Reflections, 2020 December

Volume XVI, No. 4 December 2020
David Kenneth Pye, PhD., Special Contributor
Excerpt from “Complex Relations: African American Attorney Navigates Jim Crow Atlanta,” The Georgia Historical Quarrterly, 2007
Attorney AT Walden Galvanized, Solidified Atlanta’s Black Vote
rights years ignores the dissension he faced within civic
organizations and the social complexity of the black
community. The years 1924 to 1936, Walden headed the
Atlanta branch of the NAACP. By 1936, Walden, who
still headed many other civic organizations, and received
a position on the national NAACP board, seemed
unperturbed by his loss of the [local] directorship and
began focusing more on regaining the franchise for
blacks. In fact, to him, access to the ballot was the
only assured way for blacks to gain and subsequently
maintain equality and fair treatment in Atlanta
courtrooms.2

2 Westley Wallace Law, interview with Clifford Kuhn and Timothy Crimmins, November 15 and 16, 1990, GGDP, Series E, Box 2, 168, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta.
The Atlanta that Austin Thomas and Mary Ellen
Walden encountered upon their arrival in 1919 was
one still simmering from the infamous 1906 race
riot. The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and its aftermath affected
black society by instilling a new, more rigid demarcation
between the races. For black lawyers, this period of
increased racial separation proved devastating for a
group already limited in number. The actual number of
black lawyers in the early twentieth century is unknown,
because many blacks with legal training never practiced
law for lack of clients. The United States Census Reports
of 1910 and 1920 listed the number of black attorneys in
Atlanta at six.
Despite these obstacles, Attorney Walden still desired
to practice law in Atlanta. Walden, who had begun his
career as a criminal defense lawyer before winning some
respect from the white bar and judiciary, 1
was perhaps
the only black man in 1927 who could stand in a Georgia
courtroom and forward an argument for a black citizen
against the police force.
Partly because of his stature as the only black man
practicing law in the courts, black Atlanta accepted
Walden as one of its leaders. Though he fought
dogmatically for black rights, Walden never openly
challenged white southerners’ superior social position.
It always seemed that Walden was working within the
limits placed by whites. At the same time, throughout the
early part of his career, the majority of black Atlantans
did hold Walden in high esteem--many because he was a
black man who dared argue against whites in court. For
Walden, his success in the black world was partly due
to his legal training. Yet, the traditional view of Walden
as the primary leader of black Atlanta in the pre-civil
1 Osgood Williams, interview with Clifford Kuhn, May 12, 1988 as part of
Georgia Government Documentation Project (GGDP). P1988-15, Series B.
Public Figures, Georgia Government Documentation Project, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta.
Austin “A.T.” Walden (left) with Horace T. Ward (no date).
Source: Georgia State University Special Collections, Atlanta
Journal-Constitution Photographic Archives. Fair Use/
Educational
Historic Preservation Division
2
David Kenneth Pye continued from page 1
Attorney AT Walden Galvinzed, Solidified Atlanta’s Black Vote
To mitigate the “hell” blacks experienced in Atlanta prior
to the civil rights movement, Walden, a Democrat since
the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John
Wesley Dobbs, a staunch Republican for life, settled their
ideological differences and formed the bipartisan Atlanta
Negro Voters League (ANVL) in 1949. The ANVL’s intent
was to organize the entire black community into one
voting bloc that the city’s
white power structure could
no longer ignore.
Before 1949, Atlanta’s blacks,
along with all blacks in
Georgia and the South, had
no vote in local elections.
Though the United States
Constitution protected the
black franchise, southern
legislatures found ingenious
ways to circumvent the law
and render the black vote
ineffectual. Those blacks who
somehow managed to avoid
this official harassment and
registered still had to deal
with the extralegal terrorism
of the Ku Klux Klan, the
Blackshirts, and various other
entities designed to make
the voting process less than
pleasant for blacks.
In the South, a region where
Republicans had hardly ever
won elections since Recon- struction, the general elec- tion was a moot point. As
for Georgia, the Democratic
Party continued its whiteonly primary until 1946’s
Chapman v. King, in which
the United States Supreme
Court, following the prec- edent set in Texas (1944),
ruled specifically against the
Georgia white [only] primary.
Owing to a myriad of ob- stacles designed to keep them
from voting, registered black
Atlantans numbered only 958
in 1935, representing only six percent of the total regis- tered population.3
As historian Ronald H. Bayor notes, black Atlanta’s leaders
knew it was time for action because “a voteless people is a
helpless people.” 4
3 Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p.18.
4 Ibid., p. 24.
Mayor William Berry Hartsfield further exacerbated the
urgency of Walden’s desire to register more blacks when he
uttered his now famous reply to the black leader’s request
for streetlights in the community: “Get 10,000 black voters
and come back then.” So, in 1949, excited by the Chap- man v. King decision, Walden co-founded and co-chaired
the ANVL to increase the number of black voters, to end
partisanship among black leaders, and to make Mayor
Hartsfield responsible to black citi- zens. To Walden, these efforts all had
the overall goal of producing equality
before the law.
Walden, who had served as a local
civil defense air raid patrolman during
World War II, possessed intricate
knowledge of every corner of Atlanta’s
black neighborhoods. He used this
fact to assist the voter registration
campaign by asking the same people
who had served as block wardens for
civil defense during the war to serve
as block captains for the ANVL.5

These captains held the responsibility
of registering their people and making
sure they got to the polls on election
day. Most acquiesced and the ANVL
quickly registered 10,000 blacks for the
1949 primary election.
This election pitted the incumbent
mayor, William Berry Hartsfield, against
his longtime nemesis, Fulton County
Commissioner Charlie Brown. Blacks
refused to offer unsubstantiated loyalty
to any white candidate. It became
known that any white candidate for
office would have to win the black vote
just the same as he did the white vote:
through actions and keeping promises.
Walden and Dobbs requested that
both candidates meet with the ANVL
at the Butler Street YMCA to discuss
the issues. Hartsfield, cognizant of the
ANVL’s power to sway the black vote,
agreed, but Charlie Brown, hoping
to gain votes from whites who felt
Hartsfield had already done too much
for blacks, declined the invitation. 6
Using the bloc vote strategy to prevent
a white backlash against the black favorite, blacks helped
5 See in general Michael Sherry In the Shadow of War: the United States
Since the 1930’s (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1995) for a discussion of
wartime mobilization and how it spread into peacetime mobilization for various
purposes. Also see Steven Lawson Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South,
1944-1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 65, 102-103, which
considers the Double V campaign of returning black war veterans who sought
victory in Europe and back home in the US against racism.
6 Bayor, p. 26.
The Atlanta Negro Voter League in front of Butler
Street YMCA. Source: New Georgia Encyclopedia. org
Fair Use/ Educational
A.T. Walden’s law office stand next to Butler YMCA.
The names of his staff attorneys including Rachel
Pruden Herndon are still etched on the windows.
Credit: Melissa Jest/ HPD
3
win the election for Hartsfield. ANVL Secretary John
H. Calhoun stated in a report one month following the
election that “10,000 Negroes voted in the primary, and
at least 8,500 of them cast their votes in favor of Mr.
Hartsfield…The fact that he gained only 2,800 more votes
than…Mr. Charlie Brown, clearly indicates the effect of
the Negro vote.” 7
Following their meeting, Walden told Hartsfield that the
ANVL backed only those white candidates willing to take
the political risk of visiting the black community and
voicing support for black causes.8
Throughout his long
tenure in office, Hartsfield won the black vote repeatedly
with Walden by his side, thus demonstrating that blacks
held the balance of power in these Mayoral elections. 9
It was the organized structure of the ANVL, led by
Walden’s old civil defense plan that assigned voting
captains to every block in the black community, that
forced all future mayoral candidates to listen to black
concerns. In this respect, A.T. Walden helped transform
Atlanta’s political, social, and economic history by making
the black vote a force politicians could not ignore.
Being Atlanta’s only black lawyer for many years and
leading the Negro Voters
League propelled Walden
to even greater stature.
Throughout the first half
of the twentieth century,
white city officials chose to
deal with only a handful of
select representatives from
the black community. 10
Respected, to some extent,
by both blacks and whites,
Walden became one of
these liaisons between the
races.
Furthermore, in his
dealings with the white
power structure, Walden’s
approach was definitely
nonconfrontational, a
fact that would eventually
endanger his credibility
with more militant blacks.
As is true of the black professional class in general during
the Jim Crow era, Walden’s role is fraught with ambiguity.
During the 1961 sit-in crisis in which students from
the historically black Atlanta University College staged
demonstrations in downtown eating establishments, city
7 Report of Executive Secretary, September 23, 1949, A.T. Walden Papers,
Series 7, Folder 4. Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University
Library, Atlanta.
8 A.T. Walden, letter to William Berry Hartsfield, August 13, 1949, Hartsfield
Papers, Box 9.
9 Barbara Fields makes this point about the exclusion of blacks from southern
politics actually demonstrating the power they held between two competing
white groups in “Origins of the New South and the Negro Question,” in The
Journal of Southern History v.67, no.4, Nov. 2001, 813.
10 Floyd Hunter, Community Power Succession: Atlanta’s Policy-Makers Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 49-50.
officials, unable to negotiate with the militant students,
called upon Walden, a trusted leader, to diffuse the
situation. While younger leaders continued pressing for
immediate desegregation of the Rich’s Department Store
lunch counters, Walden began private negotiations with
Mayor Hartsfield, Robert Troutman, and Rich’s owner,
Richard Rich.
Students began to plan a new round of sit-ins despite the
settlement agreement signed by Walden. Witnessing his
rapidly declining appeal among the masses, Walden begged
the students to accept the agreement in a speech given at
Warren Methodist Church near Atlanta University. It finally
took an impassioned plea from Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., who was in attendance, to quiet the jeering students.
Though the students eventually honored the settlement
agreement, they did so unfortunately out of respect for
King, not Walden.
Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr., as a gesture of goodwill, placed A.T.
Walden on the bench as a Municipal Traffic Court Judge in
1964. Sadly, Walden died a year later.
The Atlanta Daily World, usually considered a conservative
black newspaper, printed an
editorial recalling Walden’s
legal career. On Walden’s life
as a southern black man of
unquestionable talent, Coleman
argued that Walden should have
served on the United States
Supreme Court rather than settle
for a minor traffic court position,
which never allowed him the
opportunity to sit on the bench.
Coleman continued by writing that,
“He was not justly honored. He
should have been much more. This
life is such a waste, your sad heart
cries.” 11
For somewhat militant blacks in
the late 1960s, A.T. Walden’s life
became a metaphor for the limited
prospects blacks faced in the
South.
Dr. Pye is an independant scholar who holds a PhD from the
University of California, San Diego.
The Georgia Historical Quarterly is published quarterly by the
Georgia Historical Society. The Georgia Historical Society has
published the Quarterly continuously since 1917.
For more information on the quarterly, visit https://georgiahistory.
com/publications-scholarship/the-georgia-historical-quarterly/
Permission granted by Managing Editor Stan Deaton.
11 George Coleman, Atlanta Daily World, July 4, 1965, p. 4.
A.T. Walden being sworn in as judge of the Atlanta Muncipal
Court, Feburary 3, 1964 by Mayor Ivan Allen.
Source: New Georgia Encyclopedia.org, Courtesy of the
Atlatnta Journal-Condistution. Fair Use/ Educational
4
Humble Living in a Georgia Mountain Town - Stephens County
Nedra Deadwyler, Contributor
African American Programs Assistant
Named after Toccoa Falls, 1
Toccoa had been a
destination for various Native groups such as the
Mississippi, Cherokee, and Catawbas Tribal Nations who
lived in the region long before whites settled in the area.2
Most Blacks in Toccoa migrated from the surrounding
rural areas where their families were formerly enslaved
and then worked as sharecroppers until the early 1930s
after the boll weevil destroyed cotton fields across the
state.3
Stephens County native Larry Gholston recalls
stories of when his paternal grandparents moved to
Toccoa from Franklin County. “My grandmother
brought her chickens and my grandfather insisted on
bringing his mule,” he said. His aunt had a garden and
a chicken coop, and his uncle built the house where his
grandparents lived. At 86 years of age, his late aunt knew
what herbs worked for homemade remedies to keep the
family healthy.
As Southern cotton industry struggled back from the
boll weevil infestation of the 1920s and 30s and the
Great Depression, manufacturing made its way from the
North and Midwest. “They brought jobs, yes. But most
Blacks [here] couldn’t get those jobs, Gholston said. His
mother may have been considered one of the lucky ones
as she worked at Wrights Manufacturing, also known as
Morona Sports, making and pressing men’s pants.
1 Kathryn Trogdon. History of Stephens County Georgia, 1715- 1972.
Toccoa Womans Club. 1973, 181- 182.
2 Elizabeth B. Cooksey. "Stephens County".New Georgia Encyclopedia.
org.July 2005 https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/countiescities-neighborhoods/stephens-county. Accessed November 6, 2020
3 Larry Gholston, interview with Nedra Deadwyler, September 17,
2020. Notes filed with Interviewer.
He said, his mother “made production” in a factory
where both Blacks and Whites worked on the factory
floor together during the legal racial segregation.
Gholston shared about his grandfather who raised hogs
for the Ginn Family in Carnesville. The Ginn family also
owned the local funeral home there. His grandfather was
hired to raise the hogs for sale and slaughter. Gholston
said Black folks would use the parts of the hogs the
whites did not want-pig feet, ears, brains and intestines.
Some even made a congealed dish from the head called
hog head cheese, he added. In the Carnesville area,
families such as the Gillespies, the Carnes, and the
Seegers would plant 30 + acres of cotton and hire Black
sharecroppers to harvest it. They were paid for each
pounds they picked, only to turn around and give all the
money back to Whites who owned the local store and the
housing. Sharecropping created a system of unchecked
racialized economic domination that disenfranchised
Black people.4
Gholston described how the families he knew celebrated
life despite living in poverty. “During those days, many
Blacks did not consider themselves as being poor. They
were working people who lived by sharing with others.
Community was a verb,” he said. The Black church
was central to this communal way of life. According to
Gholston, the earliest Black churches in the Toccoa area
were Fair Play (founded in 1850), Greater Hope Baptist
(1877), and Mt. Zion Baptist (1899), founded by enslaved
individuals and later sharecroppers who worked the
land in Banks, Franklin, and Stephens counties. He said
church kitchens served as shared food pantries and a
place for group activities like canning and quilting.
4 "Sharecropping,"Equal Justice Initative, Nov 8, 2019. http://eji.org/
history-racial-injustice-sharecropping. Accessed November 6, 2020.
Coats & Clarke Inc. still packages sewing thread in Toccoa.
This former plant stands vacant. Credit: Melissa Jest/HPD
Larry Gholston works to save historic sites like Arnolds Chapel
School in Franklin County. Credit: Melissa Jest/HPD
5
Woodruffs and the Gholstons. As for famous Toccoans, he
noted that Bobby Bird who played with music icon James
Brown built his first wife’s home in Toccoa, and native son
Dale Davis, former center for the Indiana Pacers NBA
team who maintains tie there. Gholston also credited
the ingenuity of Black women, who were led in the
community and in their homes, and who prevailed in the
absence of their men. Many Black women left the fields
for the city and found regular work as a domestic workers,
he said. These women were able to persist because they
supported and cooperated with each other.
By remembering the “old ways”, one can learn how to
be independent and self-sustaining which are relevant
lessons Gholston wants to keep alive for the generations
yet to come. He founded the Cultural and Historical
Society of Banks, Franklin, and Stephens Counties
two years ago to present the rich and complex legacies
of Black life to young audiences. Instead of asking
youth to shoulder a history focused on enslavement,
the Society seeks to promote an enduring culture of
ingenuity, cooperation, and pride in the face of sustained
oppression.
Telling stories about foodways traditions, the spiritual
traditions of sharecropper churches and their field songs
that date to the mid-1800s, and local history of Black
entrepreneurship on Toccoa’s Broad Street inspired Larry
Gholston and his family to start the Poke Sallitt festival in
1990.
As with many Black traditional foodways, Gholston
said Black families in Toccoa and surrounding counties
supplemented their food budget by growing vegetables
and gathering wild greens like the poke weed, the main
ingredient in the vegetable dish, poke sallitt.
Gholston recalled a seeing the church kitchen stacked to
the ceiling with home-canned fruits and vegetables.
The roots of entrepreneurship run deep in Toccoa’s Black
community. In the Broad Street business district bounded
by Broad, Wood, Spring, and Goodman Streets were small
mom-and-pop businesses such as Drew’s Dry cleaners,
S & M Grill, Holly Barbershop, Gray Cab Company and
Mayfield Garage. Two funeral homes-Drews Funeral
Home and Moss, Stovall, and Neal--served the community
as well. Gholston has a family connection to S & M Grill
through his maternal aunt who moved to Boston in 1955.
There she attended culinary school and learned how to
make pastry. In the mid-1960s, she returned to Toccoa to
open S & M Grill until 1975.
Gholston said many left before his aunt in search of better
as part of the Great Migration. This phrase describes the
mass exodus of Black people from the agricultural South
to the Northeast and Midwest from 1910 to the early
1970s.5
Historian Matthew Wills points to racial violence
stating that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Southern blacks were exposed to truly incredible levels of
lethal violence both at the hands of white mobs and the
white criminal justice system.6
Mr. Gholston named several families in the Banks,
Franklin, and Stephens counties that served and
influenced the larger Black community-- the Drews, Keils,
Mayfields, Martins, Neals, Swifts, Swillings, Scotts, Smiths,
5 Christine Leibbrand, Catherine Massey, J.Trent Allexander, Katie
R. Genadek,, Stewart Tolnay. “The Great Migration and Residential
Segregation in American Cities during the Twentieth Century”, Social
Sci ence History 2020:44 no.1(2020): 19-55. Doi:10.1017/ssh.2019.46.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PM7297198. Accessed
November 6, 2020
6 Matthew Wills. "Racial Violence as Impetus for the Great Migration".
JSTOR Daily, Feb 6, 2019. https://daily.jstor.org/violence-as-impetus-ofthe-great-migration/ . Accessed November 6, 2020. Festival founder Larry Gholston (far right) and family in 2019.
Courtesy Seth Gholston
Friendship Baptist Church was founded in 1887 as Toccoa’s
first Black Baptist church. Credit: Melissa Jest/HPD
6
Black Life in a Georgia Mountains Town - Stephens County
Poke or pokeweed is a poisonous perennial weed with leafy
green leaves, common in the South. It has a magenta red
stalks, white flowers, and clusters of deep purple berries and
can grow to 8 to 10 feet tall. Food historian Michael Twitty,
describes the conditions of poor whites and Blacks was
such that because of walking barefoot, medicinal cures were
needed to de-worm and [eating poke] became part of the
diet both out of necessity and as folk medicine.7
Poke has
vitamin A, C, iron, calcium, and a unique antiviral protein.8
The name is unusual and a blend of two cultures, poke
comes from a word for "blood" or "dye" in an indigenous
North American language as the red, bright berries can
be used to make dye when ripe. Gholston added that poke
berries were also used for war paint by Native warriors.
The word sallet (or sallitt) comes from an older form of the
Eglish and refers to a cooked salad.9
Gholston described
making poke sallitt as a long process of cleaning, cutting
and boiling the greens outside in large caldrons for several
hours. He said a community of women would come
together, each performing a role in the long preparation.
Growing up, Gholston said poke salllitt was served with fat
back and cornbread.
And that is how Gholston and family served it at their
annual Poke Festival held at Emory “Bullett” Johnson Park
in Toccoa. He said his mother-in-law would also prepare
fried fish at the festival. “You should see folks coming,” he
laughed. The annual Festival is held in May on Memorial
Day weekend and includes other activities such as a cake
walk and a spelling bee. One year, it featured a basketball
tournament sponsored by NBA player Dale Davis. Along
with Toccoa’s Poke Sallitt Festival, Gholston reported two
other festivals in the southeast in Arabia, Alabama and
Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The late singer-songwriter and Lousiana native Tony Joe
White popularized the dish in his 1969 hit song “Polk Salad
Annie” that found success on the R&B and pop charts.
Gholston described Black life in Toccoa from 1930 through
the 1950s as being shaped by the opportunities, or lack there
of, available to rural Black people migrating in from the
farms. “In the 1940s, these small towns weren’t like Atlanta.
The town was mostly dirt roads. The [local government]
sprayed them down with water to keep the dust down,”
Gholston explained. Chicken coops dotted neighborhoods
and most families had a small garden. “They (the elders)
had their techniques for making things work. Andhey had
to!”
When racial integration occurred, Gholston said people,
“ran away from their heritage”. The Cultural Historical
7 Abby Carney, "How Did this Poisonous Plant Become American South's
Staples?", Saveur. Oct. 3, 2019. https://www.saveur.com/poke-sallet/. Accessed November 6, 2020
8 Annie Mott, “Pokeweed: How to Prepare ‘Poke Salad,’” Wild Abundance, Dec. 31, 2019. https://www.wildabundance.net/pokeweed/ accessed November 6, 2020.
9 Ibid, Accessed November 6, 2020.
Nedra Deadwyler continued from page 4
Society of Banks, Franklin, Stephens County in tandem
with the Poke Sallitt Festival aims to uphold the history
and traditions of Black people who migrated to Toccoa
and established communities that have endured. The
Society offers annual February programs in local
churches and exhibits artifacts like caldrons, Dutch
ovens, oil lanterns, and family Bibles to provide the
context for his narrative on Black life. “I want the youth
today to have pride in where they come from and to not
hang their head in shame,” he explained.
The Society, a nonprofit, 501C(3) organization
headquartered in Toccoa, seeks to expand the reach of its
travelling history programs and to collect oral histories
from elders in the three counties it serves. Gholston
envisions promoting local Black heritage and culture to
visitors and tourists discovering Toccoa and the Georgia
Mountains region. By keeping this important history and
culture visible through public history and community
preservation, Gholston hopes to uplift local Black youth
and families who remain and to encourage those who
have moved away that their family homesteads are worth
maintaining and returning to in the future.
Young Cooper helped harvest Poke for the 2019 festival.
Courtesy of Seth Gholston
7
Announcements

GAAHPN steering board welcomes six new members located throughout Georgia
Celebrate with the Georgia African American Historic Preservation Network (GAAHPN) and steering board as it
welcomes its new board members from four of Georgia’s planning
regions. (Please find the full board listed on p. 9)
The GAAHPN board looks forward to engaging preservation
colleagues and supporters from all twelve of Georgia’s regions on its
committees and in its future vitural workshops.
GAAHPN “Network” is composed of nearly 5,000 advocates and
constituents from community organizations and heritage groups
and various preservation-related fields committed to preserving and
promote the places and oral history that tells of African American
life and contributions in Georgia.
For information about 2021 virtual workshops and other ways to
connect the GAAHPN network, please contact GAAHPN liaison
Melissa Jest.
Georgia Historic Preservation Division
Melissa.Jest@dca.ga.gov | www.georgiashpo.org
Image credit: Georgia HPD
National Trust awards grant to GAAHPN’s
“ Building A Better Network ” Initiative
GAAHPN, in cooperation
with HPD, was selected as
one of 27 significant places
or projects to receive a 2020
grant from the African
American Cultural Heritage
Action Fund (AACHAF)
of the National Trust for
Historic Preservation with
support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This AACHAF support will allow GAAHPN to improve
its efforts to engage grassroots advocates, promote the
inclusion and use of diverse places throughout Georgia,
and build leadership capacity with the network through
training and technical assistance.
Georgia Historic Preservation Division
Melissa.Jest@dca.ga.gov | www.georgiashpo.org

Image credit: National Trust for Historic Preservation
Historic Presrvation Division joins
Georgia Department of Community
Affairs, moves to new offices
The Georgia Historic Preservation Division is now a
division of the Georgia Department of Community
Affairs. As of December 21, 2020 HPD will be located
in the DCA offices at 60 Executive Park South, NE
Atlanta GA 30329. David Crass continues as HPD
Director/ Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer.
For information, contact Allison Asbrock at Allison.
Asbrock@dca.ga.gov .
Georgia Historic Preservation Division
60 Executive Park South, NE Atlanta GA 30329
www.georgiashpo.org
Image credit: Georgia Dept. of Community Affairs
The Georgia African American Historic Preservation Network (GAAHPN)
was established in January 1989. It is composed of representatives from
neighborhood organizations and preservation groups. GAAHPN was formed in
response to a growing interest in preserving the cultural and built diversity of Georgia’s
African American heritage. This interest has translated into a number of efforts
which emphasize greater recognition of African American culture and contributions
to Georgia’s history. The GAAHPN Steering Committee plans and implements ways
to develop programs that will foster heritage education, neighborhood revitalization,
and support community and economic development.
The Network is an informal group of over 3,000 people who have an interest in
preservation. Members are briefed on the status of current and planned projects and
are encouraged to offer ideas, comments and suggestions. The meetings provide
an opportunity to share and learn from the preservation experience of others and to
receive technical information through workshops. Members receive a newsletter,
Reflections, produced by the Network. Visit the Historic Preservation Division
website at www.georgiashpo.org. Preservation information and previous issues of
Reflections are available online. Membership in the Network is free and open to all.
About GAAHPN
This publication has been financed in part with federal
funds from the National Park Service, Department of
the Interior, through the Historic Preservation Division,
Georgia Department of Natural Resources. The contents
and opinions do not necessarily reflect the views or
policies of the Department of the Interior, nor does
the mention of trade names, commercial products or
consultants constitute endorsement or recommendation by
the Department of the Interior or the Georgia Department
of Natural Resources. The Department of the Interior
prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color,
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programs. If you believe you have been discriminated
against in any program, activity, or facility, or if you desire
more information, write to: Office for Equal Opportunity,
National Park Service, 1849 C Street, NW, Washington,
D.C. 20240.
Published quarterly by the
Historic Preservation Division
Georgia Department of Natural Resources
Dr. David Crass, Division Director
Melissa Jest, Editor
Dr. Jennifer Dickey
Barbara Golden
Vaughnette Goode-Walker
Dr. Alvin Jackson
Richard Laub
Joyce Law
Dr. Linda McMullen
Dr. Darrell Nettles
Tracy Rookard
W. Frank Wilson
Dr. Veronica Womack
Dr. Gerald Golden, Interim Chair
Board of Directors
Dr. Gerald Golden
Interim Chair
Melissa Jest
African American
Programs Coordinator
Reflections Editor
Voice 770/389-7870
Fax 770/389-7878
melissa.jest@dnr.ga.gov
HPD Staff
8
Since its first issue appeared in December 2000, Reflections has documented
hundreds of Georgia’s African American historic resources. Now all of these
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cemeteries, churches, districts, farms, lodges, medical, people, places,
schools, and theatres. You can now subscribe to Reflections from the
homepage. Reflections is a recipient of a Leadership in History Award from
the American Association for State and Local History.
About Reflections
Nedra Deadwyler
African American
Programs Assistant
Voice 770/389-7876
Fax 770/389-7878
nedra.deadwyler@dnr.ga.gov