In 2015, the City of Decatur, Georgia, opened a new Black history “museum” in the Beacon Municipal Complex, the site of two historic African American schools the city demolished two years earlier. The Champion, a DeKalb County newspaper, reported on the complex opening: “The center is built on the site of the historic Black Herring Street, Beacon Elementary and Trinity High Schools. The center includes a museum that features exhibits on the history of the Beacon community.”

There’s much to be said about the “history” presented in the “museum.” The City is proud of its efforts to “preserve” Black history. “Decatur has taken steps in recent years to preserve the history of the Beacon community and to honor its spirit,” one City website proclaims. Some Black residents, however, are outraged by the many gaps and errors in the City’s story told at the Beacon complex.

The Beacon exhibits are the culmination of a century of displacement and erasure that began with the creation of a Black ghetto in downtown in the first decades of the 20th century. It continued with successive stages of slum clearance and urban renewal between 1940 and 1970. And, it continues today with large-scale public-sector redevelopment projects and gentrification. Perhaps no document better illustrates the ways that the City of Decatur has erased Black people and Black history is the 2009 citywide historic resources survey. Nowhere in the voluminous study do the words “Black” or “African American” appear. The survey furthermore found no Black history sites worthy of landmarking and preservation.

Historic Black schools being demolished in Decatur, 2013. A text panel inside the redeveloped Beacon complex reads, “The former school buildings that now house the Beacon Municipal Center are one of the few remaining landmarks of the Beacon neighborhood.”

The two schools on the site now occupied by the Beacon complex were historic, though. So were many other places that have been demolished since the report was completed in 2009. But the Beacon complex has become Decatur’s biggest monument to white supremacy for the history that was erased at the site and the racist, whitewashed version of Black history told on its campus.

My 2019 Journal of American Folklore article, “The Decatur Plan: Folklore, Historic Preservation, and the Black Experience in Gentrifying Spaces,” explores the many problems embedded in the Beacon complex. As I have been telling academic audiences and participants in Decatur walking tours, the complex’s exhibits reflect Black history as mediated through a white gaze produced by people with little understanding of Black culture and Black history in Decatur.

In my tours and academic talks about Decatur I always mention Donald Grant Ebster (1874-1965). He was a prominent Black resident who was active in civic affairs and his church community. He is one of only a few Blacks whose names were inscribed in Decatur’s 20th century landscape. The city’s former “colored park” was named for him in 1947. Other places named for African Americans in Decatur were Oliver Street (named for entrepreneur Henry Oliver; renamed Commerce Drive in the 1980s) and the Allen Wilson Terrace Apartments (public housing named for a Black educator and clergyman).

Despite Ebster’s prominence, though, few Decatur residents know anything about him other than the park named for him and that he was a church deacon. But when I asked folks if they could tell me more about who he was, most couldn’t. One man told me a story about telling a relative about Ebster:

She thought that Deacon Ebster’s name was Deacon and I was telling her, no, he was a deacon in the church. Now I don’t even know what Deacon Ebster’s first name was. But he was a deacon in the church. He was very instrumental in getting things done. You know, they had to have people to go to the board of education and say we need this and we need that and there were civic leaders and those people should be remembered.

Back in 2013, I got a telephone call from one of Ebster’s extended kin. After the 1906 pogrom in Atlanta during which many Blacks were murdered and assaulted, Ebster’s twin brother appears to have moved to Pittsburgh and it was his great-great grandson who called me. We spoke a few times over the years and after I moved to Pittsburgh in 2019, we met. He told me that his family was proud that a Southern city would name a park for his ancestor at the height of Jim Crow racism in the nation. “I hope they never lose the names,” he told me about the park and the pool which bears his family’s name.

Ebster Park and Ebster Pool, June 2018.

Though Ebster’s name is not in danger of being forgotten anytime soon in Decatur, the person behind the name appears to have been erased. Some of that erasure comes out in the quotation above. It becomes more clear when longtime residents cannot offer any details about Ebster’s life outside the church. Census records show that he worked for many years for a local paper company, as a laborer and, later, a porter. He was a homeowner (in White Street) and his extended family made substantive contributions outside of Decatur, in Chicago and Pittsburgh. But the man himself has been reduced to a gloss: Deacon Ebster.

Another place Ebster’s erasure becomes clear is in the panel with his photograph and some text inside the Beacon Municipal Complex:

Donald Grant Ebster (1872-1962) served as Deacon of the Thankful Baptist Church for over 40 years. He was a prominent leader with the Decatur Civic League, and a celebrated storyteller who wrote an historic account of the Thankful Baptist Church. He was known for inspiring young people to be good citizens and good Christians.

Set aside for a moment the trite text and its general lack of substance. One fact, the dates that he was born and died, shouldn’t be in question. There are lots of sources available for researchers to learn a lot about Ebster, including the years he was born and died — which are not the years shown in the Beacon complex exhibit.

“Beacon Role Models,” Beacon Municipal Complex exhibit, May 2015.

Donald Grant Ebster text panel, Beacon Municipal Center, 2016.

The consultants who created the Beacon exhibits wouldn’t have had to go far from their desks to get information about Ebster. Online genealogy sites and digitized newspapers would have done the trick.

Donald G. Ebster obituary. The Atlanta Constitution, February 9, 1965.

Now that activists have gotten rid of Decatur’s Confederate monument and they are on track to remove a cannon that celebrates Native American genocide, perhaps another project might be decolonizing Decatur’s racist Black history museum. One suggestion, though: don’t erase the “museum” — it’s now part of Decatur’s racist legacy and it can be a powerful teaching tool.

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

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