Atlanta loves to repeat its favorite line, a city too busy to hate. But these places know otherwise.
There are streets in Atlanta where memory lies low, beneath the asphalt, whispering like wind through brick. If you walk slowly enough, you’ll hear it: not history, but instruction. Not nostalgia, but reckoning.
Begin here. Georgia Avenue. Capitol View Avenue. Ormonde Street. This is Summerhill, but it is also Peoplestown. It is also Mechanicsville. They sit together like braided memory, Black, old, and enduring.
In 1865, newly freed people came here, built lives out of what could be salvaged. Summerhill, settled by emancipated Black families. Mechanicsville, home to white railroad workers, grew up beside it. Peoplestown, lined with Victorian houses and electric streetcars, welcomed domestics and immigrants, Black and Jewish, who worked and worshiped side by side.
By the 1940s, shotgun houses filled the blocks, rows and rows of single-family homes with porches and tight kinship. There were corner stores, churches, barbershops, bakeries, movie theaters. Not slums, communities. Working-class, yes. Overlooked, often. But never passive. They had built something. Something Atlanta decided it needed to erase.
In 1957, the city called it urban renewal. But to the people living here, it looked like bulldozers. In the name of progress, Atlanta cleared more than 3,000 housing units, closed 154 businesses, and promised relocation that rarely came. The neighborhoods were shattered. The expressways, I‑20, I‑75, and I‑85, became walls. Then came the final insult: a stadium, built not for the people displaced, but for the white crowds who would drive in and drive out without ever learning the names of the streets they parked along.
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By 1966, Summerhill and its sister neighborhoods had endured enough, but there was still more pain to come. On Sept. 6, a white police officer shot a Black man named Harold Prather near Capitol View and Ormonde. He was unarmed. The response came swiftly. More than a thousand Black residents gathered. Not just for Prather, but for every eviction, every neglected school, every trash pile left festering in a city that forgot them. Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee came. So did Stokely Carmichael. And so did Mayor Ivan Allen, climbing atop a police car as the crowd refusing to be silenced rocked it beneath him.
Tear gas eventually cleared the streets. But no words could.
From that moment, Summerhill was marked, not as a victim but as a threat. Yet the truth is more nuanced.
Now we walk west.
You cross time and terrain to arrive in Dixie Hills, a middle-class Black neighborhood where pain was dressed in patience. In 1950, over 200 homes had been built, but not one had running water. Residents tapped into a park’s water line just to bathe and cook. By the mid-1950s, apartments rose on Verbena Street, followed by a shopping center to match. The Flamingo Grill, the centerpiece, would become the flashpoint.
On June 17, 1967, a young man named Eddie Wilkins stood outside the Grill. He had a beer. He was 21. Security harassed him. A scuffle broke out. Police arrived. Arrests followed: Wilkins, his sister Georgia, and a bystander, Joseph Kendrick. By nightfall, 300 people gathered. Dixie Hills had been asking for streetlights, working sewers, garbage pickup. They received handcuffs instead.
The next day, Stokely Carmichael returned, wearing a Malcolm X T-shirt, speaking outside St. Joseph’s Church. He was arrested again, along with four others.
On June 19, a young man disabling an alarm was shot by police in Dixie Hill. That night, as 250 residents gathered inside the church, SNCC members shouted down city leaders pushing for calm. Outside, the crowd swelled. Riot police arrived. Sounds of shotguns cracked through the summer night air.
On June 20, the city tried to sweep the wounds clean, sending street cleaners, grading land for a playground, making promises. That night, a cherry bomb was thrown. A shot rang out. Willie Ross, an elderly man, was killed sitting on his porch. A 9-year-old boy was wounded, too. Officials blamed a sniper. Community leaders didn’t believe them.
The city passed emergency ordinances, gave itself curfew powers, and promised concessions: Black butchers, Black apartment managers, pest control, fresher vegetables. But when Mayor Allen returned to the Dixie Hills neighborhood a year after the uprising and following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the same burned-out buildings remained. The same poverty. The same park. The same unfulfilled promises.
What connects Summerhill and Dixie Hills is not only geography, it is a pattern. Both neighborhoods were told to be quiet. Told to wait. Told to be patient. Told the system would work if they just behaved.
But as King warned, a riot is the language of the unheard.
Atlanta loves to repeat its favorite line, a city too busy to hate. But these streets know otherwise.
They remember the shotguns, the tear gas, the vacant homes, the families displaced, the voices dismissed. The rhetoric of pride has always cost someone their neighborhood.
So again we walk.
We walk Georgia Avenue, through the memory of Harold Prather. We walk past Turner Field, where houses once stood. We walk on Verbena Street, where promises were broken and rebroken. We stand outside the Flamingo Grill, still echoing with the sound of rage.
And when we stop, we do not call it history. We call it a warning.
Because these neighborhoods were never broken, they were betrayed.
And if you listen closely, the ground still speaks.
So go now. Find their ghosts. And let them walk beside you.
