Tag Archives: Decatur (Ga.)

Atlanta’s all-white newsroom

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Last week, Decaturish, the blog parked at decaturish.com, announced a new newsroom hire: Jim Bass, a recent University of Georgia graduate. He joined founder Dan Whisenhunt and assistant editor Zoe Seiler as the 10-year-old blog’s third full-time staff member. Decaturish takes its name from the suburban city where it was founded, Decatur.

Decatur is the seat of DeKalb County, Georgia, one of five counties that form the historic core of Atlanta’s sprawling metropolitan area. Atlanta itself has long been called a Black Mecca for its substantial Black population and African American institutions, from successful Black business empires to the arts and some of the nation’s most prestigious HBCUs. DeKalb County itself has a significant Black history and Black residents comprise 53% of the county’s current population.

Commemorative marker adjacent to Decatur City Hall. The plaque contains a condensed version of the city’s origin story and its first motto: “A city of homes, schools, and churches.”

Decatur’s city hall is about six miles east of downtown Atlanta’s Georgia state capitol. It’s a city with a tangled racist and exclusionary history that includes a school week designed to keep Jews from living inside the city limits, urban renewal, and aggressive gentrification that decimated a once prominent Black population and all of the city’s affordable housing.

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All the news that’s missing

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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.

A Decatur, Georgia, Recap

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Professional accomplishments directly resulting from my research in and about Decatur, Georgia, 2011-2023. No, it’s not a game.

September 6, 2023: “Decatur Day and the History of Serial Displacement in an Atlanta Suburb.” The Metropole (Urban History Association blog).

April 24, 2023: “Our Missing Middle Housing Didn’t Just Go Missing. It Was Torn Down.” Next City.

August 6, 2022: “Heirs, History, and Land: Recovering and Conserving Black Spaces and Stories.” Featured presentation, Shelton Family Settlement at Possum Trot Family Reunion and Historical Marker Unveiling, Berry College, Rome, Georgia. (Delivered remotely.)

July 2022: Agnes Scott College is awarded a $750,000 Mellon Foundation grant to conduct research, community engagement, and develop curriculum on race and racism in Decatur, Ga. The grant application relied on my research; the institution wrote that if the grant is awarded that the college would seek to hire me as a researcher and adjunct professor. It would have been nice if Agnes Scott College had consulted with me prior to using my name and my credentials in the application. Needless to say, I did not collaborate with Agnes Scott College on its project.

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Public history

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Ultimately, rendering marginalized communities the subjects of your research doesn’t absolve you of your privilege or complicity in an inherently anti-Black, racist, classist, and ableist system. In fact, it exacerbates the problem — GVGK Tang, History@Work, June 2020

Public history’s activism roots go all the way back to W.E.B. duBois. Over the past month

The author leading a walking tour in Decatur, Ga., Feb. 2020.

historians increasingly find ourselves in the thick of anti-racism movements responding to a white supremacist president; racialized police violence; and, the enduring hold that the Lost Cause has over too many white folks in our nation.

I wrote about my transformation into an anti-racism activist in an earlier post. This post goes back seven years to a plea that I made to the Decatur, Georgia, City Commission. The evening of February 4, 2013, I delivered a report that I had commissioned documenting the city’s racist historic resources survey. And, I asked that city leaders take immediate action to address displacement and the marginalization of the city’s Black residents.

 

https://youtu.be/Ejrf105uT1E

My requests went nowhere. The city moved forward with demolishing historic African American sites and no action was taken to stem displacement. In fact, later that year, in October 2013, the city commission actually rejected a motion to enact a moratorium on single-family home demolitions.

That night in February 2013, I was terrified and angry — the emotions show in my shaking hands and voice. Two weeks earlier, a Decatur builder had filed a false report with the police alleging that I had threatened to kill him; that was his best and only way to silence my writing and speaking on racism, etc. in the city. By that time, my wife and I were one year into a sustained campaign by fragile white Decaturites retaliating against my efforts to shine a light on structural racism there. The racism was facilitating the removal of Black bodies from the city and the erasure of Black history.

Though I had worked in public history since 1984, I think I genuinely became a public historian that night in 2013.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

How I became an anti-racism activist

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In 2011, I started down a path towards becoming an anti-racism activist and I began dedicating my professional work to showing how historic preservation is implicated in erasure and the production of racist histories & commemorative landscapes. My work began in Decatur, GA, and Silver Spring, MD.

This video segment is from “Silver Spring: A Sundown Suburb in the Capital’s Gateway,” recorded April 13, 2019. It includes my explanation to a Silver Spring audience for how and why I became an anti-racist.

https://youtu.be/Ox3_gFjW1h8

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

The urban displacement blues

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Look closely and you will see not a damaged and decrepit Mississippi River town, but the anguish and despair of inner-city neighborhoods across the United States. — Steve Goldstein for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 19, 1992.

KingBiscuit-03Helena, Arkansas, in the 1980s was a struggling Mississippi River port town when city leaders embarked on an ambitious economic turnaround using blues music and history as its foundation. I first visited Helena in the early stages of this “revitalization” during the spring of 1988 while working as a folklorist for the State of Arkansas. Results of some of my research there were published in a 1992 Southern Folklore article, “The Helena Blues: Cultural Tourism and African-American Folk Music.”

Ethnomusicology was the basis for my work in Helena and the subsequent article. Concepts like displacement and gentrification weren’t on my radar screen as I turned ethnographic experiences into written accounts. More than 25 years later I look back on Helena’s efforts to jumpstart its economy and the social engineering that went into turning the city away from its industrial past and towards its tourism-based future and I see the forces reshaping cities around the world in play in the Mississippi Delta. Continue reading →

Separate and unequal: Preserving Jim Crow

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Equalization schools were the South’s futile attempt to cling to Jim Crow segregation. They were built throughout Georgia, South Carolina, and other Deep South states as a last ditch effort to forestall court-ordered public school integration. According to Georgia architectural historian Steven Moffson, his state had the greatest number of schools built to preserve the separate but equal doctrine that ultimately was dismantled under the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.

Decatur’s Beacon Elementary and Trinity High schools were among the hundreds of equalization schools built in Georgia after World War II. They were constructed in 1955 and 1956 on the site where the city had maintained its African American school, the Herring Street School, since the early twentieth century. In early 2013, three years after receiving a $10,000 historic preservation grant that should have led to the property’s protection, the City of Decatur began demolishing parts of the two schools to build a new police headquarters and civic plaza. Continue reading →