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.
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.
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.
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.
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