The City of Decatur, Georgia, is a champion in canceling people. In the early 1900s, it tried to cancel Jews by legalizing a Tuesday through Saturday public school week that held classes on the Jewish Sabbath. It has spent the past century trying to cancel Black bodies through slum clearance, urban renewal, and gentrification. In 2009, the City’s historic preservation survey canceled Black history and Black historical landmarks. Last week, the City canceled me. Again.
City officials and Decatur residents loved my work so much that they built a substantial part of Decatur’s first Juneteenth celebration around it. The only problem is that City officials and residents didn’t ask for my permission to use my work nor did they credit me in any of their Juneteenth products.
For the past several months City leaders and their partners in private organizations planned a large Juneteenth celebration in Decatur’s courthouse square. The event featured two main events: festivities featuring music and speakers and a walking tour of the historic Black community erased in the 20th century.
City of Decatur Juneteenth graphic. Source: visitdecaturgeorgia.com.
In planning for the Juneteenth walking tour, Decatur residents working with the City approached me and other historians for information. In May, one of the event planners asked me to modify the “Decatur Displaced and Erased” walking tour that I developed in 2020 for the National Council on Public History. I offered to update the tour booklet for the Juneteenth event and invited the organizers to link to my storymap. I never heard back from them.
The week before the Juneteenth celebration, the City of Decatur published a page on its tourism website promoting the event and linking to a storymap for the official “City of Decatur Juneteenth Celebration 2021: A Walking Tour of the Historic African American City.”
Decatur walking tour header. Screen capture June 17, 2021.
Decatur walking tour sites. Storymap screen capture, June 16, 2021.
The City’s website included a summary of all the tour sites:
Walking Tour Stops,” published at the visitdecaturga.com site. Screen capture June 17, 2021.
The city’s tour looked a lot like the tour I created for the NCPH.
Decatur Displaced and Erased Walking Tour. Booklet produced for the National Council on Public History, March 2020.
Even my colleagues recognized the City of Decatur’s Juneteenth tour as my work:
Tweet sent June 16, 2021.
I sent the Decatur Juneteenth storymap link to a Decatur resident who is familiar with my work. They replied:
Wow, I hate this. I hadn’t seen that site. That is really ugly, especially the pro-Decatur gloss which has been added to it (in addition of course to taking your work without attribution). It makes me sick.
A public history colleague also observed: “They don’t even link to your posts about this– there’s no credit in any way.”
I emailed City officials and the residents involved in planning the event notifying them that their walking tour violated my intellectual property rights by using the material created in 2020 without my consent, without attribution, and without compensation. The City’s storymap was deleted on June 17, 2021.
ESRI Storymaps screen capture for the URL used by the City of Decatur for its Juneteenth walking tour. Screenshot June 17, 2021. Click link still posted at the visitdecaturga.com website: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/37e58ce8d9f046569c275c66a4732041.
The City of Decatur also modified the tour route on its tourism website:
Screen capture, visitdecaturgeorgia.com, June 18, 2021.
This wasn’t the first time that the City of Decatur has canceled me and I’m sure that it won’t be the last. The episode does underscore, however, many of the observations that I have made about the city and its residents since I first wrote about gentrification, racism, and erasure there nearly a decade ago.
Decatur didn’t get to hold its Juneteenth celebration because of Tropical Storm Claudette. I can’t help but smile at the irony that the weather ultimately ended up canceling Decatur.
Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights Facebook post, June 18, 2021.
visitdecaturgeorgia.com screen capture, June 22, 2021.
© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein
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