Black students get diplomas years late

Recognition has been hard-earned and incremental for the Flat Rock community in south DeKalb County near Lithonia where residents are descendants of one of the oldest slave settlements in America.

For the past five years, the county, residents, historians, archaeologists and anthropologists have made a concerted effort to recapture the once lost history of Flat Rock and make amends for decades of oversight and neglect.

On a Saturday in February in a ceremony at Arabia Mountain High School, eight elders --- black students now in their 70s, 80s and 90s --- were given honorary high school diplomas from the DeKalb County school system that six decades ago did not give high school diplomas to blacks.

The students all attended Flat Rock School in the 1930s and 1940s, a time when there was such hostility to educating blacks three schools in the district --- Flat Rock, Miller Grove, and County Line --- burned down in a single night, likely the acts of arson.

The oldest of the former Flat Rock students, Zilla Guthrie, 93, recalled her childhood days in the one-room schoolhouse in the 1930s, where two teachers taught the first through seventh grade, which was as high as the curriculum went.

After the seventh grade, she said, "they let you out and you went to work in the fields" of the many farms in the area tending vegetables and cotton. Others found jobs as domestics working for white families. Others went into the military.

Guthrie was thrilled to finally get the diploma that has eluded her for 78 years. "I always wanted to go to college, " she said. "I guess I could now."

Activist Johnny Waits helped found the Flat Rock Archive two years ago and has spearheaded efforts to chronicle Flat Rock's history by compiling oral histories from descendants, written family and church histories and genealogical research into the 250 buried in a nearby Flat Rock slave graveyard.

He said official records of Flat Rock all but vanished after it was last identified on a state map in 1865, and the community isn't even mentioned in the official history of DeKalb County.

That area of the county was largely rural into the early 1980s (when some roads were paved for the first time). Flat Rock, Waits said, didn't have county water, electricity or telephone service until the 1950s.

With funding and assistance from the Arabia Mountain Heritage Area Alliance, the Archive commissioned Atlanta filmmaker Edward Anderson to produce his recently completed short documentary on the community, "Flat Rock --- Where Home Is."

The Atlanta Archaeological Society and the anthropology department of Georgia State University continue to scour what records can be found to chronicle the lives of those buried in the slave cemetery.