Jackson McGrady Smith Jr. remembers the first time streetcars rolled through the streets of Atlanta, connecting his African-American neighborhood on Auburn Avenue to the seat of white leadership downtown.
Not that he had much use for them growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, when Jim Crow ruled the South and restricted where African-Americans lived, worked and socialized. Besides, Smith says, he had just about everything he needed up on Auburn Avenue, then the center of black life in Atlanta. In 1956, Fortune magazine dubbed it the “richest Negro street in the world.”
When the last streetcar rang in 1949, Auburn Avenue and other parts of the Old Fourth Ward brimmed with black-owned grocers, banks, churches, cultural institutions, restaurants and offices. The trolleys returned in late 2014 to serve a different group.
Today, an electric streetcar shuttles tourists from downtown Atlanta to Smith’s old stomping grounds — now a separate neighborhood from Old Fourth Ward called “Sweet Auburn” — and the nearby King Center, which pays homage to the neighborhood’s most famous resident, the Rev. Martin Luther King. Jr.
Smith agreed to hop aboard the new streetcar on Thursday, a day before annual weekend-long celebrations of the civil rights leader kicked off. As the streetcar hummed past the funeral home where King’s body was prepared, Smith launched into his life story, pointing out landmarks from his childhood.
Smith’s journey from Auburn Avenue to Morehouse College to regional division manager of the Federal Aviation Administration is in many ways a realization of King’s dream of upward mobility for African-Americans.
The story of Auburn Avenue, however, and the Old Fourth Ward has not been as linear.
Much has been written about the decline of Auburn Avenue after desegregation, which led families and businesses to leave the neighborhood, and its struggle to rebuild. In the past five or six years, the narrative has taken a cautiously optimistic turn as new businesses and residential real estate open in the area and Georgia State University’s footprint in the neighborhood expands.
The streetcar has been touted as a crucial piece of this renaissance by bringing visitors to the area. What will they find when they get there?
Smith’s father owned the gas station at the corner of Auburn Avenue and Jackson Street, where the family lived. Across the street is Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King’s father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., baptized Smith at age 5 and presided over Smith’s wedding. Smith watched MLK grow from a young man known as M.L. to Rev. M.L., then Rev. King, and, finally, Dr. King. As a teen, Smith mowed King’s lawn and inherited his old suits and wing-tipped shoes.
Today, the gas station is gone, replaced by a shopping plaza with a barber shop and a store selling homeopathic remedies, both popular with the seniors who live across the street in Wheat Street Towers. Ebenezer is still there, adjacent to the King Center, and King’s birth home is up the street. The landmarks are the main destinations for tourists disembarking at the King historic district. Due to its relative high foot traffic, the streetcar stop attracts panhandlers offering tour guide services in exchange for donations to get them a bed at the Atlanta Mission.
Down the road, derelict buildings now jostle for space with new hipster bars, upscale restaurants and cafes, embodying tension between past and present in an area experiencing gentrification in some parts and stalled development in others.
An irrepressible booster for Atlanta — “the most beautiful city in the world” — Smith proudly holds himself up as a product of Atlanta in the civil rights era, as well as Ebenezer and “Daddy King.”
Will today’s residents of King’s neighborhood benefit from the same supportive environment? Smith has his doubts.
“I think Dr. King would be disappointed in the poverty that’s still showing up on Auburn Avenue,” he said, slowly choosing his words, as the streetcar rolled through the Georgia State campus.
“He would be disappointed in all the violence that still goes on and the crime. He would’ve thought that we would’ve advanced more toward peace and liberty and respecting everybody’s rights. I know we’re not there yet.”
What would MLK’s father, “Daddy King,” make of it?
“He believed in entrepreneurship. ‘Daddy King’ would be disappointed at the slow economic development that we’ve been able to take advantage of,” he said.
Change for the better?
A ride down Auburn on the streetcar bears testament to Smith’s concerns, as well as signs of progress. Plenty of business owners share the entrepreneurial spirit of “Daddy King” along Auburn and Edgewood Avenues. But for every mom and pop shop there’s a crumbling storefront or empty lot serving as reminders of what the neighborhood used to be and could be again.
History hides in plain sight; blink and you might miss the explanatory signs hanging on poles and historic plaques on sides of buildings. One block from Smith’s childhood home — past Atlanta’s two oldest black-owned funeral homes, a fast-food seafood joint and a convenience store — is the masonic hall that was home to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s first office and its new Atlanta headquarters. Around the corner is a restored Madam C. J. Walker salon featuring antique hair care products.
Separating the businesses from the historic cluster is a dilapidated building and a desolate lot offering a view of the former site of the Wheat Street Garden Apartments (not to be confused with the Wheat Street Tower). The homes were a unique partnership between nearby Wheat Street Baptist Church and the city to provide affordable housing to low-income families displaced by urban renewal policies that replaced slum housing with stadiums, civic centers and highways — including I-20 and the I-75/I-85 connector.
Today, it’s home to a community urban garden, which started in 2010 and has proven sustainable through community farming initiatives.
In winter months, however, plants in the ground and barren trees on the lot don’t offer much of a view. On Thursday, a former resident of the apartment happened to be visiting the neighborhood with her daughter and stopped to take it in.
Donyale Printup left the neighborhood in 2007 for Stone Mountain, one year before the buildings were demolished. She has fond memories of growing up with her extended family in the homes. But when drugs became rampant in the late 1990s she decided it was time to leave.
She’s happier in Stone Mountain, where it’s quiet and “I don’t have to worry about all the noise,” she said. Her daughter, 19-year-old Kasey, misses the energy of the city.
Printup said something needed to change on Auburn but the neglected buildings are barely an improvement.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if they got a Target or Ross or somewhere nice to shop? The little trolley comes through but there’s nothing to do. If people are coming here from all over they should have something to see,” she said.
“I’m just overwhelmed by all the changes,” she added, “but the thing is, what are the changes for?”
Ricci de Forest, proprietor of the Madam C.J. Walker Beauty Shoppe Museum, remembers when his salon looked onto the Wheat Street Garden Apartments, recalling with fondness the tight-knit community of extended families living among drug dealers and “crack addicts.”
A professional stylist who moved to Atlanta in the 1980s, de Forest was enchanted by the abandoned storefront with the salon’s original signage miraculously preserved. Even better were the antique hair care products left behind.
He moved his salon into the shop about 10 years ago and put the antiques on display, transforming the space into a time capsule. On the other side of the room, vintage vinyl fills tall shelves. When he learned that the space above the salon in the Prince Hall Masonic Temple was home to WERD, America’s first black-owned radio station, he was inspired to revive the call numbers and start a radio show.
He said he brokered an understanding with the drug dealers and users that led to peaceful coexistence. Streetcar-related construction was a bigger disruption to his business before it started running in late 2014, he said.
“There’s no doubt it’s a crucial piece in revitalizing Auburn Avenue,” he said, a glass of red wine in his hand as jazz from his radio broadcast filled the salon. “We have built it so they will come. Now we need to work on bringing more businesses and vitality to the neighborhood.
“Progress didn’t start with Dr. King, and it didn’t end with him.”
Signs of progress
Down the street near the Dobbs Plaza streetcar stop, past more Instagram-worthy “ruin porn” and a walk beneath the 14-lane highway, is another survivor.
Ten years ago, Sweet Auburn Bread Company owner Sonya James moved from the Sweet Auburn Curb Market on Edgewood into the Odd Fellows building, the former headquarters of the Atlanta Chapter of the Grand Order of Odd Fellows. The building’s Jacobean revival architecture recalls the grandeur of the era when it served as a hub for black businesses and the site of a black social club.
James makes the most of the bakery/storefront, squeezing into the tight space a display case of tempting pastries, shelves of preserves and framed newspaper clippings of the time she presented President Bill Clinton with her famous sweet potato cheesecake.
In this space, she weathered streetcar construction, the economic recession and a 2008 tornado which took out several historic structures, including the Herndon Building across the street — former home of NAACP offices, The Savoy Hotel, the Atlanta Urban League and B.B. Beamon’s, a white-table cloth restaurant for blacks where Smith brought his prom date.
A native Atlantan, James is proud to continue Auburn Avenue’s legacy of black entrepreneurship.
“This is my home,” she said as she prepared food for delivery in a small space behind the display case. “When people come all the way to visit historic Auburn Avenue we have to give them something to see.”
Right across the street is a relative newcomer who has made it past the one-year mark in an area of high business turnover. The walls of Sweet Auburn Seafood are decorated with pictures of neighborhood landmarks — King’s birth home, the Royal Peacock, Big Bethel AME Church — and past Atlanta mayors.
General manager Douglas Jester, another Atlanta native, remembers when Auburn was the epicenter of the civil rights movement. Some of the pictures hanging on the restaurant’s wall are of politicians — Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young — who visited Jester’s school in the nearby Summerhill neighborhood to talk to students about black pride and the value of an education.
He also remembers when the neighborhood “lost its charm” in the 1980s as disinvestment coupled with nation’s drug epidemic made Auburn Avenue an urban blight.
“We want to be a viable partner in the community,” he said. “Because I’m a native it means a lot to me to know that this is home.”
On the other side of the street, the Royal Peacock marquee remains, advertising twerking contests and DJs at a nightclub now known as M. Next door, another historic facade lingers, the hand-painted lettering on the window of Silver Moon Barber Shop — “the oldest barbershop in Atlanta” — even though the inside has been abandoned since 2012.
As Georgia State University approaches near the Piedmont streetcar stop, students lugging backpacks and bags of takeout walk past a beauty salon, a Caribbean restaurant, niche retail stores. After sitting empty for nearly seven years due to tornado damage, the Atlanta Daily World building — former home of the country’s oldest black newspaper — reopened in 2015 with a juice shop and, later, a coffee shop.
This is the part of Auburn that gives Smith hope.
The gentrification debate
As the streetcar passes through Centennial Olympic Park, a panhandler who tried to offer us a national historic site pamphlet for the King Center tries his luck on Smith. After declining politely, Smith ponders why his people are still struggling, especially in King’s hometown.
It’s two things, he said.
“You’re a product of your environment. I’m a good example of that. I would not have advanced in my life like I did had it not been for the environment I grew up in with Ebenezer and the Kings, feeling that failure is not an option,” he said. “Then, there is systematic organized racism, against males and females and Hispanics and it’s not getting any better with this presidential stuff we got going now. I think Dr. King and “Daddy King” would be disappointed with some of the rhetoric we’re hearing and the anti-Muslim stuff.”
The solution? “The black church played such an important role in the advancement of our people,” he said. “We need more social activism, more leadership to help guide our people like I’ve been talking about. How ‘Daddy King’ guided us at Ebenezer.”
The streetcar turns onto Edgewood Avenue, ground zero for Atlanta’s gentrification debate. Through some see it as a positive bellwether for Atlanta’s revitalization hopes, others see it in another light.
“(‘Daddy King’) would probably be a little disappointed that there’s not a lot of black businesses up and down Edgewood there,” Smith said.
It’s just one block away, but unlike on Auburn Avenue, white-owned businesses have anchored Edgewood Avenue for decades, many of which are still standing, said Joe Stewardson, president of the Old Fourth Ward Business Association. Even if white-owned businesses outnumber black-owned businesses on Edgewood, he says it’s still among the most diverse business corridors and neighborhoods in Atlanta.
“Change is hard and you can call it whatever you want and no matter what you do there’s always going to be some groups or individuals that have problems with those changes,” said Stewardson, a property owner on Edgewood who’s also on the board of the Sweet Auburn Works initiative.
“At the end of the day, what’s really important important is that whoever we attract legitimately wants to have a great neighborhood where everyone can live, work and play in a safe environment.”
As day turns to night, revelers fill the sidewalks, lining up outside bars that draw patrons of all colors from throughout the city and suburbs: blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians.
Progress? Maybe.