Ann Crichton was elected to the Decatur, Ga., City Commission in 1971. Her colleagues in 1977 selected her as mayor of the municipality that is organized under the “council-mayor” form in which the mayor is a ceremonial position. Individuals are “elected” by their peers to chair city commission meetings and to perform other symbolic functions.

Crichton, an Agnes Scott College graduate, became a nationally recognized expert in municipal government, community development, and affordable housing. After being ousted from office in 1979, Crichton went on to serve as President Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta-based regional director of the Economic Development Administration. After that, Crichton briefly moved to the United Kingdom before returning to Atlanta and founding her own economic development consulting business.

Decatur’s imagineers and brand managers, however, seem to have forgotten Crichton’s historically significant term. In museum text panels and other city-sponsored publications, Elizabeth Wilson is described as the Atlanta suburb’s first mayor.

The error prominently appears in a text panel mounted inside the city’s Beacon Hill Black history museum.

In 2021, the Beacon Hill Black Alliance and its city government partners reproduced the errors in an aborted Juneteenth Black history tour of the city’s erased historic African American community.

Whoever writes Decatur’s history introduced this error more than a decade ago. Since then, it has been reproduced multiple times, including by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Funny how that works: a newspaper can correct its mistakes yet the city of Decatur and its residents continue to reproduce them.

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