Turning Beacon Hill into a passive park can unite the community

More than 150 years of history reside on a grassy patch of land at the intersection of West Trinity Place and Electric Avenue in the city of Decatur. This is what’s left of “The Bottom” or Beacon Hill, a community established by freed slaves in the late 1860s at the end of the Civil War.

At the time, the area was a thriving Black community with homes and businesses supported by a network of churches. But for more than a decade, since 2014, when the city demolished the Allen Wilson Terrace apartments, a public housing complex, the land has been vacant.

In recent years, the site has served as the location for Decatur Day, an annual celebration that recognizes the history of Beacon Hill. Previously, Decatur Day was held at McKoy Park in Oakhurst, but in 2023, city officials moved the event to the vacant space.

Now, once again, present and former Decatur residents may have to move their gathering to accommodate the school district’s planned $23 million Early Childhood Learning Center.

Doris Sims Johnson leads a press conference on Friday, Jan. 16, 2026, asking the city of Decatur to grant a historic designation to the vacant land on Electric Avenue where the school district is proposing to build an early learning center. The open area was part of the historically Black neighborhood of Beacon Hill. (Ben Gray for the AJC)

Last week, the city imposed a moratorium on permitting and construction for up to 90 days while determining if the swath of land meets the criteria for historic designation. In summary, this makes three times in the last 12 years that members of Decatur’s Black community have been forcibly removed from public areas by the city.

It is a continuation of what public historian David S. Rotenstein called a “century of serial displacement” in his 2019 article in the Journal of American Folklore.

No matter where you may fall on this current debate, we should agree on one fact: When people are repeatedly told they must move themselves, their families and their customs from one place to another, it sends a very clear message that they, along with everything and everyone that is important to them, are expendable.

“People move into this community for the school system. It is walkable and safe. It is clean, but not unlike many other communities, they don’t care to know who came before them. People are not asking those questions,” said Fonta High, co-chair of the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights.

Anyone who does ask those questions would learn the history of the Beacon Community and may understand why yet another instance of displacement is an affront to people who have spent the better part of a century fighting to be seen.

As in many 20th-century American cities, zoning laws and municipal policies that enforced segregation kept Black residents in Decatur concentrated in a single geographic area.

In 1937, when Congress passed the public housing law, Beacon Hill had the lowest “D” rating from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which formalized race-based exclusion from mortgage lending in the area, leaving it vulnerable to decades of disinvestment, low property values and government-sanctioned demolition.

The Allen Wilson Terrace apartments, a 200-unit public housing complex, were completed in 1941 for Beacon Hill residents. Then Congress passed the Housing Act of 1948, allowing local municipalities to use eminent domain to seize private property, mostly in low-income, blighted or slum areas, presumably for redevelopment.

While the act also funded the construction of public housing, it offered no strategy for long-term maintenance. Housing was considered a national priority, but instead of addressing inequities, the Housing Act reinforced them, displacing communities and reinforcing segregation.

By 1961, no one was hiding their intentions. A plan from the city of Decatur and school board officials to enlarge Decatur High School “would replace slums,” according to an Atlanta Journal headline.

Those slums were Beacon Hill.

The plan “would allow the city to turn Beacon Hill, ‘our blight spot’ of slums, into ‘the bright spot,’” quipped city manager John Markland.

This, he said, was part of the Beacon Hill Renewal Plan to “recover” 82 acres downtown over 10 years, with $1.7 million paid by the federal government and $788 million paid by the city. That did not include the cost of the new school, which had yet to be estimated.

There was an additional financial incentive to the plan. The “Beacon Hill slum,” as it was called in the article, yielded $20,300 per year in taxes. The renewal plan would double that amount.

This is where we should ask what we can learn from the past. When we look back on this plan that displaced more than 200 Black families and resulted in the building of additional public housing (only after a failed proposal to relocate those families to unincorporated DeKalb County), how does that make us feel? If the answer is concerned, ashamed or unsettled, then we’re on the right track.

The city and the school district have been gifted another chance to do better in dealings with the legacy Beacon Hill community and with other residents who are equally concerned about the cost of the new learning center, a lack of transparency in the funding process and limited green space in downtown Decatur.

“There is large community support for 346 West Trinity in Decatur to be left as it is for a number of different reasons,” High said. “What stands out is this doesn’t have to be a divisive issue. This is an issue that has been bringing the community together.”