Before urban planners coined terms like ecosystem, mixed-use, or placemaking, Atlanta’s historic Westside was already living those ideas.
Homes, schools, businesses, shared spaces, and intergenerational leadership were not abstract concepts here. They were the lived infrastructure of thriving Black communities whose roots stretch back to the founding of the Atlanta University Center institutions in the 1860s.
Across Vine City, English Avenue, Ashview Heights, and the Atlanta University Center, life was always interconnected.
This Black History Month, we reflect on what makes a neighborhood whole: stability, opportunity, education, and connection — and on the history that proves these were never just aspirations. They were deliberately built.
Live — Stability as the First Act of Freedom
For generations, establishing a home on the Westside was itself an assertion of freedom.
After the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917 displaced thousands of residents, many Black families moved west into Vine City, bringing with them the entrepreneurial spirit that had defined Sweet Auburn. By the 1920s, Vine City had become one of the most prestigious Black neighborhoods in Atlanta.
In Ashview Heights, businessman Herman Perry created one of the nation’s first planned Black middle-class communities, extending mortgages when they were nearly impossible for Black families to obtain and deeding land for Booker T. Washington High School. Within a decade, the school built for 2,000 students was serving nearly 6,000 — a testament to the community’s growth and determination.
But stability proved fragile. Decades of disinvestment fractured neighborhood fabric. Public housing developments deteriorated. Vacancies rose. Blight spread. Systemic lending discrimination persisted.
Protecting housing stability today is not only about affordability. It is about preserving Black history as something lived — embodied in families and neighborhoods that built it.
Work — Black Enterprise as Community Infrastructure
On the Westside, small business was never just commerce. It was community infrastructure.
Alonzo Herndon, born into slavery in 1858, built a barbering empire before founding the Atlanta Life Insurance Company in 1905. His Vine City mansion — designed by his wife and built by Black craftsmen — symbolized the wealth and vision circulating within the community.
But enterprise extended far beyond one man. Pascal’s La Carousel and the Busy Bee Café became gathering places for civil rights leaders and strategists. Maynard Jackson Jr. mapped his historic mayoral campaign at Pascal’s. These spaces fed both bodies and movements.
Along what is now Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway, attorney Donald Hollowell led the desegregation of the University of Georgia, represented Martin Luther King Jr., and later became the first Black regional director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. His career reflected the corridor’s deeper identity: a place where economic and civil rights struggles intertwined.
Dorothy Bolden, born in Vine City, organized domestic workers by riding every MARTA bus line in Atlanta, founding the National Domestic Workers Union of America in 1968. Within two years, workers saw significant wage increases and gained access to benefits long denied to them.
Economic justice on the historic Westside has always been built from the ground up.
Learn — Education Inside and Outside the Classroom
Education on the historic Westside is rooted in emancipation itself.
Atlanta University was founded in 1865, becoming the first institution in the nation to award graduate degrees to African Americans. Morehouse College, Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University), and Spelman College soon followed. Together, these institutions formed the Atlanta University Center — now the world’s largest consortium of historically Black private colleges and universities.
These schools were not separate from the neighborhood. They were its intellectual center of gravity.
Beyond the AUC, Booker T. Washington High School and the English Avenue School anchored their communities. The English Avenue School, bombed in 1960 amid desegregation resistance, continued to serve families for decades and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020. Booker T. Washington High School shaped dozens of prominent city and national icons, including Dr. King.
Leaders such as Dr. Asa G. Yancey, the first African American doctor at both Grady and Emory, and Grace Towns Hamilton, the first African American woman elected to the Georgia General Assembly, were shaped not only by classrooms, but by the neighborhoods that surrounded them.
Learning here has always extended beyond school walls.
Connection — How Community Makes Leadership Possible
Leadership does not grow in isolation. It grows in connection.
Reverend Joseph E. Boone — pastor, organizer, and strategist — opened Rush Memorial Congregational Church to the Atlanta University Center student movement, providing a headquarters for civil rights organizing when students were forced off campus. Known as “the picketing preacher,” Boone later led Operation Breadbasket’s economic justice campaigns, securing hiring and contracting commitments from major corporations.
Helen Howard demonstrated another form of leadership in 1967 when she founded the Vine City Foundation to provide medical, legal, and food resources during a period of neighborhood decline.
These leaders were not anomalies. They were products of an ecosystem — of homes, businesses, schools, churches, and shared spaces that nurtured trust and collective action.
Neighborhood Wholeness Is Living History
Black history on the historic Westside is not confined to archives. It is etched into the streets — Hollowell Parkway, Boone Boulevard, Cameron M. Alexander Boulevard, and many others — and into the institutions and homes that shaped generations.
It is the story of deliberate construction: neighborhoods built by visionaries like Herman Perry and Alonzo Herndon; institutions founded in the wake of slavery; leaders who used law, labor, ministry, and organizing to expand opportunity.
It is also a reminder that when housing stability, economic opportunity, education, and connection are disrupted, the ecosystem weakens.
Preserving that ecosystem — homes that anchor legacy, businesses that build dignity, schools that cultivate leadership, and relationships that sustain community — is what makes a neighborhood whole.
And that is what we honor this Black History Month.