Atlanta Citizenship and Housing, Success and Setback
That Georgia turned “blue” to help deliver the U.S. presidency to the Biden-Harris ticket in November followed by the two Democratic wins in the nail-biter of a Senate runoff election two months later might have seemed to indicate the sudden emergence of a New Georgia (Figure 1). But the reaction from Georgia’s conservative lawmakers was nearly immediate. At the end of March, Republican governor Brian Kemp signed state Senate Bill 202, a new voting law designed to disenfranchise Democratic leaning groups, like African Americans. Yet again Georgia’s racial equity activists must win back the assets of democracy that should accrue by right.
This pattern—one step forward, one step back (or more)—reflects a longstanding cycle of reprisal against racial progress in Georgia and other states in the U.S. South. Countervailing white supremacist policies run through the state’s history, most famously in the Jim Crow laws that followed Reconstruction. But they also appear in the arena of my current research: public housing in the twentieth century.
Figure 1. Political lawn signs in Democratic-leaning DeKalb County, Georgia, January 2021. Photographs by Christina E. Crawford.
Atlanta was the site of the two first slum clearance and public housing projects funded by the federal government in the United States: the racially segregated Techwood Homes (1936, for white families) and University Homes (1937, for Black families) (Figure 2). It is also the city in which I live and vote.
My goal in this article is twofold. In my role as historian, I sketch the founding story of University Homes, which features two moments in which Black advocacy in segregated New Deal Atlanta resulted in material progress. In my role as citizen, I reflect that the story of University Homes also reveals the cyclical pattern of setbacks that seem to perpetually emerge in the wake of such racial justice achievements.
Figure 2. Map of Atlanta Housing Authority housing projects. Red hatches indicate “slum” areas; pink areas indicate the two PWA projects—University Homes (U) and Techwood Homes (T); and dark red areas are later Atlanta Housing Authority projects. Atlanta Housing Authority, Rebuilding Atlanta. First Annual Report, 1939. Reproduced with permission of the Atlanta Housing Archives.
In the 1930s, at the dawn of public housing in the United States, the West Side of Atlanta was home to the institutions of higher education that compose the Atlanta University Center (AUC), a powerhouse consortium of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). (AUC remains there today.) Despite these extraordinary neighbors, Black residents of the area’s Beaver Slide neighborhood, subject to Jim Crow rental practices, paid higher than average rents for housing that was poorly maintained and unconnected to city infrastructure (Figure 3). Street hydrants provided water for cooking and bathing, and few houses had their own privies.
According to standard metrics, including density and access to utilities, Beaver Slide was a slum. But as W. E. B. Du Bois (then chair of Atlanta University’s Sociology Department) and his students determined, it had a “stable, black working-class” population. Many residents were even middle-class: families who could have afforded housing elsewhere but whose choices were limited by de facto race-based tenancy restrictions throughout the city.
Then came University Homes. In 1933, the city’s Black intellectual and business elite crafted a shared vision for an affordable and modern neighborhood to replace Beaver Slide, one geared toward upwardly mobile West Side families who would benefit from proximity to the institutions of higher learning (Figure 4). As Du Bois noted, the area was “an inner community surrounded by beauty with unusual chances for intellectual and social contact” between the academics and tenants. After approving draft plans developed by white Atlanta architectural firm, Edwards & Sayward, AUC President John Hope drew up a pro forma under the masthead of the Corporation for Improvement of Negro Housing, assembled a biracial board of trustees, and successfully applied for funding through the nation’s first peacetime public housing program, administered by the Housing Division of FDR’s new Public Works Administration (PWA). The project, with 675 apartments and built at a cost of $2.5 million, opened four years later.
Figure 3. Beaver Slide neighborhood, future site of University Homes, with Spelman College in the background, c. 1935. Courtesy of U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
Figure 4. Construction of University Homes, c. 1936. The Spelman College campus is at the bottom righthand corner of the photo; Atlanta University is at the top left. Charles F. Palmer papers, Box 167, Folder 10. Courtesy of the Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.
But not before the first setback: the failure to include space to support social programs. Prior to the design of University Homes, AUC president Hope had solicited faculty suggestions for cooperative programs between the colleges and the new housing. Faculty proposed activities to lift the future residents to respectable middle-class status while also cautioning against heavy-handed management. Based on these recommendations, the University Homes Advisory Board pushed the PWA to include a dedicated community building on the site. But PWA officials in Washington, D.C., rejected the idea. Architect Sayward, on their orders, instead provided a building with commercial and office space, and no room for the proposed activities.
The community pushed back. Upon opening, the Administration Building, as the commercial structure was called, became the responsibility of the project’s Assistant Housing Manager, Alonzo Moron, a Brown University graduate, social worker, and future president of the Hampton Institute. In the hands of Moron and his staff—with help from local women activists of the Neighborhood Union (a Black settlement house), AUC faculty, and social work students—the project secured more funds from Washington and transformed the second floor into an auditorium and recreation center. The building was renamed Roosevelt Hall in the 1940s.
The renovation was hugely important for the tenants and, by extension, Atlanta’s West Side Black community. In one post-renovation week, University Homes residents saw doctors in Roosevelt Hall’s clinic, danced in the auditorium at a Halloween Ball, met for a debate hosted by the project’s Young Men’s Social Club, and played ping-pong, whist, and bridge, while WPA supervisors guided recreational activities for neighborhood children (Figure 5). As urban planner Akira Drake Rodriguez argues in her new book, public housing projects like University Homes, and spaces like Roosevelt Hall, served as critically dense sites of social and political tenant action that exceeded even original advocates’ visions.
If University Homes marked a fundamental turn in the relationship between Atlanta’s Black community and the state, progress was short-lived. To begin, while University Homes met the desires of Black activists to build a model middle-class neighborhood in their midst, the location suited Atlanta’s white elite because it did nothing to challenge the city’s racial geography. Indeed, it was squarely within the “Black” section of town designated by the city’s zoning plan of 1922 (ruled unconstitutional in 1924) (Figure 6).
Figure 5. University Homes and John Hope Homes children on the Roosevelt Hall stage, c. 1940s. Reproduced with permission of the Atlanta Housing Archives.
Figure 6. Tentative Zone Plan, Atlanta, City Planning Commission, 1922. Atlanta University Center and Beaver Slide areas in the proposed R2 (“Colored”) Race District, indicated by black circle added by author. Courtesy of Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center map collection.
More important, Atlanta, like every U.S. city, was in the process of being redlined. In the mid-1930s, the New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) began creating residential security maps that would allow it to assess the performance of its loans. HOLC Area D17, that included the AUC and University Homes, was noted to be the “best negro area in Atlanta” with the “highest percentage of negro home ownership.” Despite this positive qualitative assessment, it was graded “D” (the lowest rating for residential sections) and shaded red (Figure 7). As historian LeeAnn Lands explains, all of Atlanta’s Black neighborhoods were assigned this rating, even when, as in the case of D17, appraisers noted that if race were not a factor they “would rate as a high B grade, or possibly a low A grade.” Soon, the federal government was cautioning private lenders to “refuse to make loans in these areas [or] only on a conservative basis,” making it nearly impossible for buyers to access mortgage financing anywhere on the West Side for the next several decades.
Figure 7. Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Map of Atlanta, 1937. Atlanta University Center and Beaver Slide areas indicated by black circle added by author. Courtesy of Mapping Inequality.
It also made it difficult for tenants to leave. PWA residential construction was intended to be transitional “up and out” housing rather than permanent homes for low-income families. But redlining along with older forms of segregation meant that the housing could only function that way for white residents. Techwood, Atlanta’s white project, experienced early high turnover as occupants improved their economic status and qualified for other kinds of housing, including private houses purchased on generous terms through loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and, after World War II, the Veterans Administration. This was much harder for the Black families at University Homes. Even if redlining were not a problem, racially restrictive covenants, all but mandated by FHA’s Underwriting Manual, were—even once declared unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1948. Some middle-class Black tenants who moved into University Homes in the 1930s were still there in the 1970s.
Repeated in city after city, this racialized pattern contributed to the stigmatization of public housing and, in turn, severe underfunding. Excluded from much of the private market, tenants of University Homes thus became unwitting participants not in a program of racial uplift but in a vicious downward cycle.
Eventually, this chronic neglect of basic maintenance led Atlanta to another “first”: the federal HOPE VI program. Established to “eradicate severely distressed public housing,” it was piloted in Atlanta in 1993. By 2009 University Homes, along with all of the city’s large-scale public housing projects for families, had been demolished. Most were replaced with privately built, owned, and managed mixed-income developments.
In the difficult pandemic and presidential election year of 2020—trauma from which has slid into 2021—the present that I experience as a citizen has felt eerily convergent with the New Deal past that I am sifting through as a scholar. Over breakfast I read Atlanta Journal Constitution coverage of the efforts of Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight Action and other Georgia-based advocacy groups to demand access to voting, representation, and resources for the city’s Black population. Then I sit at my desk and read letters from the 1930s by extraordinary faculty at Atlanta University that urged federal authorities to renovate the University Homes Administration Building to include the community spaces that Black tenants deserved. Political activism—necessitated by persistent inequities—defines both moments.
Today, Atlanta has virtually no public housing as conventionally understood, meaning governmentally constructed and owned rental housing for families. And the city’s racial geography is remarkably similar to that of the 1930s. But despite persistent efforts to contain the city’s Black citizens, to keep African Americans in their place, the two recent elections have proven that their voices are not so easily silenced.
Author’s note: Funding for this research comes from a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.
