Remembering Rose Hill, a Black community erased to create Candler Park
By Bo Emerson, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 13, 2022.
Razed as a ‘slum,’ Rose Hill is memorialized through bi-racial effort.
Under the smooth grass of a Candler Park soccer field, a village is buried. Eleven houses were bulldozed. A cul-de-sac was erased. Eighty years ago the neighborhood disappeared.
Last month that ghost community briefly resurfaced, one week before Halloween.
Using bright yellow rope, volunteers inscribed the outlines of 11 missing houses against the green grass. They used yellow rope to sketch the footprint of the Edgewood Evening Star fraternal lodge and home-made cardboard signs to indicate two short intersecting streets.
The tableau created on the Candler Park soccer field was part of a Commemorative Living History event and a project intended to look more deeply into the background of a green space that has become a beloved part of the community.
Candler Park is beloved, but like other Atlanta landmarks, its creation came at a cost.
Before Candler Park existed, Candler Park Drive was called Mayson Avenue North, and the mixed neighborhood in that area adjacent to the railroad tracks was part of the independent town of Edgewood.
One of the oldest institutions in the area was the Antioch East Baptist Church, founded in 1872. Across the street was the Evening Star lodge, which served as a community center for Edgewood’s Black residents.
Antioch’s wooden sanctuary on Whitefoord Avenue North burned mysteriously in 1916. But another one, made from stone and still standing, soon replaced it.
“My mother told my sister they didn’t want us here: We praised the Lord too loud, we sang too loud,” said Willie Mae Harris, 83, standing in the sanctuary of the stone church that Antioch members built by hand to replace the burned structure.
”They burned down one, but we built another one of bricks and stone, so they could not do it again,” said Yolanda Banfield, an Edgewood descendant who flew down from Silver Spring, Maryland, for the event.
The cause of the church fire remains unsolved, but many Antioch members believe it was antipathy from the growing white community in Edgewood.
That belief was reinforced when Candler Park was created in 1922. In that year Asa Candler sold 54 acres of undeveloped land to the city of Atlanta for $10. That acreage effectively surrounded the 9.5-acre Rose Hill enclave.
To expand the whites-only park in 1942, the city used a new “slum clearance” ordinance to condemn Black-owned houses in the Rose Hill neighborhood and had them torn down. By the 1950s the writing was on the wall. The Antioch congregation moved southwest to a new location on Hardee Street, near what would become the Edgewood shopping district.
Their stone church across from Candler Park became the home of the First Existentialist Congregation, a Unitarian-affiliated organization that is mostly bohemian and white with a philosophy and a worship style dramatically different from the charismatic Baptists.
In the early 2000s, Edith Kelman became the office manager at First E. Cong, as members call it, and stumbled on file cabinets in the church basement brimming with historical research on the building, some of it undertaken by the late historian Cliff Kuhn and students at Georgia State University.
Her reaction: “This stuff is amazing!” She reached out to the historians and then to the members of Antioch. With elders from Antioch, members of her congregation and others in the community, she helped form the BiRacial History Project to tell a more complete story about the neighborhood.
In 2006, First E. invited Antioch’s elders and minister Rev. John F. Williams to lunch at what they called the Stone Church. The following year a large contingent from Antioch visited the Stone Church and, with their choir, musicians and step-dancers, created a joyful noise.
This year, on Oct. 22, the two congregations collaborated on the Rose Hill project with a day-long schedule of symbolic activities.
The day began early in Candler Park, with a commemorative golf tournament in honor of Margaret Latimore, a Rose Hill descendant who, legendarily, became the first African American woman to play at the segregated Candler Park course.
“She was an entrepreneur,” said Banfield, who is Latimore’s niece. “She was first in many things. We were very proud of her.”
Then came speeches and songs at the First E. sanctuary, including a roof-raising “He Is Always Looking Out For Me” by Antioch’s music minister John Cherry.
Marsha Mitchiner, First E.’s minister, told the Antioch visitors, “We’ve always considered ourselves to be the stewards of this physical space but also of the spirit of love that you created.”
Afterward, the group left the church and walked across the street to the soccer field to visit the outlines of the ghost houses. Placed on tables within those yellow perimeters were short histories of the residents who once lived at each address.
Using census data, Sanborn maps, city directories and interviews with descendants, Kelman and her citizen researchers pieced together a portrait of a hard-working community of chauffeurs, carpenters, brick masons and domestic workers, some of whom had multi-generational ties to the land.
Neatly typed, and enclosed in three-ring binders, the histories revealed a disappeared world.
An example: At 437 Savage Court lived Jack Battle who bought the property in 1897 and built his house there. Battle worked as a porter for a printing company and his wife Martha Battle worked as a laundress, “likely bringing clothes home from white families to wash, starch and iron,” write the historians.
The Battle house and other Rose Hill houses lacked indoor plumbing, as did “almost half the houses in Atlanta at the time.”
Jack Battle was 70-plus years old and a widower when the city began to condemn lots in Rose Hill. He held out until the end, and his property was the last to go. “In 1942 the city assumed the house and the land for $16.95 of unpaid property tax.”
Over the next 10 years what was a predominantly African American neighborhood became predominantly white. Antioch moved to Hardee Street in 1951.
In 2019, Antioch moved again, to a 10-acre compound in Ellenwood. They salvaged the stained-glass windows at the Hardee Street church and gave several to the First Existentialist Congregation. Those windows were installed at the old stone church, that was once the home of the Antioch congregation.
“They fit!” marveled Kelman. October’s event was the first time many of the Antioch members had seen the old windows installed in the stone sanctuary.
One window featured a golden harp; another featured the double-pan scales of justice. The colorful bars of light they shed on the unusual gathering, Black Baptists and white existentialists, added to a dizzy sense that this moment was a layer cake of diffracted histories, from 1872 to the present.
“There’s always a ram in the bush,” exulted Antioch’s Rev. Michael Anthony Smith, dropping a reference to Abraham as he addressed the congregation inside the old Stone Church.
“We were forced from this place,” said Smith, “but we look at these windows and see that we are still a part of this community. And we will always be a part of this community.”
See also Gallery #6, Remembering Rose Hill.