It’s difficult to explain how many accounts of harassment, intimidation, & retaliation that I collected over a decade of research on Decatur, Ga. Here’s one account that I didn’t have to elicit — a resident volunteered it in a public meeting.
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
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
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.”
In 2019 I began teaching a seminar on ethnography and community engagement for historic preservation in Goucher College’s graduate historic preservation program. Goucher’s summer residency program has a tradition: field trips to Baltimore area historic sites and museums. I took my inaugural class to Baltimore’s Otterbein neighborhood. That had been my plan for 2020 and then the pandemic hit. All bets were off: Goucher’s classes moved online to Zoom and my students wouldn’t be traveling to Baltimore from New Mexico, Maine, and elsewhere. The only way I was going to have a field trip was if I did something virtually. Otterbein was my first choice as a “destination.”
Baltimore resident tells Goucher students about her neighborhood’s history, July 2019.
By June I was already reaching out to Baltimore colleagues to help assemble video footage and photos to fill in my Otterbein gaps. I would try to recreate the 2019 field trip in which we walked through the historic district and discussed issues of regulatory control over aesthetics, gentrification, affordable housing, and which histories are privileged in places we recognize as “historic.”
Homesteader Park, Otterbein neighborhood, Baltimore, 2015.
My virtual tour script was taking shape and I was just about to send emails with requests for specific video footage and photos when I got an email from a Decatur, Georgia, resident. He had seen social media posts about a virtual walking tour I had done for the 2020 National Council on Public History’s March conference that had moved online.
Atlanta Daily World urban homesteading ad. June 10, 1979.
After a few email exchanges and Zoom chats, we moved forward with a plan to revive the NCPH virtual tour for my class and for Decatur residents. It was going to be a remote community engagement exercise that brought my graduate students into the same virtual space and Zoom grid as more than 30 Decatur residents interested in learning about the city’s erased Black history sites.
In a way, it was a perfect idea. My interest in in Baltimore’s Otterbein neighborhood originated in my Decatur research. The first Decatur teardown that I documented in October 2011 belonged to an urban homesteader. Urban homesteading was an innovative affordable housing program introduced in the early 1970s and Decatur was one of 21 pilot cities [PDF] for the federal program. Baltimore also was one of the earliest urban homesteading cities.
My article about the Decatur virtual tour appears in History@Work post, “A Virtual Walking Tour in Decatur, Georgia: Linking Race, History, Community.”
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
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
In 1990, a young married couple bought a ranch house in a Decatur, Georgia, neighborhood. I met them 21 years later and they recounted an episode that led them to ask, “What Twilight Zone have we dropped into?”
The story involved one of their new neighbors awakening them the morning after the first night in their new home. He banged on their door at 7:00 a.m. and asked them one disturbing question. In this clip, they tell me about that first day in Decatur.
Note: The couple’s names have been changed and the audio was manipulated to disguise their voices and to remove references to their names and to their new neighbor’s name.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
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
A colleague invited me to Decatur, Georgia, to take her public history class on a test run for the walking tour I designed for the National Council on Public History 2020 annual conference. I began last week’s session in my colleague’s college classroom with an introduction to how I began my research in Decatur. I described documenting more than 130 teardowns over three years, African American families packing their lives onto U-Haul trucks for moves away from the city, and erased Black history.
At the end of the introduction we had a brief discussion with questions from the students, the professor, and a college administrator. One person asked me how Decatur could address is racism problems.
I thought for a moment and replied, “I don’t think it can.”
Classroom, February 7, 2020.
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.