DeKalb County: Historic African-American Communities

Andrew Wiese’s 2004 Places of Their Own breaks with the traditional suburbanization narrative, which has treated the process as a middle-class, white phenomenon, to examine African-American suburban development in Atlanta from the early 1950s through the early twenty first century. He quotes journalist Joel Garreau and defines the African-American suburban experience as a “large, churchgoing, home-owning, childrearing, back-yard barbecuing, traffic-jam-cursing black middle class remarkable only for the very ordinariness with which its members go about their classically American suburban affairs” (p. 257). During the second half of the twentieth century, thousands of African-Americans chose to live outside the City of Atlanta in neighborhoods southeast of the city, while whites took flight to North Fulton and Cobb Counties on the northern outlying of the city limits. However, I wondered where had African Americans lived in DeKalb Country prior to this wave of suburbanization? Did they develop strong communities at the turn of the twentieth century like that near Atlanta University?

Historically, blacks in DeKalb County had been concentrated in Lynwood Park near Brookhaven or the area called Beacon Hill in Decatur. The fate of these two historically African-American communities captures the prejudice black residents experienced as they sought to overcome residential discrimination. The Beacon Community was the center of Decatur’s African American community until the mid-1960s. Bounded by N. McDonough Street on the east. W. Trinity Place on the north, Water Street on the west and Howard Avenue to the south, the area included a tight-knit residential community, schools and churches in addition to numerous African -American owned businesses. Atlanta Avenue once connected Trinity Place West (formerly Herring Street) and Howard Avenue and was the center of the African American business district. Tyler Funeral Home is the only remaining business. In 1941 a 200-unit public housing development for African-Americans called Allen Wilson Terrace was built in the Beacon Hill area. But by 1964, as part of Decatur’s urban renewal process, the Beacon Hill community was demolished for a new courthouse and high school. These policies left little trace of what Beacon Hill meant for African Americans in DeKalb County. Only three of the original African-American historic sites are still standing, two of which are found on Robin Street in downtown Decatur (Lilly Hill Baptist Church, the former Trinity Presbyterian Church, and the former Trinity High School building on Trinity Avenue).

Lynwood Park, which dated back to the Civil War and consisted mainly of wood and cinderblock homes, saw little new home construction until the 1990s. Now surrounded by encroaching residential developments that range from $300,000 to $750,000, the neighborhood feared for its demise. With the assistance of DeKalb County the neighborhood association developed a HOME-eligible program to construct single-family homes and make them available to lower income, first-time home buyers. This program works to preserve and revitalize the community and expand the supply of affordable housing in DeKalb.

Wiese argues that the long-term impact of discrimination in housing, lending, schools, and services is still visually evident in DeKalb County. As one examines the physical landscape of DeKalb County, it is not hard to surmise the role race and class have played in the development of the county’s southern suburbs. However it is also challenging to link the history of African American suburbanization with the county’s historic black communities prior to the Second World War.

Sources:

http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2006/wiese/1a.htm

http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A16087

Mason Herman, Jr., African-American Life in DeKalb County, 1823-1970 (Arcadia Publishing, 1999).