Category Archives: Decatur

Decolonize Decatur

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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.”

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Decatur City Schools

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This summer I am teaching a graduate seminar on ethnography and community engagement for historic preservation. For the the final day of the virtual residency, I will be re-creating the Decatur, Georgia, walking tour that I did for the 2020 National Council on Public History (virtual) conference.

This version will be a little different because our world has changed dramatically since March. The tour focuses on the intersection of racism, municipal planning, and historic preservation. For this iteration I will be using interviews with Decatur residents that I did between 2011 and 2018.

The clips I am using drill down into how the city’s schools have reinforced structural racism, from Jim Crow segregation to efforts to resist integration to racial curriculum tracking. City leaders have weaponized the school system to create an environment that is hostile to Black children and their caretakers.

In the interviews that I did, I collected accounts of real estate speculators threatening grandparents with children in the schools. The city makes it possible for people to file anonymous tips to report children attending the schools who are not living with their parents inside the city limits. People told me about real estate speculators who approached elderly African American homeowners with unsolicited offers to sell their homes. When the homeowners declined the offers, the real estate speculators threatened to report them to the City Schools of Decatur because grandchildren or nephews and nieces were living with them.

Such reports result in removal of the children from the school system and possible fines and criminal charges for the adults.

This brief clip (which isn’t part of the tour) has one woman telling me about the city’s successful effort to purge her granddaughter from the city’s schools.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

Where are the pictures?

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I recently took a group of public history students to the Black history exhibits in the redeveloped Beacon municipal center in Decatur, Georgia. Ever since the space opened in 2015, I have described it in conference papers and articles as “Black history under glass.”

It is a sanitized, flattened version of the city’s Black history that does great violence to the city’s history and the people who made it happen. Much of the single story told in the Beacon exhibits derives from the experiences of one person: a tokenized African American woman who made significant civil rights contributions to the city and who became a controversial figure after serving in city government.

The students who accompanied me on the visit earlier this month have been working with a church congregation that was founded in Decatur in the 1860s. It was the oldest Black church congregation in the city before it was displaced in the 1990s. Though their grant-funded project has been widely reported by multiple Atlanta media outlets, it has received no coverage in Decatur-based media (blogs or city publications).

Antioch A.M.E. Church digital history project screen capture. The website is a rich archive of textual, visual, and oral history primary materials.

Their work, and the stories of the multiple generations of church members with whom they have been working, are some of the notable erasures in the Beacon exhibits. They are erasures first brought to my attention in calls and emails I began receiving after the exhibits opened. Many lifelong Decatur residents who grew up in the razed and erased Beacon community contacted me to tell me that the exhibits didn’t tell the their community’s entire story. They were angry that it privileged the story of a single individual, whose experiences didn’t match their own.

Beacon Community story map. Beacon Municipal Center, November 2019.

In the discussion with the public history students, I asked them what they thought was missing from the exhibits. One woman pointed to a graphic illustration of the erased community (a map with historic photos and text panels) and she asked where all the pictures were. Through her work with the historic Black congregation, she and her colleagues knew that there were photos of sites indicated in the map, yet they weren’t represented.

Detail from the Beacon Community story map. The exhibits were completed after the former Antioch A.M.E. church building was demolished. The map doesn’t include a photo of that building or its pre-urban renewal predecessors and it incorrectly tells visitors that the church “is now located on Atlanta Avenue.”

The City of Decatur boasts that the Beacon exhibits, “Preserve the history of the Beacon community and … honor its spirit.” Hardly. The exhibits are another act of racial violence in a city with a long history of racism and anti-Semitism. If the erasures are so evident to undergraduate history students, I wonder what a public forum comprised of former Beacon residents that fully represents the community’s long and rich past might tell city leaders about its cosmetic effort to erase decades of racism.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

Where did the Decatur survey go?

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Sometime in 2019 the City of Decatur, Georgia, deleted from the municipal website its 2009 citywide historic resources survey and all of the study’s supporting materials: a comprehensive narrative report, maps, and forms for all of the properties surveyed. Visitors to the city’s website can read and download the 1982 Decatur Town Center Plan, a 2004 Greenway Plan, a 2002 MARTA Station Study, city council meeting agendas and summaries, and lots of colorful publications touting everything that makes “Decatur Greater.”

What visitors to the city’s website can no longer read and download is the costly study completed in 2009 that fully erased the city’s Black experience along with every single historic property important to Decatur’s African American community.

It may be that Decatur city officials are embarrassed by the racist survey. I doubt that’s the reason — city officials have vigorously defended it since 2012 when I began writing about the survey’s shortcomings.

February 22, 2012 email from then-Decatur Historic Preservation Planner Regina Brewer to David Rotenstein.

City officials may be embarrassed that the survey failed to meet even the most basic requirements for such surveys established by the Georgia Historic Preservation Division, the state historic preservation office. Though city officials never informed residents and taxpayers, the 2009 citywide historic resources survey couldn’t even be entered into the state’s master survey files because the city’s consultant completed, and the then-historic preservation planner approved, a deficient product.

January 2019 memorandum requesting that the Decatur City Commission approve an application for federal grant funds to complete a new historic resources survey.

Details about the deficient 2009 survey were revealed earlier this year when the city’s new historic preservation planner requested approval to seek federal grant money to fund a new citywide historic resources survey. The Decatur City Commission on January 22, 2019, voted unanimously to submit the grant application.

Buried deep inside the grant application that the City of Decatur submitted to the state, which administers the federal grant program for the National Park Service, is the admission that a new survey is needed to correct the deficiencies in the 2009 study: “The City of Decatur’s previous historic resources survey in 2009 did not use Georgia Historic Resources Survey Forms, so HPD does not have copies of the collected data. At that time, HPD requested that the correct forms be used in order to integrate the information into their inventories. That is the City’s intent with the updated survey.”

City of Decatur’s 2019 Historic Preservation Fund CLG Survey & Planning Grant Application. Copy received from the City of Decatur under Georgia’s Open Records Act.

The City of Decatur didn’t get the $15,000 it requested in its application. According to the same document, city officials expect to spend $55,000 on the new survey.

In September, I wrote to the city’s new historic preservation planner after I received a copy of the grant application. I asked, “Can you tell me if HPD approved the application?”

“They did not,” she replied.

Curious about updates to Decatur’s historic preservation planning documents, I visited the City’s website. Previously, the complete 2009 historic resource survey documents had been posted in the Historic Preservation Commission’s “Historic Decatur” page. I wrote to City Manager Andrea Arnold asking why they had been deleted. I received no response.

City of Decatur website screen capture, “Historic Resources Survey.”

Perhaps some Decatur residents or local journalists might have better luck getting answers from city officials regarding the deletion of the 2009 historic resources survey.

UPDATE:

More than a year after first emailing the Decatur city manager about the survey I tried again. Here is her reply:

Here we are rolling up on three years since the survey disappeared and two years after the city manager wrote that the survey would be restored to the city website and it’s still MIA.

Twitter and the academy: a call for reflection and restraint (updated)

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Decatur, Georgia, gateway and the entrance to the gentrified Oakhurst neighborhood.

Last week a professional historian who lives in a community that I have been researching and writing about since 2011 published some inflammatory, malicious, and demonstrably false tweets. The historian has a substantial social media following: almost 13,000 Twitter followers. Many of them are my colleagues and peers: university faculty, public historians, museum curators, and journalists. These folks unwittingly were pulled into a social media tar pit that has been well documented. Perhaps the best explanation for what I am writing about here may be found in this October 2015 History News Network article.

I no longer use social media to litigate my issues with Decatur and its fragile white residents. This post is intended to mitigate some short-term harm: readers of the historian’s tweets can take to their preferred search engines and use multiple permutations of words that the historian tweeted to discover my identity. Though the historian didn’t name me in her tweets, she effectively provided her readers with an easily navigated route to my identity.

The Decatur historian’s actions last week were understandable considering the gentrified community in which she lives. Her response echoed those of her neighbors years earlier: attorneys, engineers, and journalists who couldn’t reconcile what I was writing about their community with the carefully constructed image of Decatur being a liberal, progressive, and diverse community. Their exploits were outlined in the 2015 History News Network article and they will be more fully analyzed in my book on gentrification, erasure, and race in Decatur. Contrary to what the Decatur historian tweeted last week, there has been only one official legal action stemming from Decatur’s fragile white residents’ defensive and abusive actions to preserve their community’s brand and their own self-images as liberal, progressive, and diverse: I was the plaintiff.

DeKalb County, Georgia, temporary protective order issued on my behalf against an individual that the court found sufficient evidence for the order under Georgia law.

My last word on the matter for now is a recommendation for folks landing here to read Robin DiAngelo’s insightful 2018 book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. If visitors here don’t have time for the book, DiAngelo wrote a concise distillation of the book for The Guardian. If you’re on the run, no problem: NPR has a wonderful interview with DiAngelo that was broadcast in August 2018.

Meanwhile, for about 24 hours last week, thousands of people read the Decatur historian’s tweets; more than a hundred “liked” them and offered replies — definitive, blunt, and threatening — given without understanding the context for the tweets and without interrogating the tweeting author’s motives or the factual basis for them. Those replies included calls for me to be arrested, expelled from professional organizations, blackballed from academic conferences, and fired from my job. Several opined that I had a history of harassing and stalking women students. One implied that I should be assaulted.

This is a distraction from other important work. But, there is something from this distraction that I believe has educational value, especially with regard to how academics use social media. For that reason, I want to share some of the responses to the Decatur historian’s tweets. They will be cited in my future work on Decatur and on the complex issues around race, white privilege, and white fragility.

“If this person is acting this way with colleagues, imagine how he might be treating undergraduate women.” — Sara Norton, public history instructor.

“You need to have all of this on record, so talking to people about it is good. In addition, maybe get “Ring” as your new “doorbell” because it is a camera and can let you see who is there even if you’re not home. Please stay safe!” — Kristen Hillaire Glasgow, PhD candidate in history, UCLA.

“Gross gross gross!!!! I’m so sorry that happened to you. My cousin is an atty in the ATL if you need a firm recommendation” — Maggie Yancey, Independent Alcohol Scholar.

“I’m sorry you’re having to deal with a sentient piece of shit masquerading as a human.” — Dr. Rob Thompson, Historian, Documentary Team, Army University Press, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

“Sorry this is happening to you. He deserves to be professionally blackballed for this kind of behavior.” — Evan Bennett, historian of the American South.

“Definitely talk to a lawyer and local police. A restraining order might inflame him—but it’s something to think about. Also get a home security system with a panic button if you don’t already have one.” — Rebecca Anne Goetz, Associate Prof. of History, NYU.

“Don’t take chances, don’t assume your’re over reacting. Talk to police you trust will take you seriously. Talk to others for advice who have had this experience. Be safe. @ProfMSinha” — Daniel Louis Duncan, Live for 19thc history, writer and musician.

“I am so sorry this nutjob is coming after you. Definitely time to bring in the police.” — Dr. Megan Kate Nelson, Writer. Historian. Working on a book about the Civil War in the Southwest.

“[REDACTED] of course you don’t deserve this. But get him in his place: don’t stop writing, advocating, and everything else you do.” — Debbie Gershenowitz, senior acquisitions editor, Cambridge University Press.

“Holy shit [REDACTED]. I’m so sorry this is happening to you. I’m glad you’re getting the police involved, and coordinating action with his other victims.” — Amy Haines, Lecturer University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

“Dear God! I know I’ve said it before … but, some people just scare the hell out of me! This guy sounds like a sick creep!!!” — Jesse Horne, broadcast journalist, Wisconsin.

“Fuuuuuuuck. That man needs a restraining order. [REDACTED] do you need to move?” — Sarah Neill, master’s student in art history.

“holy shit. What an asshole. What are the police doing about this? If there’s more than one person being stalked, shouldn’t that merit an investigation??” — Victoria Woeste, Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.

“That is craziness–you mean a job interview? Whoa. This is wayyyyy beyond the pale. Yep, I agree with others, time to get serious and report.” — Dr. Anne Whisnant, public historian.

“I would go to police. This is criminal behavior (literally)” — Susan D. Amussen, Professor of History in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced.

“This is awful. I would forward all of this info to his employer, as well as any pertinent law enforcement agencies.” — David Cordell, 8th grade social studies teacher.

“This is dreadful. Definitely go to police and consult professional organization. No one should have to put up with this nonsense.” — Kathryn Tomasek, Professor of Digital Humanities and Digital History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

“This should hold true as well for any university or college he’s affiliated with. Chances are that somebody like this has already harassed students.” — Zeb Larson, PhD student at Ohio State University.

“Report his sorry ass to whatever professional associations he belongs to.” — @Ole_Bonesy.

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The Decatur “F-you” fence

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I spent a few days in Decatur this week following up leads derived from interviews I have done over the past year. One of the things that I wanted to see and photograph was a fence that a historic Black church had erected to block access to its parking lot in Decatur’s gentrifying Oakhurst neighborhood. I learned about the fence in a February 2018 interview that I did with a Decatur native who grew up in the city’s Beacon Community during the second half of the twentieth century.

Thankful Baptist Church parking lot and fence, June 2018.

“Right up there on Mead Road they’ve got a bar and now they’re trying to take over the parking lot on the weekends,” the woman told me in a telephone interview. “I think even when you try to be nice, they take advantage.” Continue reading →

Environmental racism explained in one photograph

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In the early twentieth century, the City of Decatur, Georgia, constructed a municipal trash facility in the heart of the city’s African American neighborhood. The city that long called itself a “City of Homes, Schools, and Churches” could have picked just about any site along its periphery; aerial photographs and historical maps indicate lots of space away from established homes, schools, and churches.

Sanborn fire insurance map portion showing Decatur’s African American neighborhood, c. 1950. The annotations show the trash facility (A); Decatur’s African American school (B); and, the Allen Wilson Terrace apartments (C).

Instead, the facility — which included an incinerator and space for refuse vehicle parking — was built adjacent to the city’s “colored school” and sandwiched into a densely occupied urban neighborhood. The City Manager’s annual report published in 1963 boasted of its facility: “10 collection trucks and 40 employees spend 1280 hours per week in disposing of 360,000 lbs. of garbage and trash weekly for the City of Decatur.” Continue reading →

Decatur loses important LGBTQ history site

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Facebook screen capture, February 27, 2018.

For many Americans, Danny Ingram isn’t a familiar name. But to the military LGBTQ community, Danny is family. The former army sergeant was a leader in the nationwide effort to overturn Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and he lived in Decatur, Georgia’s Oakhurst neighborhood since a 1990s gentrification wave attracted a large number of gays and lesbians to buy homes in the neighborhood. Yesterday, Danny posted on Facebook that his former Fayetteville Road home had been demolished.

Danny’s former home had been built in 1925 and it would have been a comfortable part of any historic district because of its architecture. The 19 years that Danny lived there gave the property its associational significance with LGBTQ history. I first met Danny when I was well into interviews for my book on gentrification in Decatur. In April 2014, I interviewed him in the home that was demolished. Continue reading →

How I lost my White Card

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Nearly six years ago I met with Lyn Menne, Decatur, Georgia’s assistant city manager. We spoke over coffee at Java Monkey, a hipster joint featuring high-end coffee and evening performances, in Decatur’s upscale downtown. I had lived in Decatur for about six months and my wife and I already were considering moving from the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood where we had bought a historic bungalow in July of 2011.

Had I been more aware about race, gentrification, and the role neoliberal cities play in facilitating displacement and the conversion of space for wealthier and oftentimes whiter users, I probably could have had a better response to Menne when she said, “They’re just going to die” after I laid out my concerns about the rampant teardowns in our neighborhood and the social costs of gentrification to some of Decatur’s most vulnerable citizens. To Menne, there were no viable solutions to stem the displacement that her city’s municipal policies promoted.

Instead of citing examples of inclusionary zoning and affordable housing preservation programs in other cities as well as the affordable housing recommendations given to the City of Decatur several years before we moved there, I recall sitting there stunned and at a loss for words. That exchange is forever etched in my mind as an example of how cities and humanity fail.

How things have changed since then.

A pile of rubble is all that remained of Shirley Huff’s home 24 hours after demolition began in October 2011.

My meeting with Menne occurred after I watched a builder demolish the late Shirley Huff’s home and after I began an informal research project on our area’s history as an Urban Homesteading Demonstration Project neighborhood. I had begun mapping and documenting the 113 “dollar homes” that the city sold between 1975 and 1982 and I was interviewing residents about displacement.

In early 2012 I had a very rudimentary and unsophisticated understanding of gentrification and displacement. They were concepts I had encountered in the margins of my work in historic preservation regulatory compliance and as a consultant to a Washington community development corporation funding intermediary. Like many people alive today, gentrification was something I would know if I saw it but I doubt that I could have held my own in an academic debate with a geographer or sociologist or historian who had been working in and around gentrification for years. I also doubt that I could have successfully defended an academic article or thesis on the subject. Continue reading →

The uses and abuses of diversity in Decatur, Georgia

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Earlier this year, the National League of Cities named Decatur, Georgia, a 2017 winner in its City Cultural Diversity Awards program. The membership organization then gave Decatur a platform on its website to describe the municipal program for which the award was given. The June 2017 CitiesSpeak blog article written was by Linda Harris, an employee in the city’s economic development department and one of the Atlanta suburb’s chief spokespersons. It detailed initiatives that the suburban Atlanta city began after a confluence of events spotlighting race-related tensions forced municipal leaders to confront diversity and inclusion. The CitiesSpeak article described Decatur’s “Better Together”

Decatur Square, 2016.

initiative and its objectives to increase community engagement and to introduce more diversity to spaces where civic issues, from affordable housing to police racial profiling, are discussed and decided.

Gentrification is one word missing from the Decatur article. And, perhaps more importantly, the city’s key role in creating an environment that promotes gentrification, displacement, and inequity is conspicuously absent from the CitiesSpeak essay and other city-produced and promoted narratives about the Better Together initiative. Continue reading →