(gentle music) - When you think of racial segregation, you may think of these images.

(tense upbeat music) But what about these images?

(horn honking) (upbeat music) Some people don't know the truth and some people may think it's a conspiracy, but the reality is that neighborhoods, streets, and highways across America have all been impacted by racism and segregation.

And in this episode, we're gonna investigate racial segregation in Atlanta from legislation.

- I'm gonna turn to the Ashley Ordinance, - Adopted 1913.

To individual actions within communities.

- Remove this community insult, a serious block on Atlanta's image.

(gentle music) ♪ Rise up from the wake of sleep ♪ ♪ Rise up, come out of the ground ♪ ♪ Rise up ♪ - [Dr. Maurice] There's no better way to understand history other than immersing yourself in the actual places where it unfolded.

♪ Oh rise up ♪ - [Victoria] From the archives to the streets of Atlanta, join us as we uncovered the hidden stories from Atlanta's past and how they impact today's future.

♪ Rise up, rise up ♪ ♪ Oh rise up ♪ - [Noah] With every question and new discovery, we all leave our mark (bright music) in "Re-Defining History."

(upbeat music) - [Presenter] This episode of "Re-Defining History" is brought to you by the Rich's Foundation.

(upbeat music) (lively music) - I am on my way to the History Center to meet with Paul Crater, and I am really excited to see what he has pulled that's all about Atlanta's racial zoning.

Especially the Ashley Ordinance, being able to see it and read it, see any other city council ordinances or kind of hard evidence that ties back to these racial zones in Atlanta, and also why the city looks the way it looks.

- Hey, Victoria, how are you?

- Nice to meet you.

- Nice to see you.

- I am so excited to be here.

- Good to hear.

- I have never been to the basement, only upstairs.

He has so much laid out on the table.

I am seeing two really huge books that look like city council meeting minutes, so I can't wait to open those up and see what I have inside.

There's a city directory book, tons of photographs, two full folders full of, I don't know what yet.

I have been looking into racial zoning history in Atlanta, and at least as far as I'm aware, black and white Atlantans, especially in the Fourth Ward, lived together on the same street.

They had strict rules, I think, about who lived in which houses.

But all of that really changes with the Ashley Ordinance.

And I've heard that you have a copy of the Ashley ordinance or the original.

- We do, in fact, have a copy in this book from Atlanta City Council.

This is Ordinance Book number 11.

This is from the Atlanta City Council, which covers legislation between 1910 and 1916.

- Wow.

I love the hand handwritten cover.

- Right.

- It's like an old textbook.

- It's quite old school.

So within this book, we have the actual copies of the legislation that was passed.

And I'm gonna turn to the Ashley Ordinance, which was passed.

- To 1913.

Before we go any further, I wanna give a little context about the Ashley Ordinance.

(people chattering) After the 1906 massacre, there is a lot of residential movement of black Atlantans into Auburn Avenue, further up into Auburn Avenue especially.

And you actually see the King family buy their home at this time, John Wesley Dobbs buys his home at this time, and that is making white neighbors from Jackson Hill really nervous, for lack of a better word.

They're concerned with what they're saying the streetcar is bringing in black residents to their neighborhood.

Morris Brown is right next door, which is an HBCU.

There's a black Catholic church that just opened down the street.

- That's right.

- That's right, yeah.

- And so these neighbors get together and decide, you know, how are we gonna keep this from happening?

So they elect one of their own neighbors, Claude Ashley, to city Council, and he introduces what is called the Ashley Ordinance.

And this is the first time Atlanta attempts to legalized racial zoning.

This is the actual typed up ordinance by Councilman Ashley.

And there's a section that has explicitly saying that black people could live in the alleys or live basically as domestic servants in some capacity.

- [Paul] That's right.

The goal was to prevent white people and black people from living side by side a forward facing street.

- Wow.

And this has a small amendment adopted June 16th, 1913 and approve, wow, approved the next day by Mayor Woodward.

And then, so they do this ordinance and would it be like recorded somewhere else?

- That's right.

It came out of the police committee, which was a committee for the city council, and they reported it out and here's a record of that.

- Oh, this one here.

A police committee made favorable report on the ordinance by Councilman Ashley providing for the separation of the white and colored races in residence sections.

- This piece of legislation was ruled unconstitutional by the Georgia Supreme Court, but the city council followed up with additional legislation in 1916.

- And what people don't realize is, even though they were deemed unconstitutional, when the city did approve those ordinances, they were arresting black people or kicking black people out of their homes.

So eventually the racialized languages deemed unconstitutional by the US government.

And what we do is you see the city start to change out racial words.

So instead of using explicit, let's say black or white, they're gonna start using housing typologies, apartments, more density, R1, R2.

And all of those things are coded language for racial words.

But because they're not using explicitly racial words, those warning ordinances are allowed to pass and stand, and really the ordinances that we still use today.

- So this is the 1916 legislation passed or submitted by Councilman Renfro.

- If I remember, the only difference here is that I think in the original white people were the deciders of whether a black was gonna be white or black.

- Correct.

- And then this change here is they decided to allow both races to decide.

Yes.

Wow.

Is that the photo of Morris Brown, right, the original campus?

- [Paul] Yes, this is a photograph taken around 1910.

- Oh, so the exact time.

- Right.

- Wow.

- So this illustrates the fact that Morris Brown College was then located in the Old Fourth Ward, - And this was Boulevard.

I think it's incredible for me to see how this really starts with white residents, you know, angry about something really, having these implicit racial beliefs.

But it translates into legislation, and you can see that all here with these tools of just, you know, there's no conjecture.

- So racial zoning takes place in a number of different ways in Atlanta for well over a century, and one of them is through legislation.

Another one is through the voluntary practices of individuals living in a particular area.

After World War II, there was a huge housing shortage in Atlanta in the 1930s and 1940s.

And so there was a housing shortage, in particular, for African Americans.

There was some effort to build houses in the outskirts of the city for black families, but for the most part, black families had to find decent housing in areas that were normally inhabited by white residents.

- Oh, white residents are not happy, I take it.

- White residents are not happy.

- We see that.

I'm assuming there's evidence of that as well.

- After World War II, into the 1950s, the area in East Atlanta, known as Moreland Heights, were experiencing the situation where black families were buying houses in a white neighborhood.

Lee Field, who served on the board of Alderman, wrote the Mayor William Hartsfield and said that he is requesting a biracial committee to handle what he's calling the Whitefoord Avenue situation.

- Okay.

- And this is a situation where African American families and black realtors are attempting to- - Sell and buy houses.

- Sell and buy houses.

- Wow, so he writes a letter to the mayor.

- Right, you can see here in this letter from 1957 to another Alderman that they've set the precedent to do this in other areas of the city.

He's mentioning Adamsville, Center Hill, Grove Park, the West End, Stewart Avenue.

There's countless examples in Atlanta of the city setting up these biracial committees to decide what parts of this particular neighborhood where white people live in and what parts black people will live.

There were a number of stakeholders involved, but over the years, the process for this particular area sort of broke down the biracial committee, a part of it.

And so white residents basically took things into their own hands and approached the city council with this ordinance.

This is saying that they are requesting that the street name, the street designated as Whitefoord Avenue, be changed to Memorial Terrace.

There's countless examples just as you're driving through the city.

- Yes.

Moreland and Briarcliff.

- In every street.

I mean, there's so many, - The street just magically changed its name.

And on many occasions, the cause of that is white residents wanting to change the name of the street.

- So they don't say they live on the same street as black residents.

- To disassociate themselves from black res.

And this is, you know, becomes law.

I mean, they passed this, - They passed this in 1961 to change the name from a section of Whitefoord Avenue.

- 1961.

Wow.

That is not long ago.

And so these are all the signatures.

And then you have, is this map shows us this street, like where they switched this?

- This part of East Atlanta where Memorial Drive intersects.

- So memorial seems to be the dividing line.

Is that what they did?

- Right, so you have Whitefoord Avenue running north and south, it hits Memorial Drive.

And then this is a pre 1961 map.

So you can see it's still Whitefoord Avenue, but this is the area that was changed.

- And is it still laying that today?

- Yes.

- I think for someone who lives on that street to understand that, right, there's a physical implication to all of this.

and we still have it.

This is to me why the archives are so exciting in a way, because there's so many documents here that really show you what these residents were thinking.

- The Peyton Road incident is the most notorious example of white residents wanting to basically build a buffer between them and black residents.

There was a situation in 1962 that sort of illustrated by this petition that the white residents of Peyton Forest, which is on the west side of Atlanta, wrote and pledged to themselves that they would not sell their house to a black family.

- This though then leave sort of a neighborhood, kind of like we said, interpersonal hatred situation, but it becomes a reality.

How do they do this?

- Well, they're petitioning the Mayor, Ivan Allen, to do something about it.

- Okay.

- And so in November of 1962, the mayor receives this memo from one of his aides.

And the aide is saying that a white homeowner, Foster Eugene Bennett, has sold his property on Fielding Lang to Clinton Warner, a negro who- - [Victoria] Presently lived in Collier Heights.

- Right, this aide is basically saying that you need to take immediate action to see that Dr. Warner does not move in.

He says explicitly, "Because there will be trouble."

- There will be trouble.

Wow.

And this is a memo to the mayor.

- This sets the mayor in a course of action to develop what he sees as a compromise, because there's all kinds of areas in Atlanta that are zoned for industry, and he wants to make 250 acres of this development available for African American families to live in.

But he also wants to block off Peyton Road as a sign to African American real estate agents- - Don't cross.

- That don't cross that line.

- [Victoria] Close Peyton Road and Harlan Road.

- I find it difficult to resolve in my own thinking, and I have attempted to do this for several days, the wisdom of establishing a precedent of cutting off streets.

If we cut off streets in the Seventh Ward in this section, there's no reason in the world why people living in other parts of the city who are experiencing the same situations cannot come before this board or a committee of this board and ask for the same thing.

I seriously questioned the legality of it.

- So as you can imagine, there was a huge outcry about this.

Atlanta had built itself up as a city too busy to haze and had a stellar reputation.

There are telegrams sent to the mayor, like this one.

This telegram was sent- - [Victoria] Oh, from Atlanta University students.

- [Paul] For Atlanta University students.

Saying that they will protest this action and send pickets.

- This says 175 picketers per day.

We will stage demonstrations at the city hall with no less than 1500 students.

This is amazing.

- A few months later, a local court struck down this law or this action.

So the barricades were taken down just a few months later.

- All these examples really show how the physical legacy of racial zoning is still here.

You know, we still have this street name changed.

I mean, these roads still exist while the barricade doesn't maybe exist.

It's like these houses are still here where those neighbors lived, you know, the corner of the Ashley ordinance.

And so, I mean, my next step is I'm just gonna go out to these places 'cause I really wanna stand in this space.

And this was so helpful.

- I think in this sort of investigation, it's obviously very important to delve into the documents, to understand exactly what was happening on the ground in terms of integration in Atlanta.

But then by going to these actual spots where these battles were fought over, it tends to really bring it home.

- So we just saw the Ashley ordinances at the History Center, and I decided to come out to the Old Fourth Ward, to the spot where all of this took place.

We are at the corner of John Wesley Dobbs, which used to be Houston Street, and Boulevard.

And at this time, Freedom Parkway wasn't there so it's a busy intersection now.

Jackson Hill is a neighborhood that's behind me, originally part of the Fourth Ward, because we weren't calling it the Old Fourth Ward at that time.

Across the street, on the corner is the white church where the Jackson Hill residents met.

And the neighbors actually gathered in the same church and they decided that they were gonna form what they called a vigilance committee.

The original campus of Morris Brown is here to my left.

Now, Morris Brown took up at least two city blocks, and it was formed in 1885, and so it had been here for a long time.

It's the first HBCU started by black people in comparison to Spelman or Morehouse.

And so this really kicks off the worries of the residents.

And then Sweet Auburn is in the distance in front of me.

This is the epicenter of black Atlanta, (jazz music) black churches, black businesses, black entertainment.

It is just a magical place for black people at Atlanta.

So black life and black progress, it's just too close for comfort for the Jackson Hill community.

As we learned at the Atlanta History Center, although the ordinances that they wrote were deemed unconstitutional, what we see take place is a veiling of racial language, which leads us to the community landscape we currently have today.

(gentle music) Racial language is hidden in the residential land zones such as R1 and R2.

This type of zoning was a way to restrict areas by economic status and thus race.

Once we've created these clusters of low income black communities, the city government continued to not invest in them.

And then by the 1960s we see the slum clearance projects.

(gentle music) Slum clearance is just one example of the discrimination and displacement that stemmed from racial zoning.

This cause and effect legacy isn't unique to Atlanta.

It stretches far beyond the city's borders.

There was racial zoning in many US cities like Charleston, Birmingham, Indianapolis, New Orleans, and Baltimore.

They all attempted to put racial legislation in place.

And although they were met with legal challenges, you could still see the impact through all kinds of housing discrimination.

With the passing of the Fair Housing Act, also known as the Open Housing law of 1968, redlining and other forms of housing discrimination were prohibited.

(gentle music) However, it did not put an end to voluntary acts of racial segregation and housing such as white flight.

As black Atlantans sought homes, they too desired access to various neighborhoods, including affluent areas.

It wasn't an intentional pursuit of white communities, but rather a deliberate move into thriving desirable communities.

- I think that the open housing law, after the initial impact, if we get one, we gotta get it outta the house and then get the thing approved will be the number one thing.

As long as the white people have anywhere to run, they're going to run, I'm afraid.

I wish I didn't have to say that, but I think it's the truth.

And I think that the only hope is to open up housing everywhere, in every community, in every city, county, state, borough, and branch head where the white people just can't run.

I think until we reach that point, we won't resolve the problem.

- White flight was one of the many faces of racial zoning in Atlanta.

(gentle music) I'm gonna go check out the West End, because that neighborhood started as a exclusively white neighborhood and then became a historically black neighborhood.

(upbeat music) The history of the West End actually starts with a neighborhood called White Hall.

There's a man named Charner Humphries and he owned a tavern that's over near where the West End Mall is today.

And it's fascinating to see how this neighborhood got developed and really changed.

So that happens after the Civil War.

You have white developers that own streetcar lines and they wanted to market this as a neighborhood.

And so they really did purposeful things.

They ended up making the area much smaller, and that meant excluding the HBCUs to the north, Fort McPherson area to the south.

And this pretty much excluded all black people that were living in the White Hall settlement, and they rebranded it as the West End.

They then named all the streets after confederate generals that signaled to who they wanted to live here.

And so post 1870, the West End became what they wanted.

It was an exclusive wealthy white suburb.

It became a little bit more upper middle class in the later years of the 20th century.

But the West End from the beginning has always been really a hotbed for a lot of racial zoning issues, residential integration.

You see that in Sells Avenue.

Westview Drive was considered a dividing line.

And even Interstate I-20.

Interstate 20 is very much well known as a racial dividing line that the white community asked former Mayor Hartsfield to have.

(gentle music) It's really in 1960s, specifically around school desegregation, that you see the final white flight.

Atlanta schools did not begin desegregation until 1961 and did not complete it until 1965.

And that is really when you see this huge white flight exodus from most Atlanta suburbs, especially in the West end, where families just leave and some places overnight.

(upbeat music) So now the West End is considered a historic African American neighborhood.

It has been for the last 50 years or so, but it's changing.

Now it's businesses and restaurants and things like that, the Beltline coming in.

So it's just interesting to see how the neighborhood is changing again and how will it change and who will it affect.

So we've been to the History Center and we've seen the documents, we've got to read the Ashley ordinance, see the evidence.

And we know now, you know, that Atlanta, the way it is is not an accident.

And so we were racially segregated, economically segregated.

And I'm curious, you know, how can we make this more equitable for all Atlantans?

How can we make Atlanta more accessible for people from different economic backgrounds?

I'm meeting up with Courtney English, the City of Atlanta's Chief Policy Officer.

I want to hear his take on how the city understands and responds to its history of racial zoning.

Hi Courtney.

- Hey, how are you?

- Good to see you.

- It's good to be here.

- The first thing I really wanna know is, does the city of Atlanta know this history?

- Well, the short answer is yes.

And, you know, Atlanta has a history of really being a tale of two cities.

On one hand, you know, we talk about being a city too busy to hate, and we've got the 1996 Olympics in the world's busiest and most efficient airport, and so many other things that we tell, major sporting event, world cups, Super Bowl.

- World Cup's coming, yeah.

- All that kind of stuff.

And it's great.

I mean, we have the eighth highest concentration of Fortune 500 companies.

And simultaneously, we are near the top in terms of child poverty.

We're near the bottom in terms of economic mobility, but we have one of the widest wage gaps between black families and white families than anywhere else in the entire country.

And those statistics are really a byproduct of a history of candidly just racist policy that has continued to play the city and just generated some really unfortunate results for far too many residents.

- Yes.

And with zoning, I wonder too, you know, how do you see these very racist, clearly racist, you know, zoning policies from 100 years ago plus, what do they look like today in Atlanta?

- It's still very, very, very segregated.

And so, you know, when you're out at a restaurant or at a mall or where you work, it might look, you know, like the United Nations and then we all kind of go back to our own little corners of the universe.

I always say that when you segregate based on economics, you get race for free.

And so we absolutely have concentrated poverty in certain areas of the city.

Those are areas are directly aligned with the racial makeup of the city.

And again, you're churning out these negative impacts, whether it almost doesn't matter the statistic that you look at, whether it's educational attainment, home ownership, car ownership, healthcare disparities, third grade reading scores, incarceration rates, it literally doesn't matter.

- It matches up.

- It literally lines up exactly with how the city was divided.

And it's highly unfortunate.

Perhaps the most damning of those stats is life expectancy.

If you look at an area like Bankhead or Hollowell Highway, I'm born and raised.

Yeah, yeah.

- I still say.

- Okay.

Okay.

I'm not really from here and I call it Bankhead.

- All right.

All right.

- So we'll go back.

(laughs) - So we're on the same page.

Yeah , you know, depending on who we talk to.

- I thought Hollowell Parkway.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No.

And they concentrated black folks in those colored areas intentionally, and they built warehouses and industrial space around them with no transit and likely no access to educational opportunity and designated those areas for multifamily only.

Not only that, it was nearly impossible for you to get a home loan in those areas.

And those were, you know, intentional decisions made again in the early 20th century that still plague us today.

And because they were intentional decisions, we can't just ignore 'em, because they will require intention to fix them.

And the truth of it is, the system today no longer requires someone to be actively prejudice.

It is absolute systemic.

- Exactly.

Yeah.

- All the system today requires is your silence and your inaction.

And again, it will still spit out those same results over and over and over again unless people of good conscience make different policy decisions.

- What is the city trying to do - For us, it means, one, ensuring that every single neighborhood is healthy and whole.

And that means making sure we have access to affordable housing in all of our neighborhoods throughout the city.

So I think we're at a point now where we can protect the character of our neighborhoods and expand development and keep legacy residents in place all at the same time.

We don't have to choose.

We protect our legacy residents through programs like on occupied rehab through paying off back taxes, by expanding the city's Anti-Displacement Tax Fund.

We are working every single day to try to undo and remove those barriers that have been created by those policies and build a brighter future for every single person who calls the city home.

- Racial zoning is structural, so sometimes it feels really immovable or like we can't make any changes, but we've learned that that's not true.

It's just gonna take really intentional change and a lot of policy change.

I'm really proud that the city of Atlanta knows their past and they're ready to move forward by making changes with policy and zoning rewrites.

Racial zoning isn't what it was 100 years ago.

It's continued to evolve, but we're still gonna be able to study it and hope for a more equitable future.

And that's what I love about history is that it gives us a chance to redefine how we see the past, but then reimagine how we're gonna see our future.

(screen swooshing) (bright music) - [Presenter] This episode of "Re-Defining History" is brought to you by the Rich's Foundation, (upbeat music) (bright music) - [Voiceover] W-A-B-E. (bright music)