I spent a few days in Decatur this week following up leads derived from interviews I have done over the past year. One of the things that I wanted to see and photograph was a fence that a historic Black church had erected to block access to its parking lot in Decatur’s gentrifying Oakhurst neighborhood. I learned about the fence in a February 2018 interview that I did with a Decatur native who grew up in the city’s Beacon Community during the second half of the twentieth century.
Thankful Baptist Church parking lot and fence, June 2018.
“Right up there on Mead Road they’ve got a bar and now they’re trying to take over the parking lot on the weekends,” the woman told me in a telephone interview. “I think even when you try to be nice, they take advantage.”
Though the bar patrons’ parking appears to be the leading irritant (so much for the drunks staggering through what new urbanism writer Scott Doyon in 2012 called his community’s “pub shed“), another contributing factor may be the great number of film and television production crews using the space while filming in Oakhurst.
The fence is the latest chapter in a long-running feud involving Thankful Baptist Church and the Imperial bar. Thankful Baptist Church was founded in 1882. Until 1970, the congregation was based on Atlanta Avenue in the city’s historically Black neighborhood, the Beacon Community. After the church was destroyed in an overnight fire — some still say the Klan firebombed it — the congregation bought an existing church building on the opposite side of the railroad tracks in Oakhurst.
Thankful Baptist Church, May 2015.
Oakhurst until the mid-1960s had been an all-white working class neighborhood. African Americans displaced by urban renewal and asserting their Constitutional rights in the wake of civil rights court cases and litigation began buying homes there. White flight quickly turned Oakhurst majority African American by 1970 — it had become Decatur’s other side of the tracks. Gentrification in the first two decades fo the twenty-first century has been reverting Oakhurst back to its pre-1960s racial makeup. Over the past decade, Oakhurst’s white space has increasingly encroached on the neighborhood’s long-established Black spaces, pushing people, businesses, and uses out of the neighborhood.
In 2012, the church and some neighbors were opposed to the bar opening. The neighbors wanted their peace and the church didn’t want the nuisances associated with a hipster bar in a hipster-rich gentrifying neighborhood: Doyon’s “pub shed.” For a brief period in 2012, the church had spelled out “We will not be moved” on its sign board.
The former gas station where the Imperial bar opened in 2012. The picture was taken while the property was still on the market in May 2012.
The Imperial bar, June 2018.
Historically it’s been whites who have enclosed and blocked Black space. In this instance, the church is asserting its rights over its property. And, it’s doing so in more ways than one. Recently the Decatur City Commission approved the church’s plans to redevelop the parking lot — plans that will eliminate the nuisance and which will create new revenue streams to the historic congregation.
Fallen sign announcing City of Decatur zoning hearing. The fence is in the middleground and the Imperial bar is in the background.
In erecting its “F-you” fence Thankful Baptist Church has flipped a long-established script on property rights and appropriation.
© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein
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