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.
Then-Decatur Mayor Ann Crichton and then-Baltimore Mayor Walter Orlinsky representing the National League of Cities appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, Feb. 25, 1977.
How can a self-styled publisher/editor/reporter have “One Of The Oldest Women In The World” living in his community of only 20,000 people and not know it?
Or, how did the Washington Post and suburban news outlets miss what the residents in a historically Black community were telling them for years about an old bridge?
I am looking for sources who can speak to the role journalism plays in gentrification and erasure. Have a story? Let’s talk.
Yesterday’s Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission discussion of the National Register of Historic Places nomination of the William A. “Woogie” and Ada Harris House was billed as an opportunity for public comment.
Pittsburgh Historic Review Commission Feb. 1, 2023, agenda. Note the reason for including the “Woogie Harris House”: “for public comment.”
With no public notice (beyond listing on the HRC agenda posted on the city’s website) and no notification by the city’s historic preservation community, community groups, and other stakeholders, the 10-minute discussion was a master class in public participation minus the public and minus participation.
Ever wonder what the smallest unit a 7-story concrete cold warehouse can be reduced to? Crumbs, apparently. Crews have gone from carting away boulder-sized concrete debris from the former Federal Cold Storage Co. site to running it through a milling machine and creating massive mounds of historic building crumbs. It looks like they’re reaching the end of the demolition phase. Demolition began in early November 2021 ….
Former Federal Cold Storage Co. building demolition, Pittsburgh, Pa., January 6, 2023.
Former Federal Cold Storage Co. building demolition, Pittsburgh, Pa., January 6, 2023.
Former Federal Cold Storage Co. building demolition, Pittsburgh, Pa., January 6, 2023.
For a complete rundown on this spectacular demolition operation and the building’s history, check out this November 2022 virtual program hosted by the Society for Industrial Archeology:
The late playwright August Wilson had some pointed opinions about the statue of St. Benedict the Moor mounted atop a church in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District. In 1968, a crane hoisted the 18-foot statue onto the church located at the gateway to the Hill District at an intersection long known as “Freedom Corner.”
Wilson told interviewer Dinah Livingston in 1987:
… all the white people are gone, so it’s all Black. And they name the church Old Holy Trinity St. Bridget St. Benedict the Moor. After much discussion about the matter, they decided to just name it St. Benedict the Moor. And they put up this stature of St. Benedict. The church sits on the dividing line between the downtown and the Hill Districtāand they had the statue with its back turned to the Blacks and its arms opened to the downtown. Every single person in the neighborhood … noticed that and felt insulted that we got a Black saint and he’s turned his back on us and opened his arms up to the white folks downtown.
Livingston, Dinah. āCool August: Mr. Wilsonās Red Hot Blues.ā In Conversations with August Wilson, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006, p. 46
St. Benedict the Moor statue as seen from Centre Avenue and Roberts Street in the Hill District.
St. Benedict the Moor statue facing towards downtown Pittsburgh.
In the summer of 2011, I watched as multiple residents of Decatur, Ga., duked it out over the city’s spatial boundaries in cyberspace. The exchanges spurred me to explore the city’s media ecosystem and how its residents and government officials create and reinforce Decatur’s identity online in the news and in social media. The city’s privileged white residents displayed considerable angst when reporters lumped the great expanse of unincorporated DeKalb County, which shares Zip Codes with the incorporated city of Decatur, into a singular monolithic “Decatur.” One now-defunct account admonished a prolific Decatur tweeter by writing, “[Decatur] is much more than 4 lily white blocks.”
I mothballed the posts that I wrote about Decatur’s online identity when I pulled the plug on the short-lived local news site that I created. As I write about the ways Decatur residents weaponize cyberspace and engage in online redlining, I am revisiting a lot of this material from 2011.
The 2011 posts included video clips from interviews done with municipal officials and residents with big online footprints. Here are a couple of the videos originally published at Dateline:Decatur in the summer of 2011. In them, a resident describes the physical and virtual Decaturs.
I can remember seeing this book, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir, on bookstore shelves while living in Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s. For whatever reason I never bought it or read it. That all changed a few months ago after I began researching a “forgotten” Pittsburgh Negro Leagues ballpark and the people involved in its development, etc. It turns out that Louis Bellinger (1891-1946), the only licensed and practicing Black architect in Pittsburgh between 1919 and his death in 1946, designed and built the stadium in 1920. And, he built Greenlee Field a dozen years later. This book is a memoir of the extended Bellinger family and their lives in South Carolina. Louis left Charleston in the teens and ended up in Pittsburgh in 1919. His father and brothers joined him by 1926. But it’s not just a window into the architect’s life. It also offers a glimpse into the life of Walter Bellinger (1901-1965), Louis’s younger brother.
Yesterday, we said goodbye to our friend Lillian Cooper Wiggins. The memorial was held at Arlington National Cemetery and the hall was filled to capacity with family and friends. I was honored and humbled to be among the many people Lil invited into her life and to be there to help celebrate that life.
Lil’s daughter asked me to draw on my many interviews with her mom to help write the obituaries published in The Washington Post and The Washington Informer. My words were unmistakable in the beautiful program Karen compiled to celebrate her mom’s life. I was fortunate to have so many of Lil’s own words to share in my tribute to her. Words like these: “My principle was to be the best I could to write as truthful as I could.” Good advice for a historian and writer.
Lil was a force of nature and one of the best people I have had the honor to know and befriend. She had a front row seat to history as Washington transformed from a Jim Crow Southern town into an iconic Chocolate City. As she transformed herself from a midwestern transplant into a centerpiece of Washington’s social, political, and economic life, Lil moved from that front seat onto center stage. Lil went from writing history’s first draft as an influential journalist to becoming part of history because of her writing and so much more.
“From the Desk of Lil” was the column that Lillian Cooper Wiggins wrote for the Washington Afro-American newspaper.
Lillian Cooper Wiggins died October 26 at age 92. She was my friend and the inspiration for much of the work that I have done since 2011 when I began writing about gentrification and racism in Decatur, Ga. I’m a historian and I first met Lillian in the pages of a history book of sorts, Dream City, the landmark 1994 work by Washington, D.C., journalists Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood. It’s a deep dive into the politics and culture of late-twentieth-century Washington wrapped around the story of Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry.
Dream City is required reading for anyone working and living in Washington. I first picked it up in 2007 while working as a consultant to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). I had been hired to do documentary research and dozens of oral history interviews to support author Tony Proscio in writing his book documenting the history of the DC LISC office.
Lillian Cooper Wiggins aboard Air Force 2 while covering Hubert Humphrey’s trip to Africa. Photo courtesy of Lillian Cooper Wiggins.
Jaffe and Sherwood introduced readers in Washington and beyond to Lillian’s best known contribution to Washington history. In the 1970s, she began writing about what has become widely known as “The Plan.” Jaffe later wrote, “We can thank Lillian Wiggins for first articulating this particular conspiracy theory [as a] columnist for the Washington Afro-American.” Jaffe got some things wrong in that 2010 Washington Examiner article, but the gist of his observation is correct: Lillian did expose many generations of journalists, historians, and sociologists to “The Plan.”
