Earlier this week I got a Facebook message from a friend who lives in Decatur, Ga.: “More construction in Decatur Oakview Rd.”

I am used to messages like this. They have arrived via email, Twitter, Facebook, and text for the past decade. Many of them come from people like my 60-something Decatur friend: the senders are Black, elderly, and many have been lifelong Decatur residents. They include photos of buildings being demolished and the McMansions that replace them. They also include comments about displacement and racism. For years these folks have tried to get relief from city officials and to get their stories told by the press.

Unlike local bloggers, overworked newspaper reporters, and disinterested broadcast journalists, I listened and I wrote. A lot. I earned the trust of a lot Decatur residents while also angering many others invested in the myth of a liberal and progressive city that only exists in their minds and the city’s flashy advertising campaigns.

The site shown in the message I received is located on Oakview Road, between Second and Third avenues, just inside the Decatur city limits. Until last year, it was one of the Oakhurst neighborhood’s few surviving twentieth century commercial nodes. The one-story buildings occupied by a beauty parlor and grocery store had been community fixtures for decades.

The block where the two buildings were located, and the market itself, had come up in several of the earliest interviews that I did with Decatur residents starting in November 2011. Some folks had told me about their memories of the store and its white owners. Many more recounted stories about the 1980s and 1990s when that stretch of Oakview Road was an open-air drug market.

Constructed in the 1920s, the buildings occupied a prime location along the South Decatur streetcar line that connected downtown Atlanta and downtown Decatur. The stores opened during a building boom in Decatur’s southwest quadrant. Between 1920 and 1950, developers platted new subdivisions and white families rushed to buy fashionable bungalows and other affordable small homes.

And yes, it was all white until the mid-1960s when urban renewal in downtown Decatur and nearby Atlanta coincided with new civil rights laws and Supreme Court decisions breaking down Jim Crow barriers to housing, public accommodations, and education.

Tumlin’s Grocery

South Decatur (officially rebranded Oakhurst in the 1980s) had been a stable middle-class white suburb since the 1890s. The many neighborhoods comprising South Decatur attracted merchants, writers, and white-collar professionals. They lived in the tree-lined streets intersecting Oakview and they shopped in the stores that popped up along the main street.

In the 1920s, two commercial nodes appeared in Southwest Decatur: one at the intersection of Oakview and East Lake roads and the other a few blocks west in the 1500 block of Oakview Road.

At the same time, George W. Tumlin Sr., who had worked at the Atlanta federal penitentiary, saved enough money to buy a home at 334 Second Avenue in Southwest Decatur. After moving to Decatur he served as a justice of the peace before retiring.

George and Nettie Tumlin had a large family: four daughters, two sons, and 10 grandchildren. George Jr., who grew up inside the Penitentiary walls, had worked as an office clerk in an auto dealership before moving to Alabama. In 1923, he married Sally Salter and their engagement made the social pages in at least one Birmingham newspaper. The couple moved to Jasper, Alabama. According to the 1930 census, George Jr. worked as a merchant and Sally was at home with their four-month-old toddler.

In 1931, George Jr. and his young family moved to Decatur and bought a bungalow at 330 Second Ave., next door to George’s parents. George Jr. went into the grocery business at 1529 Oakview Road, a short walk from his Second Ave. home. It seems like they had a good life: close to his parents who could help out with the children and close to work.

In the Spring of 1937, George Jr. began advertising in Atlanta newspapers. He called his new venture the Tumlin Grocery Co. By 1938, he was affiliated with a regional food distributor, QS [Quality Service] Stores.

George Tumlin would have been the owner recalled by a Decatur native who posted a comment in a local blog when a developer’s plans to demolish the buildings were reported in 2017:

Folks, we cannot allow this building to be lost. The building has been on that same spot for over seventy years. I know because I used to walk to the store in the early forties when I was about three years old. It was right around the corner from where I and my family lived. Remodel it, fix it up and continue to use it as a store but, don’t tear down any more historic buildings in Decatur……we’ve already lost most of them.

By 1950, Tumlin’s grocery was doing business as a “Red Dot Store.” The census that year showed that he stilled owned the market and that he had bought the home where his parents had lived and died: George Sr. in 1942 and Nettie the following year, in 1943. Also at that time, Tumlin went to work for the Morrow Realty Company’s Decatur branch. “Tumlin will specialize in the sale of small business properties,” reported the Atlanta Constitution. “He is well known in the Decatur and East Lake sections.”

Tumlin sold the grocery and died in 1975 at age 77, a few years after moving to Athens, Ga. In the 1960s, the store’s owner was another white man named “Big John.” In 1972, he put the business and property up for sale. His name is the one many longtime Decatur residents associate with the property.

Legacy Residents

By the time “Big John” sold the business, Southwest Decatur had gone from all white to majority Black. White business owners had a fraught relationship with the new residents. Mary Whitehead (1930-2018) was one of the first Black homebuyers to move to Southwest Decatur when she bought a home on Second Avenue. “We was living in apartments and I’m working like on two jobs, really, and I was working in a beauty shop,” she told me in December 2011. Her mother found the Second Avenue home and Mary instantly fell in love with its big porch.

She moved in just as many whites were leaving. “When we moved out here, evidently the whites – I can’t say what they had on their minds, but anyway, they moved real fast,” she recalled. “The lady [who] used to live next door at that time, she said, ‘Oh, if I had known we was going to have good neighbors like you all, I would have kept my house. I would have stayed here.’”

The former Tumlin store was a short walk from the Whitehead home. Whitehead’s daughter, who grew up on Second Avenue, vividly recalls patronizing the store. One episode in particular sticks with her:

And there is a store on Oakview Road and Second Avenue, was known as “Mister Gentleman Store” and he was a white man and him and his wife ran the store. And they had been there for many years. I never had any problems with them. As a matter of fact, my mom still has a letter where they sent to her because I found five dollars in the store and I gave it to them. So they wrote a letter saying how honest I was, you know. During that time, it was like, “Gosh, a black child is honest to give it back, you know.” But like I said, we made bad situations out of good things.

The Revanchists

The Whiteheads spoke about a neighborhood in transition. Emily Fitzgerald bought her Second Avenue home in 1988. A white woman with a graduate degree, Fitzgerald like Whitehead was a pioneer of sorts: she moved to Oakhurst in an early wave of gays and lesbians. Fitzgerald became active in community groups and when drug-related crimes began increasing, she used her skills as an organizer and therapist to help her neighbors. “My focus was on just safety. Safety and helping people to see that we were not powerless,” she told me in 2012.

What Fitzgerald remembers the most about the Oakview grocery store was how it contrasted with the Big H grocery down the street and a nearby convenience store. By the time that Fitzgerald moved to Oakhurst, the neighborhood had become a food desert. Unlike the Big H, the Oakview grocery offered friendly faces and fresh food:

The Oakhurst business district consisted of the penny candy lady, had a little like the size of a closet – she had a little store. She was a merchant there. The Hop N Shop, the Big H grocery was owned by, in my memory, it was owned by some Asian people. And the food in the store was overpriced and it was rotten. The meat was often rotten and the vegetables were often rotten. And that’s what people around here who didn’t have transportation had to eat.

There was this— on Oakview, like at the corner of Oakview and Second, there was that same kind of ambience there at that grocery store.

And, Fitzgerald remembered the drugs and drug dealers. In the early 1990s, Decatur began getting grant money and support from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s “Wings of Hope” program. It was a big deal and activists like Fitzgerald sought and received major-league support for their efforts.

The intersection of Second Avenue and Oakview Road was ground zero for the community’s efforts. Fitzgerald got emotional when she described one quiet Saturday night and episode she said was “a turning point “a big turning point in saving the neighborhood”:

One night when there were still no streetlights, it was midnight on a Saturday night and I don’t know where the drug dealers go, but they went there and it was eerily quiet and it was a foggy night. And it was quiet, which was very rare.

And I could hear – all the windows were open because I didn’t have air conditioning at that point. This is when I first moved over here. And I could hear singing and I began to figure out where the singing was coming from and I went to the front bedroom and I realized it was coming from south of me on Second Avenue.

And I heard these men’s voices and I went outside and I looked down the street and I could barely see them because it was foggy and because there were no streetlights. And they marched – there were six of them – and they were marching up Second Avenue and they had a casket on their shoulders. And they were African American men who were in their twenties, thirties, and they stopped in front of the house where the two guys lived who were drug dealers, who were crack dealers, and they put the casket down on the street and they sang something like Amazing Grace.

And they sang some more songs. And then they picked up the casket and then marched on down Second Avenue towards East Lake. And so the next day I asked my African American neighbors if they knew anything about that and they said it was an organization called “Wings of Hope.”

And I don’t know if this is before or after a group of us used to walk down to the corner of Oakview Road and Second Avenue and pray. And we would just stand there and pray because we had tried everything that we knew.

Forgotten and Erased History

By 2016, the former Tumlin grocery store had been stripped bare. When I photographed it in the summer of 2016, the plate glass display window had a “For Rent” sign posted in it.

The following year, a developer approached the City of Decatur with plans to rezone the site, tear down the buildings, and construct a new mixed-use development. Local blogs and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on the regulatory hearings and the project was approved. In 2021, the old market was demolished. Despite its long, colorful, and consequential history, the reporters and bloggers ignored folks like “Crazy Bob,” the comment author who recalled patronizing the store in the 1940s and the legacy residents like my friend who sent me demolition photos in 2021 and the new construction photos earlier this week.

Instead of trying to learn more about the building and the people who worked there, shopped there, and loafed there, writers focused on the hipster pop-up art studio that occupied the former market before its demolition. More to the point, writers focused on a tagger’s modification to the stenciled exterior sign, which originally read “Art Lab” and which was changed to read “Fart Lab.” One enterprising Oakhurst resident capitalized on the ignoble name and began peddling “Fart Lab” swag online.

There’s a lot more of a story attached to the one-story Decatur building demolished last year. It was located in a neighborhood where history is erased daily by displacement, demolition, and racism. George Tumlin’s grocery store deserved a more dignified obituary than the “Fart Lab” articles and social media posts. Its loss may not register among the white hipsters who now dominate Oakhurst (and Decatur). They only recall the brief “Fart Lab” chapter in a storybook that spans a century and some of Oakhurst’s most significant cultural shifts.

NOTE: The names of people still living have been changed or omitted in this post.

UPDATE

On November 10, 2022, after receiving the text about the building’s demolition, I tweeted about local media coverage of the changes happening at the building.

Decatur blogger and decaturish.com proprietor Dan Whisenhunt emailed and called the Fox Chapel, Pa., Police Department. That afternoon, I received a telephone call from a Fox Chapel police officer who informed me of the communications. The officer also told me that Whisenhunt alleged the tweet was a threat to him and his family.

© 2022 D.S. Rotenstein

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