Shortly after a mural commemorating the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre was unveiled in South Atlanta last month, residents voiced concerns about the lack of community input on the mural’s violent imagery.
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre was a four-day wave of racial terror when white mobs attacked Black communities throughout Atlanta, leaving at least 25 Black men, women, and children dead, hundreds injured or missing, and businesses destroyed.
Now, a month later, neighbors and community groups are working together to revise the mural’s design, which was commissioned by the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (NCCHR), with additional art.
The current mural, created by local artist Fabian Williams, commemorates the event with an image of a white person and a Black person shaking hands and Black citizens reconstructing a home, but at the center of the piece is an angry white mob. A white man is seen choking a Black man, an image based on a 1906 cover from the French publication Le Petit Journal.
This week, residents began voting in a Facebook group between three different images that could be added to the mural to cover the choking scene.
The poll, for South Atlanta residents, was created by the South Atlanta Civic League.
“Hey neighbors! We’ve got an important update and a little bit of a fun decision to make together. As many of you know, there’s been a lot of conversation around the new mural going up in our neighborhood. We’ve taken your feedback to heart and now have three updated design versions to consider,” the organization wrote in their Facebook post.
“We’d love for everyone to jump into the poll we’re posting and let us know which version of the mural you feel best represents our community and our shared vision. Your voice genuinely matters here and this is a chance for all of us to shape a piece of your neighborhood’s visual identity together.”
The proposed designs include a depiction of the front page of the Atlanta Journal newspaper from the time of the massacre and images of the gubernatorial candidates that year — Hoke Smith and Clark Howell — all of which played a part in causing the massacre.
Ronald Bastien, a program manager at NCCHR, said the organization is taking a back seat and letting community members decide how the mural should be updated.
“There’s a process with our community leaders and they’re taking the helm on getting feedback from as many community members as possible, and a rework hopefully will stem from that process,” Bastien told Capital B Atlanta.
While the mural’s artist could not be reached for comment, Bastien said Williams was still involved in the redesign process.
The artwork, located on the wall of a building managed by a local nonprofit named Focused Community Strategies (FCS) and across the street from Carver High School, is part of a larger project conducted by NCCHR called Truth and Transformation, which aims to bring lesser-known historical events into public spaces. Concerns raised by residents about the mural led to a tense community meeting in October.
On Oct. 6, the South Atlanta Civic League hosted a conversation among residents, Williams, and representatives from NCCHR and FCS to discuss the art. While residents were divided in their opinions about the mural, many questioned why they were not involved in the design process.
At the meeting Williams, who told attendees that his original vision for the project was overridden, received praise for the technical skill and intensity of the piece and admiration for the craftsmanship.
Brenda Trammell, a longtime resident of South Atlanta, said she took her 15-year-old grandson, a student at Carver High, to visit the mural. At the meeting, she said she was worried that the art may invoke strong feelings of violence among the students.
She said she wished that more positive imagery would have been included in the mural, such as some of the historical Black institutions located throughout the neighborhood.
The president of FCS, Marvin Nesbitt, admitted the organization had “dropped the ball” on fostering community engagement, and he publicly apologized.
An official date to redesign the mural based on community feedback has yet to be determined, according to Bastien.
While designs continue to be debated on Facebook, Trammell said she thinks reaching a consensus will be a challenge.
“It’s hard to narrow it down to one design where everyone will be happy or satisfied,” Trammell told Capital B Atlanta.
“You have a community that needs to try to agree upon what is acceptable, and everybody’s not going to get their way.”
