Palmetto, Georgia, was, by all accounts, a quiet and growing town in the final years of the 19th century. Located 25 miles southwest of Atlanta, it had a cotton mill, two warehouses, a hotel, churches, and slow, steady commerce. Its Black residents were part of the working and worshipping community that white newspapers would later […]
History Beneath Our Feet
Posted inCulture, History
Political Power and Black Business: A Sweet Auburn Building Anchored Black Atlanta
Built in 1895, the brown and yellow Queen Anne style house sits close to the sidewalk, two stories rising straight from a narrow yard bordered by hedges trimmed even with the porch rail. The steps leading from the street are paved with concrete worn at the center where thousands of feet have walked the same […]
Posted inCulture, History
From Enslavement to Legacy: The History Buried at South-View Cemetery
On the southern edge of Atlanta, red clay settles into quiet hills, and magnolia trees stretch toward the sun. South-View Cemetery rests like a long, unfinished sentence. Not silent, nor asleep. It listens. It remembers. Beneath its grass and stone lies a community that refused to disappear. Here, the dead become the storytellers about the […]
Posted inEssay, History
From Summerhill to Auburn Avenue, the Church That Would Not Fall
Sunday is when paradise is preached and seen. They come dressed in their Sunday best. Starched collars and scuffed shoes. Wide-brimmed hats blooming like flowers across the sanctuary. An elder humming low, as if tuning her soul like a string before the choir rose. The beauty of the stained glass fell across the pews like […]
Posted inCriminal Justice, History
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre Stole Black Lives Where Downtown Condos Now Stand
I hold your stories. I am Georgia’s red clay and black land. The silence that speaks beneath the roar of trains and traffic. I am a record. You call me soil, but I am memory. I remember how Black life rose after slavery’s end. How men and women carved businesses into my streets, lifted schools […]
Posted inEssay, History
History Beneath Our Feet: The Police Killings That Sparked Summer Riots in the 1960s
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. […]
Posted inEssay, History
History Beneath Our Feet: Marcus Garvey Met with the Klan and then Faced Prison in Atlanta
Stand at the corner of Auburn Avenue and Jessie Hill Jr. Drive, and wait for the wind to blow. Admire the blue letters “Jesus Saves,” hanging like a benediction above Big Bethel AME Church. Steady your eyes and try to see him in the whirlwinds. It’s been raining lately in Atlanta, so maybe you will […]
Posted inCriminal Justice, Gentrification, History
History Beneath Our Feet: Atlanta’s Gentrifying Neighborhoods Hold Haunting Stories of 24 Murdered Black Women
On a quiet stretch of White and Lawton streets, in southwest Atlanta, there’s no marker. No sign. Just a patch of sidewalk, cars passing, and weeds curling from a cracked curb that offers no clues to its past. But in the summer of 1911, this is where Lizzie Watts was found — her throat slashed, […]
Posted inEssay, History
History Beneath Our Feet: Where MARTA Runs, Lives Were Once Sold in Atlanta
Back then, they called it Whitehall Street. Today, it’s the Five Points station, where trains rattle beneath pavement and buses exhale their daily breath into the Georgia sun. But before there was MARTA, before the high-rises, before Black folks were paid for the culture that created the pulse of this city, we were on the […]