Metro Atlanta governments take up reparations amid national challenges
Wanda Sims Watters was among the first Black students who integrated Decatur City Schools in the 1960s. But in 1970, her family was forced out of the small city entirely.
Decatur seized her family’s house — and all the homes on their street — as part of an “urban renewal” initiative. Their house had four bedrooms and a full basement on about an acre of land. The city gave $10,000 for it, but Watters said it was worth more. Some neighbors in the Black enclave received nothing.
Two years after Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act, no bank would lend the Sims family money for a mortgage anywhere else in Decatur.
“It was going backwards, but nothing we could do about it,” said Watters, now 72.
Watters lives in Conyers, but she is vice chair of the reparations task force Decatur established last year — a nod to the fact that most of the people displaced from the former Black neighborhood of Beacon Hill, and their descendants, no longer live in Decatur.
Healing the damage the city government inflicted on Watters’ family and former neighbors is one of the many thorny questions facing local reparations efforts at a time of national backlash against reckoning with the effects of historical racism in the United States.
The Fulton County Reparations Task Force late last year submitted a 636-page report on the harms that Georgia’s most populous county perpetrated through slavery and discrimination against Black residents. Also last year, the cities of Atlanta and Decatur appointed members to their own reparations committees.
Decatur last year issued a public apology to residents for the city’s “role in perpetuating discrimination, oppression, subjugation and the resulting harms, profiting from policies rooted in the system of white supremacy.”
Atlanta’s and Decatur’s reparations committees are far from issuing recommendations for specific actions their cities should take. But committee members said their cities’ liberal politics have insulated their work from federal opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives under President Donald Trump.
“I think that people forget that we are actually a country that adopts redress in almost every aspect of our life,” said Decatur Mayor Pro Tem Lesa Fronk, who sponsored the city’s reparations resolution. “It has nothing to do with DEI. It has everything to do with a city government making right for harms that were committed by a previous entity of that government.”
As the current cultural capital of the former Confederacy, a bastion of the Civil Rights Movement and one of the South’s most progressive areas, Atlanta is in a position to set an example on reparations, said Sheila Flemming, a reparations expert and chairwoman of Atlanta’s reparations study commission.
Flemming is a past committee chair of Delta Sigma Theta, the historically Black sorority that lobbied the Atlanta City Council for local reparations. She is also a former national president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the organization that established Black History Month a century ago. She has a doctorate in history from Howard University.
“The country has not been willing to face this sad occurrence in our history,” Flemming said. “As part of humanity, we have to do it, and I think Atlanta is a good place for that to happen.”
Many forms of reparations
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights defines reparations as redress for human rights violations. The United States government has provided reparations in various forms to Native American tribes, Native Hawaiians and Japanese American survivors of internment during World War II, though those efforts have been criticized for their limitations.
Since the failed attempts of the Reconstruction era, reparations on a national scale for slavery and discrimination against Black Americans have never gained traction. A Congressional bill to create a federal reparations study commission has been unsuccessfully introduced every year since 1989.
Some state and local governments have stepped into the void. There are at least three state and 50 local reparations initiatives in the United States, according to the Illinois-based organization FirstRepair, which advises communities on reparations policy.
Some governments are providing, or plan to provide, direct payments to victims of land loss and housing discrimination or their descendants. But while direct compensation gets the most attention, reparations take many forms, experts said.
The first and most important step is a public apology, Flemming said, citing the National African American Reparations Commission.
The Georgia constitution’s gratuities clause, which forbids the state and local governments from giving gifts to individuals without a benefit to taxpayers in return, could preclude direct reparations payments, said Atlanta City Councilmember Michael Julian Bond, who sponsored Atlanta’s reparations commission.
Reparations could include education, health care and economic development in affected communities, said Akinyele Umoja, an Africana studies professor at Georgia State University who sits on the reparations committees in Atlanta and Decatur.
Umoja’s students and other volunteer researchers crafted a 10-page resolution outlining harms the city of Decatur perpetrated against Black residents, from relying on enslaved Africans for public works through recent gentrification that displaced legacy homeowners from Oakhurst. Acknowledging that history is an important form of repair, said Decatur Reparations Task Force Chair Mawuli Davis.
“Unfortunately, everyone wants to jump to the end of the process, when the process itself is part of the community healing that’s needed,” Davis said. “Reckoning with the truth is part of the process that needs to happen.”
Taking responsibility
When it comes to reparations, teasing out who is responsible for which harms — and to what degree — can be challenging.
Slavery was a state law, sanctioned by the federal government. After its abolition, county governments operated chain gangs of mostly Black convicts that developed the cities. Private companies also employed Black convict laborers that built public facilities without compensation. Governments that seized Black neighborhoods no longer own all the land they took. Counties and cities jointly operated segregated libraries.
In Atlanta, as in other cities, local and federal officials collaborated to build interstate highways in the 1950s that destroyed or isolated Black neighborhoods, Bond noted. The Trump administration last year repealed a $158 million grant for a park over the Downtown Connector that would reconnect the Old Fourth Ward to downtown.
Atlanta’s reparations commission will incorporate some of the Fulton task force’s research, Flemming said.
Decatur’s reparations task force has so far focused on the destruction of Beacon Hill, which forms part of downtown, members said.
Also known as Beacon or the Bottom, the tight-knit neighborhood developed to include Black schools, churches, a park and pool, restaurants, a grocery store, funeral homes, a cab company, a movie theater, beauty shops and other businesses. Jackie Robinson spoke in 1961 at the Thankful Baptist Church, then located in the neighborhood.
But by then, the city of Decatur had begun seizing Beacon Hill in pieces, for facilities including public housing, the county courthouse and Decatur High School. The first wave of “urban renewal” began in the late 1930s. Elizabeth Street, where Watters lived, was among the last land seized. The road and houses are now lost to the western edge of the large sports field at Ebster Park.
Watters is the eighth of nine children. She was 17 when the city displaced the family, which also included a beloved dog, a boxer named Duke. Watters’ younger sibling is David Sims, who became a football star for Georgia Tech and the Seattle Seahawks. Their grandmother and uncle also lived in the neighborhood.
The family ended up building a house in Washington Park, outside the city limits. In 1992, decades after they couldn’t get a loan to stay in Decatur, the U.S. Department of Justice filed the nation’s first redlining lawsuit against Decatur Federal Savings and Loan Association.
“We couldn’t prove it at the time, when we needed it,” Watters said.
Watters retired as an events manager for Invesco. She has three children and seven grandchildren. She said former Beacon Hill families wouldn’t turn down money, but it’s not most important to her.
“Reparation for me would be to not erase the history of the people that lived on that land,” she said. “Nobody’s going to get the land back and build a house and start over, but I was hoping that we can do something to commemorate it.”
This year’s AJC Black History Month series marks the 100th anniversary of the national observance of Black history and the 11th year the AJC has examined the role African Americans played in building Atlanta and shaping American culture. New installments will appear daily throughout February on ajc.com and uatl.com, as well as at ajc.com/news/atlanta-black-history.
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