Ingram’s home.
facebook screen capture, February 27, 2018.
© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein
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