On the morning of Aug. 25, an overflowing crowd filled every folding chair arranged in the West End Room of Hammonds House Museum.
Some who arrived too late to claim a seat leaned against walls. Other guests hovered near a table full of fresh fruit, pastries and beverages.
The smiling attendees, who ranged in age from retirees to children, had been invited by Nasim and Clint Fluker to see them interview Stephen Satterfield, host of the Netflix series “High on the Hog.”
Satterfield spoke about making the Peabody Award-winning show and the influence growing up in Atlanta had on its development. He also shared the isolation its resulting fame has created in his personal life.
Leila Kashani
Leila Kashani
“The experience of being on television is somewhat disorienting. It shows up in all kinds of different ways, but I’m easily overwhelmed. What I’ve had to do, to do what I need to do, is withdraw a little bit. So, when I say ‘yes’ to something it really is because I want to be there,” Satterfield told the crowd.
Satterfield’s appearance was billed as the final Soulfood Sunday, an invite-only gathering inspired by conversational salons of the 1920s. These gatherings would include artists, writers, poets, activists, musicians and community leaders, and would be organized and led by figures like A’lelia Walker, daughter of Madam C.J. Walker during the Harlem Renaissance, and Georgia Douglas Johnson, a playwright and poet based in Washington, D.C.
The recurring Soulfood Sunday salons have featured a wide range of notable speakers and guests including artist Shanequa Gay, Olympic gold medalist Edwin Moses, Senegalese musician Ngnima Sarr, photographer Jim Alexander, poet and author Tiphanie Yanique, and other notable thinkers.
“The thing about salons and the Black salon tradition is that it’s not unique to a place, and the format is actually extremely simple. It’s really bringing some folks together around an idea and having that conversation,” Nasim Fluker said.
Started 10 years ago, the event occurred in venues around Atlanta but in recent years had been hosted in the Flukers’ northwest Atlanta home. Rather than ending, the couple explained to attendees, the monthly salons would continue through a paid membership club called The Tenth.
Stephanie Hanlon
Stephanie Hanlon
A social club at its core, The Tenth seeks to connect intellectually curious people through bespoke pop-up cultural experiences. Or as Nasim puts it, “We’re trying to help them cultivate community by turning friends into kin.”
“They often tell us, you know, like, ‘Man that felt like church.’ We’re not trying to create that kind of feeling specifically, but what we take from it is that people really desire the opportunity to be in community with each other — to pause and express something important to them in public space with others, and have it received. And to dig a little deeper into what makes this city and their community special,” Clint Fluker said.
In addition to salons, members of The Tenth now have access to cultural experiences incorporating Atlanta’s neighborhoods, their histories, local visual and performing arts, and food. They hope to recruit 300 members this year, yet they aim for around 70 people at each event.
The Flukers hosted a supper club event Sept. 29 at Atlanta Contemporary, whose executive director Floyd Hall has attended Soulfood Sunday for years.
Stephanie Hanlon
Stephanie Hanlon
“Atlanta Contemporary used to be known as Nexus, and in the spirit of being a point of connection for some of the most passionate, talented and thoughtful creatives in the city, it was exciting for us to provide a space to support this next phase of growth for Soulfood Sunday as it shifts to The Tenth,” Hall said.
“This moment is a real inflection point, and an opportunity for Atlanta Contemporary to play a small part in whatever this collective is turning into for the future.”
In October, the Flukers partnered with artist Miya Bailey to offer members of The Tenth guided tours of his Castleberry Hill studio and gallery spaces. The core monthly salons are also scheduled out for several months.
“We’re going to have multiple opportunities for people to engage, because we think there’s something to scaling that intimacy but not losing the small group feel,” Nasim Fluker said.
Artist Charly Palmer, another longtime Soulfood Sunday attendee, said he was excited about the growth.
HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
“I love the cozy, quaint, intimate environment they created and I’m a little sad it has to expand, but it’s beautiful because every time they bring somebody who is an expert in some space that can teach us all,” Palmer said of Soulfood Sunday becoming The Tenth.
“I do this because it literally feeds me. It feeds my soul, it feeds my spirit, it feeds everything about me. I walk away every time feeling full and looking forward to the next one.”
Medicine for loneliness
The Flukers hope The Tenth will help remedy a loneliness epidemic they say exists in Atlanta and beyond for people of color.
They’ve seen longtime friends leave Atlanta after struggling to make cultural connections. It’s something they’ve experienced themselves, despite growing up in Atlanta with deep family roots and years of community work in the city.
Nasim is a former director of programs for Westside Future Fund and a previous program manager for the Atlanta Committee for Progress. Her mother is a fourth-generation Atlantan, and her ancestors are buried in Gilbert Cemetery, a small gravesite inside the southbound cloverleaf at I-75 South and Cleveland Avenue, where formerly enslaved African Americans were laid to rest for decades starting in 1861.
Her career has focused on equitable community development, from economics to health outcomes. She earned a master’s degree in sociology from Georgia State, and credits GSU’s Ph.D. program with helping her develop a deeper bond with Atlanta.
Jonathan Phillips
Jonathan Phillips
“I was doing field research on the westside with, like Curtis Snow, drug users and sex workers, all this stuff, doing HIV testing and learning about, at the time, the coming of the Mercedes-Benz Stadium. And I did a lot of qualitative research of Black feminist scholars. It was very formative; it rooted me in a way I don’t think any other program could have.”
Clint was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and represents generations of continuing Atlanta University Center legacy. On his mother’s side of the family are multiple graduates of Spelman and Morehouse. Clint also followed his father and grandfather’s footsteps and served as a Morehouse professor. “It’s just, you know, what we do,” he said.
Clint has applied scholarship to his affinity for popular culture, both in his role as senior director of culture, community and partner engagement for the Michael C. Carlos Museum and Emory University Libraries, and as a creative in his own right. His visual art has been displayed at Arts Clayton Gallery in Jonesboro, and he directed the recently released film “Zora Head: The Life and Scholarship of Valerie Boyd,” which debuted Aug. 24 at the BronzeLens Film Festival.
The couple met as seventh graders at the Westminster Schools and were each other’s first kiss. They became friends and remained close through college, as their individual academic journeys took them around the world, from the Caribbean to the Middle East, Asia and Europe.
Courtesy of Nasim
Courtesy of Nasim
One year, before Clint was due to fly to South Korea with the U.S. Fulbright Program and Nasim was heading to St. Thomas to study abroad, they met to say their usual goodbyes and found it more difficult than previous years. They decided to give a long-distance relationship a try, using Skype to stay connected until finally deciding to move back to Atlanta together.
“It was really unexpected that we settled back in Atlanta,” Nasim said, “and honestly, had it not been for the relationship, I don’t know that either one of us would have come back.”
They were both 27 when they married in 2013, but soon began to wonder if they would stay in the city where they met.
“We were bored,” Nasim Fluker said. “Our friends weren’t here. There was no FunkJazz Kafé, no place to go, so we started these salons as a way to make friends, create a community and determine whether we could stay or not. We had to create it ourselves.”
Building community
Clint Fluker said early versions of Soulfood Sunday were more like art parties when they began at the Atlanta Bahá'í Center in 2014. They moved the events around to venues like Hammonds House Museum, Haugabrooks Funeral Home, For Keeps Bookstore and the now-closed Decatur ArtHouse, infusing art, music, poetry and other creative dynamics with conversations related to citizenship.
“We would have one on transportation, but we would have Fahamu (Pecou), who had just done murals at a MARTA station, we’d have somebody from the Beltline, we’d have a Black biking coalition and we’d have, like, a vegan chef and people who work against food apartheid and influencers — stuff like that,” Nasim Fluker said.
Having children made producing the monthly public salon more complicated, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, so the salons took intermissions over the years. In 2023, after purchasing a new home, they decided to launch Soulfood Sunday as an invite-only communal gathering in their living room.
The smaller, concentrated format inspired deeper interactions, they said, and worked for the two accomplished parents, now approaching 40 years old with two young children.
Nasim said the ability for their kids Zayn and Niloufar to experience Soulfood Sunday was another benefit of hosting salons in their house. “As most Black parents,” Nasim Fluker said, “we are hyper concerned with how they experience Blackness, and how to instill positive self-esteem and history. We want them to love Blackness.”
Kailei Carr is founder and CEO of the Asbury Group, a leadership development firm based in Atlanta. Also a longtime Soulfood Sunday devotee, she believes the membership model will allow for The Tenth to offer more elevated experiences with an intentional group of committed members.
“I left every Soulfood Sunday experience with a new idea or connection,” Carr said.
Stephanie Hanlon
Stephanie Hanlon
“Given the work I do and the circles I typically run in, I don’t typically connect with many of the people who are a part of this community — artists, scholars, philanthropists and more across different generations, who were present in these salons. So not only did the topics leave me more informed and inspired, but the conversations I had with people I met there did as well.”
A new definition
As for the name, the Flukers said it’s not as simple as it might seem to anyone familiar with the “Talented Tenth.”
The concept, credited to author and educator W.E.B. Du Bois from a 1903 essay, espouses that an estimated 10% of highly educated Black Americans constitute a leadership class. It is a theory that is controversial within the Black community and one the couple wants to reinterpret.
“Traditionally, when you think of the Talented Tenth, you think about this very elitist kind of sensibility, where there’s this Black elite, that kind of men who determine what the erudite, scholarly, cultural and artistic sensibilities for everybody else will be. They’ll solve the problem, quote-unquote. But that’s not the way we’re looking at this,” Clint Fluker said.
“We’re actually rejecting and reinterpreting that, to open it up and make it more accessible. And so that’s why we stuck with the name, because we thought it would get your attention, but also would allow for people to kind of think about how they might be able to be part of these conversations. And we shouldn’t just leave that to those type of private meetings.”
Stephanie Hanlon
Stephanie Hanlon
One way The Tenth plans to open the experience is through Counterpoint, a partnership with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in which four concert performances will be preceded by curated salon experiences. The first in the series of concerts will be “All Mozart with Stutzmann + Chorus” on Nov. 10. While the concert begins at 3 p.m., there will be a brunch and a salon featuring DJ Salah Ananse starting at 1 p.m.
By definition a counterpoint in music is when different independent melodies intertwine to create a sort of harmony when played together, much like the different types of people the Flukers have invited into their homes, and now invite to join The Tenth, to create community.
Stephanie Hanlon
Stephanie Hanlon
Clint Fluker believes that’s the point.
“We think investing in the social infrastructure of a city is very important, and if you don’t, then you kind of lose not just the history, but you can also kind of lose touch with the spirit of what makes us who we are.”
Disclosure: UATL has a membership partnership with The Tenth. Become a member of UATL here.
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