The rambling 1950s-era brick complex, home to the police department and other organizations, is a nearly-forgotten piece of Decatur history.
To most residents, if they notice the buildings on the edge of downtown Decatur at all, they appear as drab relics of a past that has no connection to the city’s contemporary image.
Elizabeth Wilson wants to change that perception. To Wilson and other African-Americans who lived in Decatur 45 years ago or longer, the structures have a significance that’s at once symbolic, emotional and historic.
Earlier this year, when the Decatur City Commission approved financing for a master plan to renovate the complex, Wilson set about making sure everyone involved in the project knew exactly what they were dealing with.
“This was once called Beacon Hill,” she said, speaking of an area about three-quarters of a square mile, just southwest of Decatur’s square. “The primary thoroughfare was Atlanta Avenue, and it’s no exaggeration to say that this was our Auburn Avenue. These [buildings] were [all-black] schools called Beacon Elementary and Trinity High.”
They are now the only surviving buildings from the Beacon Hill era, roughly 1900 to 1967, when the schools closed following integration. Beginning in the early 1940s and lasting for the next quarter century, the city’s urban renewal campaign systematically erased Beacon Hill, not only tearing down black-owned businesses and homes while relocating families, but also removing entire streets.
Even the once-thriving Atlanta Avenue was truncated and is now divided into three short sections.
“The intention behind urban renewal was probably good-hearted,” said Steven Moffson, architectural historian for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. “But for [Beacon Hill] it was devastating. Other black communities still survive, like Mechanicsville or Summerhill, and of course Auburn Avenue. They might look different today, but they still exist, and some of the old buildings are still there. That’s not the case in Decatur, where the whole community is gone.”
When the Decatur architectural firm Rutledge and Alcock began drawing up its master plan last summer, two public meetings were held, including one exclusively for gleaning input from alumni of the city’s all-black schools. This not only included students of the Beacon and Trinity schools, which opened in 1955, but also those who attended the older Herring Street School that stood on the same site from 1913 until the early 1950s.
Architect Joe Alcock even attended a lecture given by Moffson, an expert on the 500 or so “equalization schools” Georgia built from 1952 to 1962.
“Most of them, like Decatur’s, were solidly built,” Moffson said. “It was the state’s way of improving black schools while also demonstrating absolute separateness.”
In late September Rutledge and Alcock unveiled its plan for a 33,000-square feet, U-shaped building with many ambitious touches, including an open courtyard, an amphitheater, a projection screen on one building (part of the complex includes artists lofts) and a completely new glass, brick and stucco police and municipal courts building.
But the plan also retains a good portion of both schools, along with the old library and the legendary (at least in Decatur) “Matchbox Gym,” now called Ebster Gym, built in 1949.
Further, Deputy City Manager Hugh Saxon points out, the entire complex’s interior "will be a living memorial to alumni [of the schools]. At almost any place in the building there will be a historical image or a memento. A big part of this history has to be honored.”
It’s a history that Wilson knows intimately. She moved to Beacon Hill as an 18-year-old in 1949, and nearly a half century later became Decatur’s first (and to date only) mayor who was both a woman and African-American.
She can drive around the former Beacon Hill and map out a verbal grid of the district’s halcyon days, including at least a dozen streets that no longer exist. She points out where the Ritz Movie Theater stood, and where other businesses were, including Rogers Cab Co. , Mossman’s Grocery, Kilgore and Anderson’s Barbershop, Spates Barbecue Stand, LC’s Rib Shack, the Cox Brothers Funeral Home, Tom Steel’s Cafe (known for its sausage “splits” that cost 10 cents), George Sterling’s Cafe (whose splits were 15 cents because they had lettuce, tomato and, Wilson said, “real meat”) and Thankful Baptist Church, where Jackie Robinson spoke in the early 1960s.
Lying at the district’s geographic center were Beacon Elementary and Trinity High, described by Wilson as “the soul of the community."
“They are more than just the last surviving part [of Beacon Hill],” she said. "This is hard to describe, but every strong feeling, every emotion that you knew was felt in those buildings.”
There is no timetable for completing the renovation, which Saxon said will cost about $22 million. Financing will come from multiple sources, he said, including funds raised by the arts community along with various grants. But most of the money will come from the city, and “we’ll definitely have to get creative,” he said.
No matter the cost, Moffson believes the project’s more than worth it.
“I’ve visited a lot of these equalization schools throughout the state,” he said. “If they haven’t been torn down, then they’ve been abandoned, or they’re in very bad shape. That’s what’s so great about this project. They’re not only saving the schools, they’re preserving the memory of an entire community.”
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