Canopy Atlanta Print Edition: Volume 1

VOLUME

COMMUNITY POWERED JOURNALISM

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WEST END •

FOREST PARK •

BANKHEAD •

SOUTH DEKALB

•

LAKEWOOD HEIGHTS

ON THE COVER

In 1964, Renita Johnson’s mother opened Hair Effects on Bankhead Highway.

Johnson began working in the family business and eventually took over in 1994. A lifelong resident and business owner in the community, Johnson hopes that the entrepreneurs who endured throughout the years are not forgotten as Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway experiences a transition.

Photograph by GAVIN GUIDRY

VOLUME 1

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WEST END

FOREST PARK

BANKHEAD

SOUTH DEKALB

LAKEWOOD HEIGHTS

1 2345 This is just a taste—to read the full issue for each community or sign up for our free weekly newsletter, visit canopyatlanta.org.

ABOUT

Canopy Atlanta is a community journalism nonprofit founded in 2020. We choose, report, and share stories with Atlantans—and redefine who journalism is by and for. Our journalism work extends into three major areas—original reporting, journalism training, and information network incubation.

Our Community Issues are the centerpiece of our original reporting, and help form the foundation of our listen-first approach to journalism. Residents of each neighborhood/city where we work help shape the editorial priorities of each Community Issue, as well as help identify important local assets, disseminate information, and often report on the places where they live. Atlanta Documenters is another critical aspect of Canopy Atlanta’s original reporting, and through this program we train and pay Metro Atlantans to attend and report on public meetings across the five-county area.

Since Canopy Atlanta’s inception, our intent has been to increase the capacity of our local journalism community by training more journalists and providing experience and outlets for their work. We pay and train residents—through our Fellowsship, Atlanta Documenters, and more—to report alongside experienced journalists through words, photos, audio, and more.

As Canopy Atlanta has grown, so has our capacity to identify and support emerging and existing information systems. Every neighborhood has its own formal and informal networks of information sharing, and Canopy Atlanta has endeavored to help incubate these networks through event partnerships, co-publishing original reporting, or providing organizational support to bolster infrastructure.

Canopy Atlanta’s aim is to equip residents to access information about their communities, and to tell and share stories that are responsive to community desires. Through this work, we aim to increase the overall agency of communities through journalism, and we endeavor to make sure our work reaches residents through innovative channels, events, partnerships, printed materials, and more.

FLOYD HALL, Co-Founder and Creative Director

CONTACT

@canopyatlanta

@canopyatl

@canopyatlanta

Canopy Atlanta: PO Box 115573, Atlanta, GA 30310

hello@canopyatlanta.org

ISSUE N O.

1 This historic Southwest Atlanta neighborhood is in the midst of evolution: a major redevelopment stuck in limbo, hustlin’ “water boys” at odds with some neighbors, and a thriving arts scene at risk from the pandemic—making it the perfect destination for our first Community Issue. To read more of these stories, visit canopyatlanta.org.

WEST END 2

Canopy Atlanta · 2020

Illustration by GEORGE GALBREATH

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THE WATER BOY’S HUSTLE CITY OFFICIALS DEEMED WATER SALES ALONG HIGHWAY EXITS A NUISANCE AND A THREAT. BUT FOR ONE WEST END TEENAGER, THE HUSTLE IS A WAY TO MAKE MONEY AND TO STAY OUT OF JAIL.

By GAVIN GODFREY

B

Photography by ABOUBACAR KANTE

aby D is getting ready to start his shift. Few cars are pulling off Interstate 20 at the Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard exit, but churches across Atlanta are letting out, so he knows traffic will pick up soon. He runs for a blue cooler hidden in the woods, which contains a few stray bottles from the day before. After rinsing the cooler with the leftover liquid, he walks a couple blocks to Family Dollar for a 24-pack of water bottles, followed by a stop at Chevron for a 10-pound bag of ice. He dumps it all into the container, pulls up his face mask, and heads up the ramp toward the expressway.

It’s a sweltering Sunday morning at the tail end of August, and the short 16-year-old is wearing a white long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans, tube socks with marijuana leaves on them, and Adidas slides. A line of roughly 15 cars forms at the stop sign. Baby D scans the vehicles to see which ones might roll down their windows with a few bills in hand. Moments later, an older Black man rolls down his car window. Baby D charges $1 for a bottle of water, but the man gives $10 and tells him to keep the change.

It’s the first sale of the day.

Born and raised in West End, Baby D has regularly sold water for the last year at the eastbound exit near Morehouse College. Like a lot of teens with summer jobs, his goal is to save enough money for a car. Nothing fancy. He’s seen enough to know he wants something reliable. Maybe a Toyota or, if he’s lucky, a new Nissan. The chance to cruise throughout the 4

city is a freedom that once seemed out of reach, particularly last year, when he spent some time in jail. If he can sell water for just a little longer, he might just be able to turn those car-owning dreams into reality—which, he hopes, might earn him enough social currency to impress girls.

But not everyone is interested. Ten rejections follow. Out-of-towners with South Carolina and Alabama plates look ahead to the stop sign to avoid eye contact. Elderly couples in their Sunday best smile and nod, but don’t dare roll their windows down. Others flash their beverages, hoping to save Baby D a few steps. He passes quieter moments by rapping along to his favorite Lil Baby songs playing on his phone. He mouths words to the track, “Freestyle,” out loud to himself.

They just know I’m gettin’ bigger They just know a n**** busy I been runnin’ up them digits True to the lyrics, Baby D makes $100 in the first hour of his shift. That’s more than he’d make in a day’s work stocking shelves or mowing lawns.

Plus, there’s no supervisor to tell him when to clock out. “I can do what I want,” he says. “I got more freedom.”

At that moment, he spots an Atlanta Police Department SUV coming down the ramp. Baby D, now joined by two friends, freezes. He knows the biggest threat to his dreams of cruising down Lowery in a new car is the wrong kind of run-in with the police. That freedom could vanish with the flash of blue lights.

The recent controversy over Atlanta’s “water boys”—Black teenagers who sell ice-cold drinks to motorists—had quietly bubbled under the surface for months. Last December, a passing driver near Atlantic Station called police about a suspicious person at a well-known water selling spot, possibly selling drugs: a teenager one year older than Baby D standing on a median. When an officer—skeptical the youth would indeed be selling drugs in broad daylight—approached, the teenager ran, climbed a fence, and fell almost 30 feet to the highway below, shattering his legs. The officer never found drugs, but noted in a report that two water bottles dropped out of his jacket as he fled.

Months later, even as the pandemic, police violence protests, and a presidential race consumed America’s attention, the water boys broke through the headlines. Shortly after the death of Rayshard Brooks, a young man shot and killed 18-year-old Jalanni Pless in Midtown, allegedly over competition for $10. Around the same time, police arrested a 14-year-old teenager for allegedly threatening people with a gun while selling water in Buckhead. One highway stop over from where Baby D sells water, a water boy twice shot a driver during a dispute.

Between January and July, Atlanta Police received nearly 700 calls related to youth selling water, according to APD data. Whereas some residents criticized the water boys for breaking the law, endangering themselves, and creating public health risks by approaching people’s cars at times without masks, others saw them as a key example of why the public should have fewer police encounters. Supporters argue that in a time when tensions between the Black community and law enforcement are high, and when many youth opportunities are shut down due to the pandemic, kids should be free to make money without any police involvement. Faced with

Canopy Atlanta · 2020

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Issue No. 1

protests over subsequent alleged police brutality directed at the “water boys,” Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms formed an advisory council to suggest safer alternatives for teens like Baby D. The council—composed of Atlanta residents, nonprofits, entrepreneurs and municipal leaders, with input from the APD and teens selling water in different neighborhoods—has offered 13 recommendations that urged city officials to recognize the entrepreneurial energy of the youth, collect more data to understand the issue and develop authentic, credible youth outreach opportunities. One of the council co-chairs, Jay Bailey, president and CEO of the Russell Center for Innovation, says he was blown away by the teens’ resolve. Bailey jokes that he was a water boy before water bottles existed, having started his first business at age 12. He relates to their experience of being a young Black kid with summer hustles. Through their interviews with youth and APD, the council learned that the kids are sometimes the breadwinners of their families, and officers don’t want to arrest them. However, the water boys are breaking laws.

Indeed, the report notes that the youth selling water are violating city ordinances and state statutes, including vending without a license, obstructing traffic, pedestrians on or along the roadway. The council also found that hundreds of kids like Baby D selling water have no intention of stopping their sales, no matter what incentives or alternatives are offered. As someone who’s involved with youth programs associated with organizations like the Wren’s Nest, Bailey believes city officials are not going to be able to “program our way out of this problem” and must find alternatives that serve the needs of the entrepreneurial teens.

“We cannot depend on the police to solve our problems with our youth,” Bailey says. “This is a rallying cry for solutions that come from the community, for the community. This is not a one-program fix.”

The police SUV never flashes its lights. Once their worries subside—and they see that the officer is an attractive young Black woman—Baby D and the other timid teens turn into schoolboys with puppy-love crushes. Being teenagers, stares and catcalls follow, along with requests for her to follow Baby D’s crew on Instagram.

Baby D’s focus quickly shifts back to the ramp. As cars pass by, he’s hesitant to tell me stories about his upbringing or the origins of his nickname.

One of the stories he doesn’t mind sharing is how he began selling water: He was in a detention center when he heard someone talk about the big business of being a water boy. “They were saying they made like $5,000 a year,” Baby D says. “So then I started doing it when I got out.”

Tattooed across his neck are the words, “Long Live DaDa,” an homage to the late grandfather who schooled him on how to make money. DaDa was from Louisiana, and a bit of that Bayou State drawl comes out in Baby D’s words. His parents are fine with his occupation, and he’s happy to not ask them for financial help. Selling water keeps him from “striking,” aka robbing and stealing, and beats the job alternatives he says have been offered by the city and others who have approached the boys. And he’s very good at what he does. He once made $400 in a day.

“They were trying to get us to work for Waffle House,” he says. “They are trying to pay us $9 an hour — hell nah! We make $50 an hour up here.

6

We don’t make no $9!”

The money is easy, but Baby D says law enforcement can make it hard.

He says he’s seen officers confiscate water, trash coolers, and dump ice.

He says police also sometimes take products and supplies from the boys, then redistribute them to homeless men panhandling on the ramp. But in the rare case that a water boy is apprehended, police take them home to their parents.

APD spokesperson Chata Spikes says she was unaware of such practices but noted that the department was originally not in a position to store confiscated water in its property control unit—a policy that has since changed.

The teens see the reward as worth the risk. Baby D’s friend, who goes

by Triplecross, is a taller kid dressed in all black who also lives in West End. He explains the rules of selling water. It’s essentially every man for himself on the ramp, but profit shares come in the form of the “bust down.” When a driver offers up bills of $20 or larger and wants no change in return, the water boy who secures the money is expected to split the cash with the people who chipped in for water and ice. That’s why two to three boys will approach a vehicle at a time—because if you’re the first to make physical contact with the money, you’re guaranteed a cut.

“It’s a business. We just ain’t got no store,” Triplecross explains.

“It’s a business. These folk just be scared,” Baby D interjects, referring to the more timid customers, who he says believe everything negative reported about the water boys in the local news.

Right then, two new kids emerge from the nearby Chevron. One of the boys, a shorter, louder kid with dreadlocks, is carrying a 32-pack of water.

He’s wearing a utility pouch that’s carrying a pistol. It’s not to intimidate water competition. The newcomer mentions a crew of youth known as “Mayhem” who have been terrorizing other kids in West End and the metro area. He needs it for protection, but it’s obvious the presence of more sellers and firearms irks Baby D.

West End

His concern proves valid. Three white cars—a Range Rover, Mustang and Corvette—all stop near the exit and roll down their windows. Baby D’s crew takes off sprinting in the direction of the vehicles, anticipating a flurry of bigger bills to be released. Their hardened hustler machismo gives way to giddiness, like schoolboys seeing an ice cream truck approach.

The pugnacious newcomer with a gun grabs a $50 bill from the Range Rover. Baby D and Triplecross surround him, anticipating a cut of the bust down. That doesn’t happen. Though Baby D felt that a shared exit ramp meant shared profits, this new duo brought their own water, and Baby D and Triplecross didn’t chip in for that.

Baby D grows frustrated at what he felt was a violation of the ramp’s unwritten rules. He grabs the duo’s water bottle pack and tries to throw it over the fence. Instead, it climbs halfway up toward its goal, crashing back to the earth. The bottles spill out onto the dirt.

Drivers passing Baby D, Triplecross, and the other teens like to offer unsolicited advice. A woman who often drives by tells them to be safe. Another woman in a beige sedan creeps and barks: “You guys aren’t going to get anywhere doing this!” Next, a red pickup truck with the Batman logo on the side pulls up to the boys.

The driver, a middle-aged Black man named Bernard Todd Sr., offers words of wisdom. From the driver’s seat, he asks Baby D and Triplecross why they’re selling water and what they’re saving for. The former talks about the car he’s been dreaming of, while the latter says he’s just saving—no end goal in sight. Todd hands the boys his card and insists that they reach out to him when they want to start a business or simply just need help.

A southwest Atlanta resident, Todd has three of his own businesses and, as a youth, worked odd jobs from delivering groceries to mowing lawns. His sons were the subject of a documentary on YouTube about Atlanta “water boys”: The oldest used his water hustle to invest in a mobile gaming truck, which is now his main source of income. So, that’s why Todd Sr. offers mentorship on everything from how to dress, what to wear, when to approach a vehicle, and how to speak with customers. He’s even spoken up on behalf of “water boys” at Atlanta City Council meetings.

“All of these young boys ain’t trouble,” he says.

“They just don’t have the right guide and nobody to show them, so they’re learning from each other.”

But West End residents like Vonda Henry have had enough. The former president of West End Neighborhood Development (WEND) is tired of the litter she attributes to the youth selling water, as well as their “aggressive” sales tactics.

She doesn’t believe most of the boys selling water in West End actually live there and questions their motivations. Unsurprisingly, Henry has never purchased water from the boys.

“They don’t realize that they’re being allowed to be there,” she says. “If the neighborhood decides that they don’t want them there, they will not be there, because the law is not with them.”

Following the advisory council’s report, city and police officials are now considering which solutions to pursue. They found one successful model up in Baltimore, where, last year, officials launched the Squeegee Alternative Plan, designed to curb young men of color who were squeegeeing car windshields downtown. The program developed growth plans for the youth cleaning cars, assigned mentors, facilitated reengagement in school—all to get the kids off the corner. Within 10 months, the effort led to a decrease in 911 calls and an uptick in kids switching street hustles to full-time jobs. A few miles east of West End, officials in DeKalb County

are considering a similar youth entrepreneurship program for those selling water. Instead of writing tickets or arresting teens, police would send them to a six-week training program that comes with a stipend.

In Atlanta, Bailey says local organizations such as Helping Empower Youth (HEY!) are also doing their part. Recently, the nonprofit adopted the corner of Ivan Allen and Joseph E. Boone boulevards, where adults help guide young boys in making water sales. There’s also the Corner Boys program from I’m A Father F1rst, which provides an entrepreneurship curriculum for what they called “bottle boys.” Like mentors in those programs, Todd listens patiently and doesn’t get discouraged when Baby D can’t imagine any other legal hustle that would make him stop selling water. Todd says he gets it. He sees himself in Baby D. Still, he reminds the teens that the goal should be to work their way off the exit ramp.

“Even if you’re making $30 an hour, it still doesn’t do anything to a person who doesn’t have guidance on what to do with it,” Todd says. “We can be of guidance to them.”

Since school started in early September, Baby D has juggled virtual classes and selling water, which he’ll keep doing until the weather cools. He just needs enough money to get him through to the spring. He doesn’t have a favorite subject because school is more about potential interactions with girls than what’s happening on Zoom, he says. As a young man making money independently, he’s confident in his game even if girls from class have seen him on the exit ramp and make jokes about it later.

Baby D looks down at Todd’s business card. Once the red truck drives away, the teen tosses it to the dirt ingrained with bottle caps and used condoms.

He and Triplecross say folks like Todd, Bailey, and others are simply “trying to flex cuz they on camera”—in front of a reporter and photographer—and that ultimately they “want all the water boys incarcerated.”

A homeless man approaches carrying a 24-pack and a bag of ice over his shoulders. It’s Baby D’s re-up. The man drops the goods on the ground.

“THIS IS A RALLYING CRY FOR SOLUTIONS THAT COME FROM THE COMMUNITY, FOR THE COMMUNITY. THIS IS NOT A ONE-PROGRAM FIX.”

Canopy Atlanta · 2020

Baby D hands over $3 and tells him, “Thank you, Unc,” short for Uncle. It’s a term of endearment given to anyone older than the boys. He’s making a killing today because, thanks to the cheap labor, he hasn’t needed to leave the spot yet.

Before he drove away, Baby D told Todd that he’ll most likely keep selling water. It’s easier and safer than some of his previous gigs. “I used to steal cars,” he admits. “If they stop this, then I’m going back to doing what I used to do.”

For now, Baby D isn’t particularly concerned with news headlines, or how schoolmates, residents, and would-be mentors judge his means to make money. He doesn’t dwell on what the city’s plans to address water boys are, or if the police will continue to randomly crack down on him and friends. Like any other teenager, he just wants financial independence from his parents, and a chance to talk to crushes in person once again.

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ISSUE N O.

2

Just southeast of Atlanta, Forest Park yearns for connections, yet is caught between squabbling leaders, its past, and disenfranchised residents. We uplift solutions to food insecurity, untangle complexities of policing in immigrant communities, and more in the Clayton County city. To read more of these stories, visit canopyatlanta.org

FOREST PARK 8

Canopy Atlanta · 2021

Illustration by SEAN FAHIE

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THE SOUTHSIDE A VIETNAMESE COMMUNITY FLOURISHES IN CLAYTON COUNTY

By STEPHANNIE STOKES and ANGIE TRAN-UDDULLAH Photography by KAVI VU

T

he parking lot surrounding the Vietnamese Elder Association South Atlanta fills up on Saturday afternoons. This particular July afternoon is a hot one in Forest Park. The sound of music, muffled by fans, travels through the building’s open front door.

Inside, men and women in their 50s and up take turns on stage, singing and dancing along to decades-old Vietnamese music. They stand in front of a wallsized collage of heroic-looking images of the Vietnam War, with fighter planes, a military ship, and a smiling Vietnamese couple in uniform at the center. At banquet tables before the stage, a hundred or so people watch, looking just as happy, as they laugh with each other and beam at the performances.

The seniors here off Jonesboro Road are the bedrock of the Vietnamese community in Clayton County. It’s the third-largest Vietnamese enclave in Georgia, with about 8,700 residents. It gets little attention compared to the larger clusters of Vietnamese residents on Atlanta’s Northside, along Buford Highway, which is widely known for its Asian American restaurants and businesses, and beyond. That also shows in the demographic data.

The Northside community in Gwinnett County, for example, is growing at ten times the rate of the Southside.

Many of the Vietnamese immigrants who’ve lived in and around Forest Park for decades don’t seem to mind. They were forced to leave their first home in Vietnam. The reason is visible inside the seniors’ association.

Embedded in corners are yellow flags with red stripes. The flags represent South Vietnam, a country that hasn’t existed since it surrendered to North Vietnam in 1975 following the withdrawal of U.S. forces. At that time, many of the elders here became refugees.

In need of a new home, they found it in Clayton County and Forest Park. And they’ve become a significant part of Forest Park, representing three-quarters of its Asian residents. They’ve established their own businesses and developed services to meet their community’s needs.

They have no plans to uproot again.

Moving around in the background at the Vietnamese Elder Association is Larry Nguyen. He has the look of a businessman, with a white button-down shirt tucked into his slacks. For years, he invested in property 10

around Forest Park: restaurants, homes, and a flea market. He bought this building, too, and turned it into the senior center five years ago.

While the Northside might have more things for young people to do, like going to bars and nightclubs, Nguyen says older people enjoy living south of Atlanta. They can relax here.

“The Southside is different from Northside. The Southside people are real quiet,” he says. “The Northside is very busy.”

According to Nguyen, it took some time for the Vietnamese residents south of Atlanta to come together.

Forty years ago, when he first arrived in Clayton County and worked for a trucking company, Nguyen recalls hearing there were a few thousand Vietnamese people in Georgia. But living on the Southside, with the spread-out, suburban single-family homes and strip malls, he had to work to spot them.

“I see you, look like Asian people. I say, ‘Oh, you Vietnamese?’ They say, ‘Oh, I’m Vietnamese.’ I’m real happy,” Nguyen says. “‘Come to my house.

Have lunch. Have dinner.’”

In the decade that followed, the number of Vietnamese in Georgia rose fast. The Vietnamese population expanded from around 2,000 in 1980 to almost 8,000 by 1990. This number has increased to more than 57,000 Vietnamese in Georgia today.

Many came to Georgia through local resettlement programs or to reunite with family members. Despite language barriers and hardships along the way, that generation who fled as refugees and emigrants would open up many of the businesses, nail salons, and restaurants that now dot Jonesboro Road. Their migration stories, although shared and understood within the Vietnamese community, can be kept private from outsiders.

In one of several Vietnamese-owned auto shops, an owner, dressed in his mechanic’s workwear, remembers his experience of escaping by boat when he was only 17. He asks that we not publish his name. The shop owner stands up, extending his arms, to show the size of the boat -- about the same length as the small waiting room. It held more than a dozen people for the three-week journey.

“I lay across the boat, with my head and my toes touching the water,” he says. “Very scary, very dangerous. That was the only hope, so we have to keep going.”

There were multiple stops before he found his long-term home: Hong Kong, California, and finally Georgia. In the beginning, new residents like him received help through the government. Federally paid social workers guided the refugees through the resettlement process.

The shop owner believes Vietnamese immigrants share a deep gratitude toward the U.S. “That’s why they take it like a second country and they call it home,” he says.

Four decades later, few resources remain for Vietnamese immigrants in Clayton County. Nonprofits that help Asian Americans with language services or housing needs, like the Center for Pan Asian Community Services, are located north of Atlanta and into Gwinnett County, where the majority of Vietnamese residents also live. When Canopy Atlanta

Canopy Atlanta · 2021

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Issue No. 2

surveyed Vietnamese families in Forest Park, none could name a local nonprofit organization as a resource.

Faced with this absence of services, the community supports itself. At the Vietnamese Elder Association South Atlanta, Nguyen, the founder, points to the office in the back room where people can get paperwork translated or apply for documents they need.

“You don’t understand English. You receive a letter. You come here. They help you understand,” he says. “You want to apply for Medicare, they help you with Medicare. You apply for food stamps, they help you with food stamps.”

Across from the office, the walls are lined with cardboard produce boxes for the association’s food pantry, sponsored by the Atlanta Community Food Bank. On the 21st of every month, low-income families of Vietnamese or 12

any background can come pick up food, a volunteer-run effort that Nguyen says continues during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The elder association also partners with Viet Home Care, a senior health-care service in Gwinnett County that recently expanded its reach to Clayton County. With these services and resident-led efforts, several people told us they believed the Southside Vietnamese community is only becoming stronger.

The population has held steady, at least. The latest release of 2020 Census data even shows a slight increase of 700 Asian people in Clayton County since 2010. That’s amid bigger demographic shifts countywide. In those same years, the white population in Clayton County decreased by more than 18,000 people, and the number of Black residents rose by more than 35,000.

Forest Park

But the growth of the Vietnamese population in Clayton County is only a fraction of the 13,000 estimated rise in the Vietnamese population in Gwinnett County.

According to Kim La, a local real estate agent whose clients are often Vietnamese, high-paying jobs and better schools draw people north. Some of the most popular areas now are in northern Gwinnett County, near cities like Dacula and Buford, where families can still find affordable homes.

A mile away from the elder association in Forest Park, near a quiet neighborhood of predominantly Vietnamese-owned single-family homes, is a Buddhist temple, Chùa Hai An. In addition to offering a place of worship, the temple provides Vietnamese language classes for children and a community altar for family members who have passed away.

On a weekday afternoon, the head monk, Thích Huê. Nghiêm, finishes meeting with a visitor in the courtyard, shaded by peach trees. She’s friendly, smiling often, dressed in earth-toned clothing with her head shaved. Her migration story is also linked to the war. One of her brothers worked with the CIA during the conflict, and another was placed in a postwar reeducation camp for those affiliated with South Vietnam and the American military. Thích Huê. Nghiêm’s third brother escaped the country by boat and eventually facilitated her migration to the U.S. She first settled in Seattle in the 1990s. But after the rain and chilly weather in the Pacific Northwest, Thích Huê. Nghiêm was glad to move to Clayton County in 2003 to start this temple. With the warm climate and trees, she describes this area south of Atlanta with the same word used by several other longtime Vietnamese residents: peaceful.

“Back then, I saw that this place had a lot of vegetation, like a forest. It Canopy Atlanta · 2021

reminded me of a school that I went to in Vietnam,” she says.

Thích Huê. Nghiêm has noticed the population changes around her.

As the children of the Vietnamese immigrants in Forest Park become adults and begin lives of their own, she says, they often choose to move to Atlanta’s northern suburbs. And she’s heard this move north is partly due to the promise of better schools.

But Thích Huê. Nghiêm looks at the schools around Clayton County and sees the Vietnamese students excelling. The valedictorians for the past three years at Forest Park High School have been Vietnamese-Americans.

Vietnamese residents have also watched the expanding influence of Vietnamese Americans in local government throughout south metro Atlanta. Two Vietnamese attorneys, Ethan Pham and Jenny Nguyen, who are husband and wife, recently became judges in nearby Morrow. While Forest Park has yet to elect someone of Vietnamese descent to the local government, Ward 3 Councilman Hector Gutierrez says the city also tries to be inclusive.

“I will say that as a city, we are making efforts to have Vietnamese employees,” he says. “And also, we budgeted this year for our first-ever celebration of Asian heritage.”

The strength of the Southside community fuels the optimism of the Vietnamese immigrants who’ve made Clayton County their home and plan to remain here. But it doesn’t play a role in Thích Huê. Nghiêm’s decision about her future. Asked whether she will stay in the area, she answers graciously, but without any doubt.

“Usually, Buddhist people live at the temple, no matter what the circumstances,” she says. “I will still live here.”

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ISSUE N O.

3 We probe the factors behind gentrification, explore a rich hip-hop legacy, and search for a missing police officer with a neighborhood in the midst of transformation: the Bankhead/Grove Park community in Northwest Atlanta. To read more of these stories, visit canopyatlanta.org

BANKHEAD 14

Canopy Atlanta · 2022

Illustration by BARBARA REGO

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LOCKED OUT OF LEGACY

surrounding vacant houses as he hints at the role speculation has played in the cultural erosion of his neighborhood. After the $44 million, 280-acre opened in summer 2021 and Microsoft paid roughly $150 million to acquire land in the neighborhood with the goal of building a 90acre campus, home prices immediately spiked, reaching the $400,000 to $500,000 range.

Once an against-all-odds, tight-knit community of families that had remained resilient in the face of disinvestment after white flight occurred in the ‘60s, Grove Park is now starting to see its Black population shrink. Residents that have remained now have to drive miles to access a major grocery, pharmacy, or bank. “They took everything out and brought nothing back in except high-priced houses,” Patterson says. “They want that New Atlanta.”

In many ways, the New Atlanta he’s talking about is an old pattern we’ve seen unfold for years in historically Black neighborhoods like Grove Park and Bankhead. Redlining, compounded by NEW URBAN RENEWAL PERPETUATES OLD PATTERNS OF highway construction and urban renewal beginDISPLACEMENT, LEAVING BLACK RESIDENTS IN GROVE ning in the ‘50s—or as James Baldwin called it, PARK AND BANKHEAD LOOKING FOR REAL SOLUTIONS “Negro removal”—followed by the demolition of housing projects and a sustained period of disinvestment, all but guaranteed these communities would remain devalued and vulnerable to

By NIKISHKA IYENGAR and GENIA BILLINGSLEY speculation and gentrification.

While the federal government may have been Photography by ABOUBACAR KANTE the key orchestrator of old urban renewal programs, the new model is fueled by public-private partnerships. Corporations, philanthropic institutions, private real estate capital, and city t’s a clear, sunny Saturday afternoon and governments now work together in pursuit of the much-lauded goal of Quincey Patterson is sitting in a car outside creating mixed-income communities. But mixed-income development his childhood home on South Eugenia Place, does not inherently mean equitable development. This is especially true reminiscing. His light camo jacket is no match in the city known as the Black Mecca, where renewal is often synonymous for the deceptively cold Atlanta day, but the heat with the removal of Black people. inside his car complements the warm memories As if on cue, a Maserati with Gwinnett County tags parks in front of he has of growing up in Grove Park and Bank- Patterson’s childhood home. A couple of prospective buyers get out to take head area, back when it was bustling with kids a tour. Patterson squints and points, “People like that is the only people walking to school, playing in the streets, throwing footballs, and riding able to afford these homes.” bikes. “Until that streetlight came on, we were out here every day,” he recalls fondly on his mixtape Westside of Atlanta.

Atlanta’s Westside shaped Patterson’s identity as BankHead Priest—the Grove Park Foundation, the largest nonprofit dedicated to revitalizing rap moniker he goes by as an independent artist—but it’s no longer home. the neighborhood, is currently following a mixed-income development The street he grew up on in the ’90s is quiet now, checkered with vacant playbook from the organization Purpose Built Communities (PBC). houses and an abandoned lot.

Originally created by the East Lake Foundation after the East Lake “You don’t see no kids out,” he says. “You don’t see nothing.”

Meadows housing project was torn down in the mid ‘90s, the PBC The home Patterson’s grandparents bought in 1965 and passed on to his model is geared toward breaking up “concentrated poverty” and racial aunt fell into foreclosure in 2008. The family became one of more than segregation in inner cities. It is now being replicated in more than 20 240,000 Black homeowners across the country who lost their home when cities across the country. the recession hit.

But more than two decades after it was first instituted in East Lake, The 35-year-old rapper and small-business owner has had his eyes on a new study contrasts the model’s touted success with a more sobering the home recently, checking Zillow often with the intention of buying it takeaway: The changes in poverty, crime, and educational attainment rates back to preserve the family legacy. The house sold for $29,900 in 2008. The were possibly “the result of changes of people, not changes for people,” house was then listed for $11,000 in 2010 before being lowered to $8,000 writes senior fellow and director of the Community Economic Development a month later. It finally sold for $49,000 in 2018.

Hub at the Urban Institute Brett Theodos. Theodos points to the inherent Then, a few months ago, the three-bedroom, two-bathroom home made displacement and replacement of low-income Black residents. Roughly 25 its way back on the market, listed for $339,000—a whopping 593 percent percent of the original residents of East Lake Meadows got to return and appreciation in just over three years. Even by Atlanta gentrification stan- enjoy the transformation of the neighborhood. Subsequent development dards, it’s staggering. “How could you put a house in that price range resulted in East Lake’s Black population decreasing by 31 percent and its when the other property values don’t match?” he says, gesturing to the white population increasing by 24 percent between 2000 and 2015.

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Issue No. 2

Legacy residents of Grove Park are worried they’ll meet a similar fate, and have voiced concern about all the changes that have taken place in the neighborhood since surrounding housing projects like Bowen Homes and Perry Homes were torn down. “When the housing projects were in effect, we had a community,” says Tim Freeman, a local auto mechanic and dog trainer best known as a rabble-rouser in the neighborhood. Today, Grove Park is just a neighborhood, he clarifies, not a community.

The tale of two Atlantas is perhaps best epitomized in the differences in how people view the city’s former housing projects. Whereas newer residents, institutions, and city government officials distance themselves from any mention of them, older Black residents recognize their value. When the projects were demolished, it wasn’t just affordable housing or a sense of community that was lost. There was also a clear dissolution of an organized political block that had advocated for the rights of poor and working-class people, according to scholar and author Akira Drake Rodriguez.

In her book, Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing, Rodriguez outlines how Atlanta’s projects, including Perry Homes and Bowen Homes, were catalysts for building Black political power through their tenant associations. These resident groups were often led by Black matriarchs. Atlanta has the dubious distinction of being the first major city to demolish all of its large-scale housing projects—after being the first in the nation to build them. At a time when social and public housing are 18

reentering the national dialogue as solutions to the affordable housing crisis, Atlanta’s history remains complicated.

For mixed-income private development to be truly equitable, Rodriguez offers a solution: Resource community organizing in a way that helps build back power and self-determination for legacy residents. Traditional community development—with its focus on creating affordable housing units, commercial corridors, or other physical assets like parks and recreational centers—is only one part of the formula. Community organizing, with the goal of creating lasting social change, is an often under resourced but necessary second part.

Over the past several years, in an attempt to get resident input into developments, multiple nonprofits and developers have hosted community listening sessions in Grove Park. But residents have been quick to point out the difference between check-the-box strategies and organizations actually listening to and implementing what residents want.

“They tried to ‘meeting’ us to death and make us give up,” Freeman says, pointing out how the traditional community engagement process is exclusionary by design. “You can’t keep going to this stuff. Ain’t nobody paying you. But most of them that are coming to present, they on payroll for somebody.”

Bankhead

Freeman believes institutions that are invested in the neighborhood should pay legacy residents for their time and labor to show up to such meetings. “Don’t make them feel like it’s a civic duty when we haven’t really been treated right as citizens,” he adds.

Gavin McGuire, Grove Park Foundation’s Executive Director, acknowledges that there is work that remains to be done in this area. Since joining the organization in October of 2021, McGuire has been working to bridge the gaps in community engagement that have generated criticism from residents in the past. He is now working with Freeman and others in an attempt to support community-led initiatives. “There’s a quote that drives me: ‘Don’t do anything for me, without me,’” he says.

In gentrifying neighborhoods like Grove Park, the question of who gets to be the voice of the community adds another layer of complexity. Developers and philanthropic institutions tend to only engage the neighborhood association, but according to residents, the loudest voices often come from the gentrifiers themselves. Instead of more outreach programs, residents say they need community benefits agreements (CBAs) from major developments.

Local leaders such as Devin Barrington-Ward, community organizer and recent city council candidate for District 9, which includes Grove Park, agree. “City council should mandate that any development seeking or receiving tax incentives should have a mandatory community benefits agreement,” he says.

As legally binding contracts, CBAs are meant to hold developers accountable for sharing some of the wealth by providing additional amenities, livable wage jobs, or set-asides for deeper housing or commercial affordability. In Atlanta, however, CBAs—or the promise of them—have been used

in city council despite an overwhelming opposition from residents, policing concerns in Grove Park and similar Black neighborhoods cannot be addressed in a vacuum.

“It’s easy to say that we’ll invest in this network of cameras in Atlanta when we are already one of the most surveilled cities in the country,” says Barrington-Ward of some of the solutions being discussed in these public safety meetings. “We have thousands of cameras in the city, and it doesn’t prevent crime. What prevents crime is good schools. What prevents crime are social programs that get to the root causes of poverty.”

It can be tricky to unpack all the layers within gentrification while holding others accountable for inequitable development. Beyond CBAs, current residents want to see existing nonprofits like Grove Park Foundation and Grove Park Renewal do more to foster homeownership.

Grove Park Renewal uses grants and donations to acquire and renovate properties, renting them out at affordable rates. While the nonprofit is aiming to keep legacy residents in place with these lower-cost rentals, some residents feel like the organization is benefiting more than the renters are from the acquisitions.

“You need to be moving people into immediate home ownership,” Freeman says. “I ain’t talking about no affordable housing where we rent, which is good, but y’all can do better than that. We need homeowners here.”

Grove Park Renewal’s Executive Director, Justin Bleeker, says the criticism is warranted. “We’re working against 400 years of momentum towards segregation and holding, particularly, the Black community, but many communities of color, out of homeownership,” he says. “Homeownership rates do need to increase.”

However, Bleeker notes that the nonprofit’s model is designed to address a more immediate need. Grove Park Renewal’s renters are often individuals or families on the brink of displacement, with eviction notices giving them anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months to find a new place. Grove Park Renewal is currently working with Grove Park Foundation and other nonprofits in the neighborhood to move stabilized renters toward homeownership.

Barely 25 percent of the homes in Grove Park are currently owner-occupied. To address both the gap in ownership and the lack of true community input, Grove Park Foundation has plans to implement an independent community land trust in the next three to five years, and has received a $20 million gift from Fifth Third Bank to put toward that goal.

Born out of the civil rights movement, community land trusts first emerged as a way for Black people to collectively steward land in the face of persistent racist housing policies. In addition to permanent affordability, land trusts ensure community control and grassroots participation in decision-making, with residents serving a governance role on the trust’s board. Since the pandemic and the subsequent eviction crisis, land trusts have made a comeback across the country as a solution to the speculative housing market.

Back outside his childhood home on South Eugenia Place—with its current list price still beyond his means—Patterson ponders a pivot from his original plans. Though he’s unfamiliar with the land trust model, he harbors dreams with the same goal of community preservation: purchasing land to build amenities and affordable housing so Black families are no longer displaced. “This is a motivational thing I say to myself I’ll do,” he says, “I’d buy the land they took.”

For Patterson, it is no longer just about preserving his family’s legacy, but about transforming Grove Park from a neighborhood back into a community—with kids throwing footballs in the streets, just like he remembers.

BANKHEAD AND GROVE PARK HOMES LIKE THIS ONE HAVE EXPERIENCED PRICE SPIKES REACHING THE $400,000 TO $500,000 RANGE. as a tool by developers to temper demands from community organizers.

There are two prominent examples from the last decade: the community benefits plan following the Mercedes-Benz stadium development and the community investment plan following the Braves’ relocation from Turner Field to Truist Park in Cobb County. Ultimately, neither was legally binding, both fell short of what community groups were advocating for, and both failed to prevent gentrification in the neighborhoods surrounding them.

At press time, in Grove Park, Microsoft’s recent investment has brought the subject of CBAs to the forefront again. It remains to be seen if Microsoft will pursue a watered down, nonbinding agreement or meet legacy residents’ demands to stave off gentrification. At recent community listening sessions for Microsoft have been of a different, but related flavor: public safety concerns. The corporation has hired a senior risk mitigation and threat consultant, who plans to have meetings with the Atlanta Police Foundation and Atlanta Police Department.

While residents have concerns about crime in the neighborhood, some legacy Black residents are worried about the potential for overpolicing and surveillance. This is typical in gentrifying neighborhoods, the result of a practice called development-directed policing. A recent study shows that for every five percent increase in property values, gentrifying neighborhoods experience a 0.2 percent to 0.3 percent increase in discretionary arrests.

At a time when the recent “Cop City” development in Forest Park passed Canopy Atlanta · 2022

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ISSUE N O.

4 This sleepy “bedroom” community harbors hidden gems and challenges that are rousing residents, from housing affordability to the nearby “Cop City” development. To read more of these stories, visit canopyatlanta.org.

SOUTH DEKALB 20

Canopy Atlanta · 2023

Illustration by FRKO

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A LOVE LETTER TO SOUTH DEKALB’S GREEN SPACES

I glimpsed that last scene while walking South River Trail with Mark Anthony Brown, Jr., the inimitable photographer responsible for these images. Our regal friend eluded Mark’s camera, though, so we let it ride. In recognizing that the water offered a peaceful place for the heron to dream and rest, I reflected on the wisdom of writer and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs: “I celebrate your right to evade and avoid me.”

Nature be setting boundaries forreal. Nature gon tell you when enough is enough. And Earth been tryna tell us sum’n for a minute.

I credit my home for inspiring me to listen.

Yet in a county known for Arabia Mountain, Lullwater Park, and Stone Mountain (shout out St. Beauty), greenspaces in South DeKalb like Doll’s Head, NH Scott, and Glen Emerald are often an afterthought. To fully appreciate them, it’s important to understand their history.

Long before the descendants of my African ancestors were proclaiming “Zone 6” and “Decatur where it’s greater,” my indigenous ancestors adored this land too. Then in 1821, the Muscogee people were violently removed by the American government, and DeKalb County was established a year later. Lush forests soon became farmland, where Black people labored on plantations and later prison fields for over a century. In the 1960s, rapid urbanization began, and Atlanta’s metro area sprawled exponentially.

Significant loss of rural land to decades of extensive development led to a renewed foFOR SOME, MENTION OF THE EASTSIDE INVOKES ITS RAP cus on greenspace at the turn of the century.

STARS LIKE FUTURE. FOR ONE RESIDENT, ITS BIGGEST In 2000, DeKalb County set out to preserve ASSETS ARE PLACES LIKE THE MICHELLE OBAMA TRAIL. 37,775 acres over 10 years, securing $6.4 million in funding from the Georgia Greenspace Program. Between 2001 and 2006, the Board of Commissioners issued over $225 million

By AMIRI BANKS Photography by MARK ANTHONY BROWN, JR. in park bonds. By 2013, DeKalb County had nearly doubled its park acreage, adding over 3,500 acres. The county anticipates spending an additional $85 million on future projects, seen somebody riding a horse off Glenwood the including renovations at Exchange, Gresham, and Glen Emerald parks. other day. That ain’t nun but a Tuesday tho.

All those millions don’t just increase property values. They improve One time, I was down the street from Towers quality of life for folks like the young woman whom we saw playing gleeHigh School when an owl pulled up on me. We fully with her daughter at Exchange Park. They also provide residents locked eyes under moonlit waves of greenery with improved air/water quality and recreational opportunities. until I looked away, breaking the spell. The owl “Being able to get out in nature and take it all in can be even healthier departed soundlessly, and I returned to wan- than going to the gym,” said one such resident, a fitness instructor and dering the woods alone.

YouTuber (HangTightwMarcie). She regularly walks the Michelle Obama Sublime scenery pervades the A, from towering canopies in the West End Trail, where it’s “not as crowded as the BeltLine, and it’s lovely to see the (where my momma dem grew up), to vibrant foliage in Kirkwood (where foliage change over the seasons.”

I got 3 million cousins). In January alone, I done seen foxes, possums, Equally lovely is the sense of wonder and nostalgia that nature invites. turtles, frogs, geese . . . even bats. No cap.

Seconds after we passed a father-son duo strolling quietly through Fork And within this vast jungle, there’s an even deeper wilderness: the Eastside. Creek Mountain Park, a helicopter leaf floated down and landed near me.

For some, those words evoke the lyrics of artists like Gucci Mane, Future, When I showed it to Mark, a childlike grin appeared on his face; he had Trouble, and Young Nudy claiming Candler, Flat Shoals, Edgewood, and instantly been transported to memories of gathering helicopter leaves Bouldercrest in their songs. As a native ATLien, I sholl be on that wave into a pile and tossing them in the air, creating a shower of spirals. We searched for the tree that gifted this memory, to no avail. too sometimes. (Shout out Golden Glide.)

So we thanked the wind, and let it ride.

But the Eastside also makes me think of deer dashing across Columbia On the surface, DeKalb appears to be a paragon of sustainability, but and into the brush; turkey vultures nesting in the mangled interior of a 50-year-old Cedar Grove home; or a great blue heron, motionless in the the water gets murkier when you peer a lil deeper. And I’m not just talmmisty wetlands of Panthersville. bout ongoing efforts to defend Weelaunee Forest from the development

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Issue No. 4

of Shadowbox Studios (formerly Blackhall Studios) and the $90 million police facility that’s become known as “Cop City.” (That debacle has been thoroughly documented, with ongoing, state-sanctioned violence escalating tensions and recently resulting in a preventable tragedy.)

The county is also under fire for a lack of investment in sewer infrastructure, allowing untreated sewage and industrial waste to spill unfettered into rivers across the region. In 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared this to be a violation of the Clean Water Act and demanded action, but only in “priority” areas around predominantly white northern DeKalb. The unincorporated southern region that comprises the majority of the county—where around 75 percent of residents are Black—continues to experience disproportionate pollution, which imperils health outcomes and increases vulnerability to storm damage.

Indeed, the pristine solitude of a trail walk is often accompanied by 24

eerie concrete hatches, which might feel almost mystical if they weren’t filled with wastewater. Every time I see one, I’m reminded that the county’s optics of valuing greenspaces contrast sharply with the toxic realities wrought by its negligence.

Yet even as I simmer at all the ugliness, I can’t help but marvel at all the beauty. And all the birds.

When Mark and I arrived at Gresham Park, a massive flock of blackbirds, grackles and starlings greeted us. In one swift motion, they flashed into the trees, giving way to a tranquil journey through labyrinthine paths.

Later, we would encounter a hawk, who waited for us to approach as if to say, “Wuh going on folk? Y’all tryna take a pic?”

While walking, we discussed how nature invites people to unplug from the colonial mindsets of excess and selfishness that contribute to inequality, violence, and an increasing desocialization. Restoring our

South DeKalb

broken relationship with the land can help mend our relationships to each other and reestablish connections to the collectivist mentality of our rural roots. Community gardens, for example, show the liberatory potential of greenspaces to provide healthy, sustainable food while cultivating a more interconnected, altruistic society. Parks and trails can be places of respite and refuge—whether that be for elders seeking companionship, youth seeking guidance, or unhoused folks seeking . . . well, everything.

When we came across a lighter and half-smoked rillo, Mark observed that it reminded him of an altar. Black people still practice rituals, he said, because we are the physical embodiment of our ancestors’ cultural and genetic memories. And while some of us reconnect to those memories through ceremony and herbalism, Mark reminded me that there is also immense spiritual power in a smoke sesh, pouring one out, or dancing en masse to a beat.

Canopy Atlanta · 2023

I got stories for days, more than I could ever fit in a single piece.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from nature, it’s that you won’t always be able to capture everything. No matter how much I might want to, I’m not gon’ be able to listen to every song or learn every language in the world. I’m not gon’ be able to look out for every family member and friend, or make the best decision every time.

I’m human. I’m fallible.

Despite this, Earth has the grace to care for me daily, so the least I can do is forgive myself. And if this planet is going to continue blessing us deeply flawed humans with sunlight, water, air, food, and splendor— even after all that has happened, and continues to happen—then the least we can do is show a lil more compassion and gratitude.

I’mma be back out there showing love again tomorrow.

Yeen comin’ through?

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ISSUE N O.

This community, just south of downtown, is debating how to best honor its historic landmarks and serve its residents going forward.

We explore the legacy that its General Motors plant left behind, the neighborhood’s mysterious reputation as a “Holistic Health Oasis,” and what’s in store for the vacant Lakewood Elementary building. To read more of these stories, visit canopyatlanta.org

LAKEWOOD HEIGHTS 26

Canopy Atlanta · 2023

Illustration by C. FLUX SING

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THE VOID GENERAL MOTORS LEFT BEHIND

plant was a conspicuous example of 20th-century American manufacturing and the possibility of the kinds of blue-collar union wage work that could build a middle class—including, for a short time, a Black middle class.

“It was so convenient,” Trammell says. “People could walk to work, literally. There was no such thing as carpooling.”

The bones of the sprawling plant remain, surrounded today by chain-link fencing and concrete walls covered in colorful graffiti. But the businesses that Trammell remembers from her youth—and the prosperous neighborhood supported by the GM plant—are gone.

“After General Motors left, everything started shutting down,” she says, recalling the business district centered around the intersection of Lakewood Avenue and Jonesboro Road. “We had a Colonial grocery store, we had Ace Hardware.

We had a Rexall drug store.”

Residents are still wondering what will replace everything it left behind—though there’s no shortage of ideas.

Automotive companies started popping up in Atlanta early in the 1900s, though they were small and independent. “At this point, ‘automotive’ is just putting a steam engine or electric battery or an internal combustion engine on something with four wheels,” says Timothy J. Crimmins, a professor emeritus of history at Georgia State University. Mechanizing production and introducing the moving assembly line, Henry Ford consolidated the industry—and expanded nationally. In 1915, LAKEWOOD HEIGHTS RESIDENTS WONDER WHAT WILL REPLACE Ford, headquartered in Detroit, opened its first EVERYTHING THE ASSEMBLY PLANT LEFT BEHIND—THOUGH southeastern operation on Ponce de Leon Avenue, THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF IDEAS. in the building that’s now the Ford Factory Lofts.

GM followed in 1928 with the Lakewood Assembly, adding a second plant in Doraville 20 years later. Parts were shipped in, painted, and assembled at these facilities. “Most people think

By SAM WORLEY Photography by DEAN HESSE cars are painted, but cars are not painted,” says Mary Stokes, whose husband, Charles F. Stokes, worked at Lakewood for 29 years. “The parts are painted, and then all of them are assembled into renda Trammell remembers what Lakewood an automobile.” Charles, who died in 1994, made sure the job was done Heights was like when the General Motors plant right—“no dots or blemishes,” Mary says.

In 1970, Lakewood became the world producer of the Chevrolet Grand was still open. She grew up in the area—she still lives in the South Atlanta home she’s been in Prix before switching to the Chevette; in the 1980s, the plant reconfigured since 1962—and went to school at Lakewood to manufacture the Chevy Caprice, some of which were sold as taxis, police Elementary, just down Sawtell Avenue from the cars, and other government vehicles. factory. A lot of her schoolmates had a parent In the first few decades of the plant’s existence, Crimmins says, “there who worked there. would have been a white workforce in the factory, and housing set up nearby “Back then, it was a big to-do to work at General Motors—you were con- for white workers.” Black workers were afforded only the most menial jobs: sidered highfalutin,” says Trammell, now 63 years old. “Some of the students “the sweeping up jobs, the dirty jobs,” recalled the labor lawyer Joe Jacobs, I worked with, they had a parent that worked at the federal penitentiary, in a 1991 oral history interview. “I don’t even think they let them oil the and then the other worked at General Motors. It was a very prosperous machinery in the plant.” The neighborhood that grew up around it, with neighborhood.” its now historic bungalows, was originally meant for white workers, too.

The civil rights movement opened the door for Black workers to access The federal prison is still there. But the GM plant closed in 1990, leaving an 86-acre hole at the corner of Sawtell and McDonough Boulevard. The better, higher-paying union jobs in the manufacturing sector. A 2021 working economic fortunes of the surrounding community took an even bigger paper from the Institute for New Economic Thinking describes how, during hit: The Lakewood Assembly was the area’s largest employer. With 5,700 the 1960s and 1970s, “millions of African Americans with no more than workers at its 1977 peak, laboring along 9.4 miles of assembly conveyors, the high-school education were able to secure unionized blue-collar employment

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Issue No. 5

with good wages and benefits at the major mass-producing corporations.”

James Stephens was one of those workers. He moved from Alabama in 1959, because “you could make a little more money in Atlanta,” he says.

Now 82 years old and living in northwest Atlanta, Stephens got a job at the Lakewood Assembly in 1965; in his recollection, Black people had only begun working on the assembly line two years earlier, in 1963. “My first job was dropping the motor into the chassis,” he says. “I could look up the motor line and see something that was wrong and call the supervisor, and they could get over there and change it before it got to me.” He eventually worked his way up to the maintenance department, where workers made three or four dollars more an hour than their counterparts on the assembly line. “We were the ones that kept this plant running,” Stephens says.

The automotive business was an especially important avenue to prosperity for the Black working class; by the early 1980s, Black workers made up 9.2 percent of the total national workforce, but 14.2 percent of the auto industry.

The benefits resounded beyond Lakewood Heights, says Mary Stokes: “A lot of people lived in the neighborhood, but a lot of people who worked at General Motors didn’t live in the community”—commuting in from places like Henry, Butts, or Douglas counties, or Decatur, where Stokes lived with her husband.

“The pay was good. The benefits were excellent,” Stokes says. And conditions within the plant were pretty placid, too: “The Blacks and the whites worked together. When you’re on an assembly line, you cannot make errors.

Whether you white, Black, or whatever, you better do your job and do it right.”

But the shared prosperity was short-lived, as the old industrial economy began declining in the 1980s and ’90s. The disproportionately Black workers in that economy lost out, with fewer avenues open to them in what the authors of the working paper describe as the “rising sectors of the New Economy related to the microelectronics revolution,” like the manufacture of computer microprocessors. For the auto industry, says professor Crimmins, “the great disruptors of the post-1970s were the dramatic increases in foreign manufacturing and imports.”

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The Lakewood Assembly, which had come to be considered outdated despite upgrades, was the first auto plant in Atlanta to go. Its closure followed years of uncertainty: 1,600 employees were laid off in 1988, a little over two years before the plant shut its doors for good, letting go of its remaining 2,200 workers.

In August 1990, the Atlanta Constitution reported that, after 62 years and more than seven million automobiles, the last car rolled off the Lakewood line: a gray Chevrolet Caprice Brougham, raffled off to one of the newly unemployed workers. General Motors, though, wouldn’t call it a shutdown, the paper reported: “GM has refused to say it is closing the plants, instead calling the procedure ‘indefinite idling.’ That lessens the company’s obligations to workers left jobless.”

The plant has idled, indefinitely, in the 33 years since, though some film and television studios have used it to shoot scenes. On one hand, the decline of the auto industry didn’t devastate Atlanta like it did other cities, says Crimmins, pointing to the metro area’s many sources of economic strength—transportation, services, regional and national office headquarters. “If you take a look at cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit, which were such powerhouses in manufacturing in the first half of the 20th century, those cities have seen declines in their population, whereas Atlanta’s metropolitan region has just mushroomed,” he says. “The economy is much more diversified.”

But if the industry’s struggles weren’t existential for the city at large, they presented deeper challenges in Lakewood Heights, whose development was inextricably bound to GM. “You’d be surprised, an assembly plant, how much money it put in the community, the city, and all that,” Stephens says. “We had people driving five or six hours from South Carolina to Lakewood to work there. They would get four hours’ sleep.

They would catch a ride and sleep some on the way to work and some back home.”

Lakewood Heights

“When General Motors moved, it affected everything,” says Brenda Trammell. “It affected the grocery store, the restaurants. Nobody would frequent these places any more.”

Some former workers moved closer to Doraville to find work at the GM plant there, which remained open until 2008; Ford’s Atlanta operation, which had moved from Ponce to Hapeville in 1947, also shuttered in the 2000s. Stephens transferred to Ohio to work at a GM factory in the Dayton area, before he finally retired in 2006.

Lakewood Heights declined following the departure of its major employer, Trammell says: “Because people had moved out and people were not moving in, that’s when you had a lot of vacant houses. It was a drug era. That was the deterioration of Lakewood.”

But the plant didn’t just leave economic distress in its wake—it also left a proud history. The building where Trammell went to school, Lakewood Elementary, served as the organizing base for an important sit-down strike in 1936, the precursor to a series of nationwide labor actions that would establish the United Auto Workers as a force to be reckoned with. As a 2016 article in the UAW’s Solidarity magazine put it: “It was in Atlanta where GM workers first used the sit-down strategy and built the momentum for the first major dispute in U.S. auto history.” This culminated in a 44-day strike in Flint, Michigan, that led GM to recognize the UAW as its negotiating partner.

(As John Ruch wrote for Saporta Report, “The UAW history is particularly relevant—which is to say, potentially embarrassing and threatening—today as the state of Georgia bends over backwards to lure a new generation of electric car manufacturers.” One of those, Rivian, is set to open a $5 billion plant east of Atlanta, buoyed by generous tax breaks—and, Ruch notes, “the unspoken attraction of non-union labor” in the South, where laws are less favorable to unions than in old-line labor strongholds like Michigan.

Unionization in the ongoing shift to electric vehicles is a key issue in the UAW’s present-day strike against three major automakers, which also has roots in Atlanta: The “stand-up strike” tactic the UAW is now employing is an explicit call-back to the sit-down strikes of the 1930s.

Canopy Atlanta · 2023

In a video released September 13, shortly before the 2023 strike began, UAW president Shawn Fain paid tribute to the legacy of the Flint workers: “In 1937, they occupied General Motors plants and set off an organizing firestorm in our country.”)

Shuttered since 2004, the historic Colonial Revival–style building that housed Lakewood Elementary was in the news in 2022, as Atlanta Public Schools, its owner, reversed plans to demolish it following pushback from the City and from preservationists. Its ultimate disposition remains an open question. Omar Ali, a Lakewood Heights developer, has expressed interest in turning it into housing.

Trammell could see it being available specifically for unhoused people, she says: “If they could open up the school and get some of those homeless people that are hanging around up in Lakewood Heights, sleeping on the sidewalks—I just don’t want to see it torn down.”

The school, like the neighborhood that surrounds it, could benefit from thoughtful development. Full of historic cottages and bungalows, old brick commercial buildings, and assorted churches, Lakewood Heights is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with the 2002 eligibility form citing the significance of the GM plant in the neighborhood’s development. That rich past is part of what attracted residents like Zachary Murray, who moved to Atlanta from Oakland in 2020. As chair of the Lakewood Heights Community Association, he helped convene a series of community meetings earlier this year to “capture a vision of what we want the neighborhood to be,” Murray says. “In particular, the commercial corridor at Jonesboro and Lakewood Avenue is not particularly thriving right now. It doesn’t meet the needs of all the residents.”

Dozens attended, with a variety of suggestions for neighborhood improvement: grocery stores, better pedestrian infrastructure, walkable access to South Bend Park, after-school activities, better public education, and restaurants. “Generally, folks want to see the things in this community that a lot of neighborhoods in Atlanta have,” Murray says.

Originally from Brooklyn, Lakewood Heights resident Duane Brooks moved to Atlanta in the 1990s and also has connections to the auto industry—he worked for a while as a forklift operator at Ford’s Hapeville plant. “I think we need incubation for tech and jobs, and job training, and green spaces, and safe food places,” Brooks says. “There’s nothing good in the convenience stores to eat. There’s no fresh meat, no fresh fruit, there’s probably not no fresh bread in there either. You’ll be lucky to find water and coconut water.”

As for the old plant itself? After sitting empty for decades, there’s been some movement: In 2022, real estate firm Origin Investments and developer Kaplan Residential purchased the site for $31.5 million, announcing plans to create the “largest mixed-use development” near the southern corridor of the Atlanta BeltLine: 2,000 multifamily residences, commercial space, a village center, several parks. Builders planned to break ground by the end of 2022; reps for Origin and Kaplan didn’t respond to requests for comment on the progress of the project.

Brooks still hopes, in any case, for some galvanizing force to fill the void left by the Lakewood Assembly—something he’s been thinking about since the plant closed. “Like with any relationship that goes sour, once you realize it’s real, you gotta prepare,” he says. “Or you’re gonna be sitting in the house alone in the dark with no furniture.”

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CONTRIBUTORS WEST END

ARTIST Sean Fahie

Dominique Harris Michael Rouse

COMMUNITY EDITORIAL BOARD Mr. Adassa Jocelyn Dorsey Jocelin Drake Houston Cecilia Houston-Torrence Terry Ross Robert Thompson Nichole James Vickers

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BANKHEAD COMMUNITY EDITORIAL BOARD Genia Billingsley Renita Johnson H.A. “Tony” Lawson Angy Moss FELLOWS Genia Billingsley Ann Hill Bond Nile Kendall Liberty Rudo Kimya Trotter PHOTOGRAPHERS Will Bridges Gavin Guidry Aboubacar Kante VIDEOGRAPHER Gavin Guidry WRITERS Adrian Coleman (Researcher) Emanuella Grinberg Nikishka Iyengar Christina Lee A.R. Shaw Ada Wood ARTISTS Sean Fahie Barbara Rego EDITOR Gavin Godfrey

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