Invitation only

Posted on June 14, 2015 by David Rotenstein

Invitations were sent out to a private viewing of a home for sale in Decatur, Georgia’s gentrifying Oakhurst neighborhood. Is this a new trend in gentrifying neighborhoods, middle-class millionaires marketing McCraftsman McMansions as though they are located in historically upscale neighborhoods like nearby Druid Hills or the gated communities of the suburban nouveau riche?

Like many of its neighbors, the Greenwood Avenue lot had a modest one-story vernacular home on it:

365 Greenwood Ave. in 2009. Credit: City of Decatur Historic Resources Survey.

And then a developer came along and scraped it away. According to DeKalb County tax records, in 2010 the developer paid $135,000 for the teardown and then sold the new home the following year for $550,000.

After four years, the property is again on the market:

Decatur, Georgia’s monument to white supremacy

Posted on June 1, 2015 by David Rotenstein

In part, it’s a case for historical knowledge: the world of Jim Crow seems increasingly distant and incomprehensibly foreign to blacks and whites born in the wake of the civil rights movement. In part, it’s also an issue of relevance and public policy: the segregated history of the United States is inextricably intertwined with the state of modern race relations, one of the most significant unresolved items on the nation’s political agenda. Few would go as far as the man in St. Louis who suggested that every American community should preserve at least one site associated with segregation in order to remind us that there are two racial universes in the United States and that we are not a single unified nation. Whatever the merits or practicality of the proposal, his larger points will resonate for many, both white and black: the country remains divided by race, and historic preservation has a potential to inspire reform. — Robert Weyeneth, The Architecture of Racial Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Problematical Past (2005).

Between 2013 and 2015, the City of Decatur, Georgia erased the final reminders of its “problematic past.” In what could have been an opportunity to teach about the city’s history — preserving the city’s historic African American schools — Decatur leaders and residents instead chose to build a monument to enduring white supremacy: the Beacon Municipal Center, which the City officially dedicated last month. Continue reading →

U-Hauls and tears: moving day in a gentrifying neighborhood

Posted on May 26, 2015 by David Rotenstein

I can remember when my next-door neighbor, they had been here probably as long as my mother and the last thing, when that U-Haul took off to move them out of here, I couldn’t do nothing but cry. I couldn’t do nothing but cry, it really hurts to see them go knowing that this was their neighborhood. — Oakhurst resident, January 2014.

An Oakhurst family moving out of the neighborhood in October 2011.

A few days after the U-Haul left, the trash bin was delivered just before dawn one morning.

A few days after the U-Haul left, a trash bin was delivered just before dawn one morning. Shortly after that, the house flipper’s contractors began work enlarging the home (photo below). Before moving, the previous owner had repeatedly been contacted by builders to sell the family home. She held out until one made her an irresistible offer.

The house flipper’s contractors began work without permits and were shut down by the City of Decatur. Once construction resumed, work continued well into the nights (after 9 p.m.), beyond what was allowable under City code. Trash was strewn throughout the yard of the house, spilling into neighboring yards. Neighborhood email lists regularly carry complaints about builders who create noise, trash, and traffic nuisances.

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Note: The resident quoted above was describing a location in the Decatur neighborhood near the property illustrated here. U-Hauls, tears, and trash bins are common sights in Oakhurst.

The thrill is gone: B.B. King dies

Posted on May 15, 2015 by David Rotenstein

B.B. King in Atlanta, June 1991. Photo by the author.

Lots of musicians, journalists, ethnomusicologists, and fans will be sharing memories of Riley “B.B.” King (Sept. 16, 1925 – May 14, 2015). My favorite memory that best captures King — for me — come from the musician’s 1951 New York City debut.

I wasn’t there but I did get to speak with King and someone else who was.

Robert “H-Bomb” Ferguson (1929-2006) was a boogie-woogie pianist when he met King in backstage at the Apollo Theatre Harlem. “I came out in a gray suit. He came out in a purple suit, man. This cat came on stage with a purple suit, red shirt, and green tie,” Ferguson told me in a 1990 interview.

King told Ferguson that the promoters suggested that he dress “flashy.”

“I said, man you look like a clown. Man, you look like Ringling Brothers,” Ferguson recalled. “I said, ‘Man, if we going to work together, I don’t want nobody to think I’m like you.”

According to Ferguson, King took his advice and bought a gray suit to wear on stage.

The following year I interviewed King in an Atlanta, Ga., hotel room. He remembered Ferguson and the encounter. “No, [it was] a red suit with a red tie with red shoes. Red
and black sock and black shoes,” King said. “Yeah, that’s true, they just talked about me so much, talked about me so bad that I went and changed it.”

King was a sublime entertainer — a true professional and entrepreneur. In 1991 I asked him which hat he wore most comfortably: “All I do is play Lucille,” King said with a smile, pointing toward his trademark Gibson guitar.

Thank you B, for everything.

Gentrification stories: two Decatur women

Posted on March 31, 2015 by David Rotenstein

Two recent articles document the human side of teardowns in Decatur, Georgia’s Oakhurst neighborhood. The articles are about two very different women who experienced gentrification and displacement in Decatur.

The first article, Fragile History in a Gentrifying Neighborhood (National Council on Public History’s History@Work) is about playwright Valetta Anderson, her 2008 play Hallelujah Street Blues, and the politics of public memory.

The second article, Doing Public History: This Is What Success Can Look Like (History News Network), is about a graduate student who found a creative way to resist the alienation she felt among a growing number of McMansion-dwelling families.

The Race Card

Posted on March 3, 2015 by David Rotenstein

Last week NPR’s The Race Card Project featured my submission on gentrification in Decatur, Georgia. The post was a surprise since I submitted the entry a year or so ago …

Click the image to go to the full Race Card Project entry.

"When will the next one go" – 6-words from David Rotenstein abt gentrification in Atlanta: http://t.co/d7TY0aiWFJ pic.twitter.com/2vq7XZbiyZ

— Michele Norris (@michele_norris) February 27, 2015

When civil rights history becomes a civil rights issue

Posted on February 24, 2015 by David Rotenstein

History News Network has published my article, When a City Turns White, What Happens to its Black History?

Anti-historic district sign from 2007. Photo by author, August 2011. Sign still in place, Sept. 2012.

Anti-historic district sign in Decatur’s gentrifying Oakhurst neighborhood. Photo by author, August 2011. The sign remained in place through 2013.

The HNN article is the first of several on history and historic preservation in Decatur that will be published over the next year. My book on structural racism, gentrification and housing history in Decatur will cover all of these issues.

The HNN article doesn’t explicitly state it, but I believe the problems laid out in the article are not a history problem; they are a civil rights problem. Gentrification and demographic inversion are rapidly diminishing Decatur’s African American population. Decisions by Decatur’s elected and appointed officials offer irrefutable evidence that their city’s community and economic policies embrace gentrification and demographic inversion as municipal growth strategies.

The erasure of black history and culture from the contemporary landscape and the historical record is as much of a civil rights issue as the city’s police racial profiling. As I have told folks in presentations and conversations about Decatur, erasing Decatur’s African Americans and their history is little more than an invisible form of ethnic cleansing that is related to the mass incarceration of African Americans and the substantial prison economy that has developed to profit from it. It is, in effect, another example what author Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow.”

Raising bridges, raising Hell

Posted on February 12, 2015 by David Rotenstein

Ninth Street Bridge, Spanning Allegheny River at Ninth Street, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, PA. HAER photo by Jete Lowe.

Ninth Street Bridge, Spanning Allegheny River at Ninth Street, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, PA. HAER photo by Jet Lowe.

In 1897, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fired the first shot in a war with Pittsburgh, Pa., bridge owners, industrialists, and the local government. Industrialists like H.C. Frick and riverboat interests told the federal agency that Pittsburgh’s bridges were too low and that they obstructed navigation.

Two years later, acting on information provided by the Corps of Engineers, Congress passed a law authorizing the Secretary of War “to notify the owners of bridges and other structures” that their structures were obstructing navigation. The new law also gave the federal government the power to force bridge owners to make corrections at their own expense. Continue reading →

Black History Month 2015: African American heritage in the city of homes, schools, and churches

Posted on February 2, 2015 by David Rotenstein

The historical, cultural and aesthetic heritage of the city is among the city’s most valued and important assets, and the preservation of this heritage is essential to the promotion of the health, prosperity and general welfare of the people. — “Historical Preservation,” Decatur Municipal Code, § 58-1.

Much as Jim Crow racism served as the glue for defending a brutal and overt system of racial oppression in the pre–civil rights era, color-blind racism serves today as the ideological armor for a covert and institutionalized system in the post– civil rights era. — Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (4th ed., 2013).

The Decatur Focus, Jan.-Feb. 2004. Original posted on the City of Decatur website.

Color-blind racism is a tough nut to crack. Americans in recent months have confronted some uneasy truths about how race influences the way we see the world around us. It is easier to see and perhaps explain when it’s police racial profiling or some other symptom of structural racism that has immediate and almost always deadly consequences. Racism is less visible and harder to understand when it involves a city’s approach to preserving and communicating its history. And yet, a community’s public history conveys key messages about its values and identity.

Over the past 25 years, Decatur, Ga., has slowly and almost imperceptibly worked its way into a situation that appears to reflect racial bias and duplicity in the ways history is conveyed and preserved. In the 1980s, city history documents were as diverse as Decatur’s population: the city’s black history was commingled with its white history. It was integrated. A generation later, official history and historic preservation documents present Decatur’s history in segregated narratives: one set of documents and sources for white history and another for African American history.

No matter how many image consultants Decatur hires or self-nominated accolades it wins, the city cannot break from its long history of ethnic exclusion. Each February Decatur’s soul is exposed as various municipal organizations observe Black History Month. They hold public programs and and publish articles celebrating how well Decatur observes African American history.

But how well does Decatur do when it comes to preserving African American history?

City officials have all but erased African Americans from Decatur’s official histories and from the landscape. Whether it’s the all-white Decatur history page on Decatur’s official website, the all-white historic resources survey for which the city paid $35,000 in 2009, or the all-white histories published in the city’s strategic plans, there is compelling evidence that Decatur doesn’t much care for black history. And, there is ample proof that Decatur’s citizens have failed to hold their elected and appointed officials accountable for slowly and surely editing the city’s black residents from the historical record. Continue reading →

Public archaeology, public history, and race

Posted on January 31, 2015 by David Rotenstein

A lot has changed in public history and archaeology since 1992. And, a lot hasn’t. In 1992, there were very few African American archaeologists. Within that class, even fewer of them were historical archaeologists specializing in African American material culture.

Former slave cabins, Rappahannock County, Va.

The early 1990s were a critical time in cultural resource management/public history/historic preservation. Congress had just passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the world watched as archaeologists excavated the graves where more than 400 Africans were buried in downtown Manhattan. The archaeology was being done in advance of federal building construction and the site is now the African Burial Ground National Monument. At the time, debate swirled about what would become of the site and the people buried there.

Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, not only are there more African American historical archaeologists but there are more Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians specializing in the the field and turning their professional expertise inwards on their own pasts.

Continue reading →

History Sidebar

Writings on history and the production of history

Invitation only

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Decatur, Georgia’s monument to white supremacy

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U-Hauls and tears: moving day in a gentrifying neighborhood

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The thrill is gone: B.B. King dies

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Gentrification stories: two Decatur women

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The Race Card

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When civil rights history becomes a civil rights issue

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Raising bridges, raising Hell

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Black History Month 2015: African American heritage in the city of homes, schools, and churches

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Public archaeology, public history, and race

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