Category Archives: Decatur

Displaced But Not Erased: A Documentary about Black History in Decatur, Georgia

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Piedmont University film student Jarrett Ray produced a documentary film about his family’s hometown: Decatur, Georgia. Jarrett reached out to me to let me know about the film. I asked him about it and here’s what he wrote:

For my film capstone, I decided to do a documentary on the history of the Beacon community in Decatur. The inspiration came from my father, who is also from the community, but growing up, he never shared in depth details on where he was from.

The documentary is posted on YouTube.

The film’s title is a nod to the 2020 walking tour that I designed for the National Council on Public History:

So Long John Hamilton

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Our 10-year-old basset hound decided that we were getting up this morning at a little before five. I opened Facebook on my phone while moving between the bedroom and giving our 17-year-old cat her morning medicine. The first post that I saw was one from Hannah, a woman we met 10 years ago while we were living in Georgia. Back then, she had recently lost another dog and had come to one of my programs on gentrification in the city where she lived to look for answers about why her neighbors acted the way they did.

Hannah’s post referred to her dog John Hamilton in the past tense.

Our pets are our family and sometimes our friends’ pets become important, too. I cried this morning when I learned that the dog Hannah adopted a decade ago had died. I know that it won’t be nearly as much as how Hannah will miss John Hamilton, but I will miss her posts about him and her photos of him accompanying her on her many adventures.

Hannah is one of the best things that happened to us in the aftermath of moving to Decatur, Ga. She is one of the few good people in a city of more than 20 thousand. It’s tempting to think that most people are “good” everywhere, but there are some places on this planet where a majority of the people are bad because of their actions or their inaction: silence in the midst of evil is complicity and betrayal. Decatur is such a place filled with bad people, brightened in spots by people like Hannah.

At the program Hannah attended in March 2014, she recounted the recent loss of her dog Heidi. Hannah told me in an interview the following week:

People haven’t noticed that Heidi died. Like why doesn’t anybody ask about my dog? When the two gay guys walk with their three dogs and somebody’s missing, I ask. Uh oh, where’s the other one?

Nothing.

Then a couple of times I’ve noticed that like – now I’m a aware of it and so I say something extra nice and they’re surprised.

Hit by the loss of her dog and the sense of disconnection from her neighbors, Hannah embarked on a mission to create connections, community.

I decided that I was just going to kill them with kindness and say “Hi.” Usually I don’t like the “How are you?” I say, “Hey there.” They’ll either say nothing or “How are you?”

And then I decided that I know and I feel guilty about neighbors that are very close that I have not met and so I don’t bake cookies anymore because I’m a vegan so I’ve made my own homemade deodorants, a lavender scent and tangerine scent, to pass out to those neighbors. And I have a little recipe card with my name and my phone number – not my email – and the ingredients of the deodorant and I’m introducing myself to people. And I get super nervous but I still do it. It’s really fun, though.

She joked about what she should call her project: “It’s really just meet the neighbors but maybe the, ‘Hi, hey there club.’ It’s just me in it.”

Hannah now lives thousands of miles away from Decatur and the city’s social pathologies. I wrote about how we met and her experiences for the History News Network in a 2015 article titled, “Doing Public History: This Is What Success Can Look Like.” Back then, I had to use a pseudonym to protect her from retaliation by her neighbors, the bad people, and in the article I called her “Susan.”

In a way, our pets sparked a friendship. Had it not been for Heidi, I never would have met John Hamilton in Hannah’s small apartment and I never would have met Hannah and learned her touching story.

I hope that John Hamilton was greeted at the Rainbow Bridge by our own Hannah (1998-2012), Emily, Zeke, Ziggy, Emerson, Rufus, Clyde, and Flagler.

Decatur Day 2023

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The email that I received 11 days before this year’s annual reunion of Black residents in Decatur, Ga. was troubling: “I just wanted to let you know that the City is trying to get rid of Decatur Day.” I have gotten many similar emails, texts, and phone calls since 2011 when I began documenting gentrification, racism, and erasure in the Atlanta suburb.

Past Decatur Day photo courtesy of a resident who prefers to remain anonymous.

I replied to the email asking for additional information. I also reached out to earlier collaborators in my work, current and former Black Decaturites that I have interviewed. They, in turn, connected me with others who had deep attachments to Decatur Day. Their belief was crystal clear. “People in the neighborhood saying the whites don’t want blacks at the park,” one told me.

The park that my collaborator mentioned is Decatur’s McKoy Park. It is located in the city’s Oakhurst neighborhood, the site of Decatur’s latest displacement phase — one of many stretching back more than a century.

I did multiple telephone interviews in the four days after receiving the initial email. Decatur Day participants sent me photos from past years. The digital editors for the Urban History Association agreed to consider an article on serial displacement, Decatur Day, and contemporary public policy. I completed a 3,500-word draft in two days. One day after submitting it, I received an email from the editors: “Looking forward to running the piece.”

The article, “Decatur Day and the History of Serial Displacement in an Atlanta Suburb,” is now out in The Metropole.

An amusing postscript to the reporting that I did for the UHA article appeared yesterday in a heavily illustrated puff piece published in the Decaturish.com blog. Two people from the blog’s staff attended the Sept. 2 event.

The article’s featured photo shows a man studying a poster mounted on an easel. The poster reads, “Displaced But Not Erased.” It includes three images: two historic newspaper clippings and a photo of a street sign juxtaposed against the Decatur High School football stadium wall.

Decaturish.com screen capture, September 6, 2023.

All of the images originated from my 2020 National Council on Public History virtual walking tour of Decatur’s former ghetto, the Beacon Community: Displaced and Erased: Decatur Walking Tour. Even the language that organizers used in the poster to resist Decatur’s tendencies to erase Black people and Black history derived from the 2020 tour.

Zoe Seiler, who wrote the article, also tweeted a different photo showing the poster. The content in the tweet is more legible than the photo published in the blog, especially the street sign photo.

Zoe Seiler tweet screen capture, Sept. 3, 2023. The photo in the upper right frame shows the Decatur Day poster, “Displaced but not Erased.”
Photo tweeted by Zoe Seiler, Sept. 3, 2023. https://twitter.com/zoemseiler/status/1698400495721669007/photo/2.

I photographed the Robin Street sign on June 11, 2018. The framing was intentional: to tell the story of how Decatur city officials used the high school stadium wall to prevent residents in the adjacent Allen Wilson Terrace apartments from watching the football games. But that context seems to be missing from the story published in the blog.

Robin Street sign and Decatur High School football stadium, June 11, 2018. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.
Displaced and Erased: Decatur Walking Tour screenshot.

I am honored that my work continues to influence people in Decatur. The local blog’s coverage of the event reinforces my assertions that the city and its white residents silence, erase, and whitewash history and current events.

© 2023 D.S. Rotenstein

A landfill is no place for “missing middle housing”

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In 2003, Decatur, Ga., playwright Valetta Anderson, her partner Cotis Weaver, and several neighbors sued the City of Decatur to prevent the redevelopment of an apartment building into high-end townhomes. The lawsuit and conversation it started could have been a turning point for Decatur to preserve affordable housing and diversity. Instead, the city went in a different direction.

Now, 20 years later, the home Anderson and Weaver lived in, along with hundreds of other affordable single- and multi-family homes have been demolished and sent to landfills. Earlier this year, the City of Decatur was forced to confront more than 20 years of policy missteps by amending its zoning ordinance to allow for so-called “missing middle housing.” The problem is, the city had lots of missing middle housing (and diversity).

Continue reading →

Maxwell Street, Decatur, Ga.

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I have an assignment to write an article on affordable housing in Decatur, Ga. It’s been a while since I surfed through Zillow to see what things are selling for in the city’s Oakhurst neighborhood. I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw this map.

I can recall that in 2014, Oakhurst’s first million-dollar house went on the market. I can’t imagine a house on Maxwell Street selling for 2.75 million or another one a block away from where we once lived selling for 1.28 million.

For a taste of what Oakhurst’s Maxwell Street looked like a little over a decade ago, here’s a video I cobbled together documenting the transformation of one lot, one of the first teardown-mansionization conversions. Many of the houses pictured in the driving scene at the end are now gone. So, too, are the people who once lived in them.

I made the Maxwell Street video two years before a different builder transformed another one of the lots into a spectacle by tearing down a small home built in the 1940s and building what he dubbed a “1,000 Year House.” The builder live-tweeted and blogged about the project, from start to finish. The real farce was how city officials and others bought into the hype that the new brick manor was somehow affordable and sustainable.

The “1,000 Year House” site. 2009 photo is from the Decatur citywide historic resources survey.

There are many more examples over on the Ruined Decatur site.

©2023 D.S. Rotenstein

Missing Middle Housing

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I found Decatur, Ga.’s “missing middle” housing. It turns out that it wasn’t missing after all. Most of it — affordable apartments, duplexes, etc. — ended up in Atlanta area landfills. A snapshot from 2011-2014 appears in the Ruined Decatur blog.

Chateau Daisy apartments, Oakview Road, Decatur, Ga., 2014-2015.
Zillow screen capture, Feb. 7, 2023.

Eulogy [Updated]

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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.

Oakhurst Grocery (1529 Oakview Road) and “Purple Building” (1531 Oakview Road), May 2012.
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The Whitewash

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In the spring of 2021, a group of Decatur, Ga., residents approached local institutions with a request for information about the history of Juneteenth in the city. They wrote to the DeKalb History Center and to city officials, including assistant city manager Linda Harris.

Harris replied to an initial query by directing the group to the City’s “Historic Decatur” web page and to a page dedicated to the history of Decatur’s erased Beacon community. It’s curious that Harris would direct someone asking about Black history in Decatur to the “Historic Decatur” page because the information there only discusses white history and Black history is completely absent. In fact, the page is such a clearcut example of whitewashed history that I use in in my lectures, one as recently as August 6, 2022.

Slide used in Black history presentation delivered at Berry College, Rome, Ga., Aug. 6, 2022.
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Canceled by Decatur

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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. Continue reading →

Decatur’s Genocide Cannon

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In 1906, the United Daughters of the Confederacy donated a cannon to DeKalb County, Georgia. According to the story attached to the cannon, it had been used in an 1836 campaign against Native Americans. Two years later, the UDC added to the collection in Decatur’s courthouse square by donating a Confederate monument. Activists succeeded in getting the monument removed in 2020 and they set their sights on getting rid of the cannon dedicated to commemorating the “Indian War of 1836.” But the cannon’s story goes much deeper than the displacement and murder of indigenous people in 1836. One question the Decatur activists don’t appear to have asked is why the UDC sought to commemorate a war that took place 25 years before the Civil War.

Cannon in Decatur courthouse square, June, 2021.

The so-called “Indian War of 1836” was a military campaign waged by the United States against the Muskogee (Creek) people who had lived in Georgia for more than a thousand years. It was authorized under the 1830 “Indian Removal Act.” Decatur’s activists got that part of the history right. What they missed is the 1836 Georgia military action’s connections to another campaign of displacement and murder happening at the same time: the Second Seminole War.

Fought in Florida’s swamps and prairies between 1835 and 1842, the Second Seminole War isn’t part of most history curricula. I grew up in coastal Florida among the war’s traces: the ruins of sugar plantations destroyed in the fighting and place names commemorating the Native Americans and United States soldiers who died in the battles. My first exposure to historical archaeology occurred in these places and we were taught a version of the Second Seminole War in the schools. It was unavoidable: one of the schools I attended in Daytona Beach was named Osceola Elementary School. Osceola (1804-1838) was a Seminole leader captured and imprisoned during the war. More about him later.

Daytona Beach is located in Volusia County. An east-west transect cutting through the county would begin at the Atlantic Ocean on the “World’s Most Famous Beach” and continue inland across the heart of the county’s tourism landscape into the pinewoods and swamps of Volusia’s rural interior. In 1836, there were no speedways and tourists. The economy then depended on farms, ranches, and agricultural processing facilities worked by enslaved Africans.

Thomas Sidney Jesup. Source: Wikipedia.

The link between Volusia County in 1836 and the “genocide cannon” in 2021 isn’t immediately evident. Unless you’ve heard of General Thomas Jesup (1788-1860). Jesup was Quartermaster General of the United States Army in the spring of 1836 when President Andrew Jackson sent him to command the federal response to Georgia and Alabama’s request for military support.  That short-lived action became known as the “Creek War of 1836” or the “Second Creek War.”

Instead of returning to Washington and his duties as Quartermaster General, Jesup went south to Florida to take command of U.S. troops in what became known as the Second Seminole War. He had developed a reputation as a ruthless commander, using tactics that some of his brutal attacks on Native American towns. He used those skills well in Florida, where he and his troops waged a merciless campaign.

One of Jesup’s most infamous exploits in Florida was deceiving Seminole leader Osceola into believing that the general wanted to begin truce talks. Osceola approached Jesup’s troops under a white flag and was immediately captured. Imprisoned at Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, Osceola died in 1838.

Jesup’s exploits, first in Georgia and then Florida, are what bring us back to the Decatur cannon. Strategically and policy-wise, the campaign against the Creeks/Muskogee in Georgia and the Seminoles in Florida, were indistinguishable. Though on the surface, it’s easy to connect the displacements and slaughter of Native Americans to so-called “Indian removal,” there’s a deeper history that might explain the UDC’s zeal to celebrate the 1836 events. 

Not long after arriving in Florida, Jesup found himself in Volusia County. There, on December 9, 1836, Jesup wrote to U.S. Secretary of War Benjamin F. Butler acknowledging his arrival and offering his initial take on the “war.” Historians credit this document as the most cogent analysis for why Andrew Jackson, who commanded U.S. troops in the First Seminole War (1817-1818), went to war again in 1835. Jesup wrote,

This, you may be assured, is a negro, not an Indian war; and if it be not speedily put down, the South will feel the effects of it on their slave population before the end of the next season.

“This …. is a negro, not an Indian war.” The Southeastern campaigns against indigenous peoples were as much about protecting the enslavers’ “property” as stealing Native American land. Enslaved Africans in Georgia and North Florida found refuge among some of the Native Americans we call Creeks/Muskogee and Seminole. This refuge included the opportunity to take up arms against the whites who had enslaved them.

Atlanta Constitution, April 25, 1906.

So yes, the 1906 reports that the Agnes Lee UDC chapter had acquired and placed the cannon to commemorate the actions of Col. James Calhoun, a military commander in 1836 and who later became Atlanta’s mayor during the Civil War. They also may be seen as celebrating the violent response to the resistance mounted by enslaved Africans fighting side-by-side with Native Americans. 

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein