The Epic of Collier Heights

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
Back in September, we sent 99pi producer Christopher Johnson on a reporting trip to Atlanta.

Christopher Johnson:
And that’s where I met Myrna Clayton – at her family home in a very chill, wooded suburb about 7 miles west of downtown. Her parents decided to move here in the summer of 1972 – all because of a sleepover.

Myrna Clayton:
I had a friend in elementary school. Her name is Lakanya Glass. And I had the joy of being invited to come over to her house for a sleepover. And we had so much fun playing. I mean, what second graders do… Oh, you DON”T know what second grade girls do, do you? (laughs) You run around and play!

Christopher Johnson:
And getting to Lakanya’s house was magical. At the time, Myrna and Lakanya lived in different neighborhoods. Myrna’s community was a little more dense. Her home was nice. Modest. And then, Myrna’s mom would drive her over to Lakanya’s. And – wow.

Myrna Clayton:
We had to go through these different streets. Around very – it was almost like forest-y. Lots of trees, and lots of lots of houses. And it seemed like the houses as you got closer and closer, got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

Roman Mars:
The neighborhood was lush – forested with oaks and hickories, and of course, Georgia pines.

Christopher Johnson:
The whole ride made Myrna’s little jaw drop. And it wasn’t over! They’d get to Lakanya’s house, go up her driveway, and the entire time, Myrna just stared at her friend’s house, enchanted.

Myrna Clayton:
For a second grader, you know, it was like, you know, going to Disneyland! (laughs) You know, it was just huge. And then to go to the door and ring the doorbell. Ding ding, ding ding, ding.

Christopher Johnson:
Little Myrna was so awestruck, that she just couldn’t stand it anymore! One day she came home from Lakanya’s and told her father she wanted to live in that neighborhood, too.

Myrna Clayton:
So within a year we had moved here. I was a daddy’s girl, so my dad made a way.

Christopher Johnson:
So your father – well, the whole family – put everything in boxes and bought a house and moved for you.

Myrna Clayton:
Yeah! (laughs) That’s my daddy.

Roman Mars:
For Myrna’s family and hundreds of others, this community was a 4 thousand acre suburban jewel in the postwar South. It was called Collier Heights, and it was almost entirely Black.

Christopher Johnson:
Just as amazing as the expansive beauty is how this neighborhood came to be, especially given everything that stood in the way. Collier Heights was established in the early 1950s – when redlining and racial zoning all put hard limits on where Black people could live.

Roman Mars:
So in order to create this huge, dreamy suburb, a team of community leaders used cold, sharp strategy, flipping the logic of Jim Crow housing segregation on its head. It was the first time Black Americans had the tactics and the resources to build for themselves a modern middle- and upper-class community on such a massive scale.

[MUSIC]

Christopher Johnson:
If a place like Collier Heights was gonna to emerge anywhere, it would be in Atlanta.

Maurice Hobson:
Black folk have had particular experiences in a city such as Atlanta that have been unique, unlike the American South. This is a special city for Black folk. I do not make any if ands or buts about it. I love this city.

Christopher Johnson:
Maurice Hobson teaches Africana Studies at Georgia State. He has a book about Atlanta called “The Legend of The Black Mecca.” And certainly, by the end of WWII, that was a well-known moniker for the city – which drew Black people from around the country. For close to a century, Black Atlantans had been building successful businesses, earning higher ed degrees, and accumulating wealth and political power at levels few other cities could compete with, especially in the South.

Roman Mars:
But this was still the Deep South, and Atlanta was deeply segregated, especially when it came to housing. In the mid 1940s, that system of segregation helped fuel a major housing crisis in the city. Atlanta’s population was spiking with wartime migrant labor, and soldiers coming back home.

Christopher Johnson:
And those soldiers wanted to, you know, make families.

Maurice Hobson:
Men and women came back from the war and they wanted to get it in. I mean, you know that was part of it, too. So we had this population surge, which means now you’ve got a college education, you got a professional job, you got a family, you need a house for ‘em.

Christopher Johnson:
Which meant a huge demand for new, middle-class housing. But if you were Black – despite all that the “Mecca” had to offer – finding that dream house, or ANY housing, wasn’t easy.

Roman Mars:
Because for decades, most of Atlanta’s Black communities had been strictly segregated and confined to certain parts of the city. Even the Black folks with money had to squeeze into just a few segregated neighborhoods, with a limited number of houses and apartments.

Andy Wiese:
All of them are older. And beset by a certain number of disadvantages.

Christopher Johnson:
Andy Wiese teaches history at San Diego State. He wrote a book about Black suburbanization called “Places Of Their Own.”

Andy Wiese:
They’re next to heavy industry, they’re adjacent to a creek which floods when it rains. Smoke and rail lines that cross them. Range of problems. They don’t have any services. And as more and more people moved to Atlanta, those neighborhoods, existing neighborhoods, are filled to the bursting.

Christopher Johnson:
Bursting or not, getting out of these neighborhoods was nearly impossible.

Roman Mars:
For starters, the city had carved up downtown Atlanta into residential districts that were zoned by race. At the same time, the federal government wouldn’t guarantee loans to Black families, insisting that they’d cause property values in white neighborhoods to tank.

Christopher Johnson:
And on the rare occasion Black homebuyers did break through, things could get ugly. In the late 40s, a Black beautician had just purchased her house in a white community west of downtown when it was dynamited – probably by an offshoot of the KKK.

Andy Wiese:
People who have the capacity to move beyond are being met by mobs, by organized nightriders, by the Ku Klux Klan. And they’re setting bombs at people’s houses.

Roman Mars:
Into this world of entrenched housing segregation and terrorism against Black homebuyers stepped an activist named Robert Thompson, who helped find an end-run around the whole system.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
Thompson was the housing secretary of Atlanta’s Urban League. He believed that housing could be used as a tool for racial progress. In the 1940s, he helped lead an effort to plot out more living spaces for Black Atlantans. A LOT more.

Ron Bayor:
Robert Thompson was terrific.

Christopher Johnson:
Ron Bayor is history professor at Georgia Tech. And he interviewed Thompson when Bayor was writing his book “Race and the Shaping of 20th Century Atlanta.”

[MUSIC]

Ron Bayor:
He was involved in all of the discussions that were going on during this time involving where Blacks could be cleared to live. And so what the Urban League wanted to do, they wanted to set aside areas Blacks could move in without meeting violence from whites, because there was already violence erupting.

[ARCHIVAL TAPE]
ROBERT THOMPSON: THERE WERE THE… THERE WERE THE KU KLUX KLAN. MARCHING, HARASSING BLACKS.

Roman Mars:
Recordings of Robert Thompson are rare. But in this 1985 interview with Ron Bayor, Thompson describes the sense of urgency when it came to housing and violence right after WWII.

[ARCHIVAL TAPE]
ROBERT THOMPSON: THERE WAS A HATE ORGANIZATION CALLED ‘COLUMBIANS’ DYNAMITING HOMES OF BLACKS WHO HAD MOVED INTO NORTHWEST ATLANTA.

RON BAYOR: SO REALLY, YOU WERE TRYING TO FIND HOUSING, THEN, THAT YOU COULD MOVE INTO WITHOUT ANY KIND OF VIOLENCE ERUPTING?

ROBERT THOMPSON: RIGHT. THE TOWN WAS ABOUT TO EXPLODE.

Christopher Johnson:
“The town was about to explode,” Thompson said. So, he and a group of prominent Black Atlantans identified half a dozen so-called “Negro Expansion Areas.”

Roman Mars:
These were small pockets spread around Atlanta that were very carefully plotted out in order to protect future Black residents from violent white backlash.

Christopher Johnson:
The group met with white neighborhood associations, and they struck these so-called “gentlemen’s agreements” to use highways, cemeteries, train tracks and other landmarks as boundaries between the Black “expansion areas” and white neighborhoods. Y’all stay on your side, we’ll stay on ours.

Roman Mars:
But these few small areas still weren’t enough for a growing Black Atlanta. And some of the city’s Black leadership disliked these “gentlemen’s agreements,” just on principle. They felt that agreeing to segregated boundaries was basically an endorsement of segregation.

Andy Wiese:
The irony is, of course, if you looked at the pretty sharply drawn racial barriers around them and boundaries around them, you would be looking at a map of Jim Crow segregation, envisioned to reach out into the foreseeable future of the city.

Christopher Johnson:
So while the expansion areas went ahead, Thompson and his team decided around 1950 that it was time for a much bigger, bolder play. One that would harness Black Atlanta’s development know-how, and its wealth. They called the plan – Project X.

[MUSIC]

Ron Bayor:
Project X was an attempt to very simply not have whites decide where Blacks could live. That was it.

Christopher Johnson:
The whole thing was orchestrated by Atlanta’s Urban League. They’d later write up this document – on a typewriter – and the front page just said “PROJECT X” in all caps. Very special ops. It’s sort of a manifesto, sort of a white paper. It lays out in cold, hard numbers and charts a crystal clear strategy to grab the west side for Black development.

Roman Mars:
Thompson’s team surveyed land west of central Atlanta. There were some white neighborhoods out there, and a few small Black communities. But to the west of all those, they saw a LOT of undeveloped land that stretched all the way out to the county line.

Andy Wiese:
And they decide that they’re going to try to buy land further to the west. Thompson wrote, “We’ll survey all of the property ownership in a swath of west Atlanta all the way to the Chattahoochee River.”

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
And they’d find ways to buy up that land and develop it. Since those parcels were outside the city limits, they weren’t subject to Atlanta’s race-based zoning laws. Meaning, Black people could still buy it, if the owners were willing to sell.

Christopher Johnson:
Thompson’s team needed a strategy. And what they came up with was a plan to use racism in the real estate market to their advantage.

Andy Wiese:
White Atlanteans in the West Side were fearful of the arrival of African-Americans.

Roman Mars:
The Project X team knew that because they were Black, they could depress the value of white-owned space by simply buying property that was adjacent. The white owner would then likely be pressured to sell. And once white communities found out there were Black people next door, those residents were likely to move, and white homebuyers would shop elsewhere.

Christopher Johnson:
Either way, all of that space would then be open to Black Atlanta. Manipulating Jim Crow psychology was just a tactic on the way to creating great Black neighborhoods. Project X counted on the fear of a Black neighbor.

Andy Wiese:
They undertake to use white fears of integration – white fears of living among or near African-Americans – against whites to secure ownership of land and space for Atlanta’s African-American West Side to grow.

Christopher Johnson:
But they had to keep Project X kind of on the low. White communities were expanding, too. And if they sensed that Black developers wanted this land, they might snatch it up first, effectively cutting off the west side to Black people.

Roman Mars:
One of Project X’s first big steps was to assemble a group of 23 investors, including a few doctors, some teachers, a newspaper editor, and a housewife. They formed a corporation, sold shares to raise money, and set their sights on more than a thousand acres.

[MUSIC]

Christopher Johnson:
And then, they went deep into the west side, and just started buying up land next to white communities, which were caught completely unawares.

Ron Bayor:
The white ignorance of the Black community, what they didn’t know – there was money in the Black community. And they began to jump over the white areas and create housing for themselves beyond that. So they began to encapsulate the white areas between two Black areas. So the squeeze was on.

[MUSIC]

Christopher Johnson:
Where the old plan for expansion areas had Black neighborhoods surrounded by white homes, Project X flipped that. Black developers were now encircling white communities.

Roman Mars:
In neighborhoods around west Atlanta, locals started seeing these modern, gleaming new middle-class houses go up on what used to be farmland or woods. White homeowners then watched in amazement as Black families moved in.

[MUSIC]

Christopher Johnson:
In just a couple of years, multiple white neighborhoods found themselves encircled. Robert Thompson described this strategy as both a leapfrog, and a military style pincer move.

[ARCHIVAL TAPE]
ROBERT THOMPSON: WHAT WAS DEVELOPING AT THAT TIME WAS KIND OF A LEAPFROG/PINCER. SO WHAT WE DID, WE JUMPED OVER. SO THEN THESE WHITES WERE POCKETED. WE HAD JUMPED OVER, BOUGHT LAND. NOBODY CAN STOP YOU FROM BUYING LAND.

Christopher Johnson:
“Nobody can stop you from buying land,” Thompson said. The Project X strategy helped open up Atlanta’s west side for Black development. The pincer moves had worked brilliantly.

Ron Bayor:
Yeah, yeah, I would say that was right. Very good description coming out of the World War II era. The World War II generals would have been proud. It came around the white area and caught them in between.

Andy Wiese:
And it will produce some of the most attractive, comfortable, expensive, as well as affordable suburban style housing that African-Americans are able to purchase and live in anywhere in the United States in the 1950s & 60s.

Roman Mars:
One of the places where these “leapfrog tactics” were used to best effect was out near a small suburb that was the original, all-white Collier Heights.

[MUSIC]

Christopher Johnson:
In 1953, a Black development company bought a thousand acres west of that white neighborhood. And the white folks lost it. Rumors spread that the whole area – including their neighborhood of 135 homes – would soon be all Black. They understood that if just one person sold, white Collier Heights would fall like dominoes.

Roman Mars:
The small community tried to form a united front. The civic club made it a moral issue, pressuring neighbors to stay loyal to the white race by holding the line. Those who wanted to sell were accused of being selfish.

Christopher Johnson:
As one homeowner lamented, “we sure do want to keep our property white, but there are negroes all around us now.”

[MUSIC]

Christopher Johnson:
In just a few months, every white resident had sold their house to a Black buyer. It was all over. White Collier Heights had become a Black community, just like that.

Clarence Luckett Sr:
Every house that you see that you’re passin’ now, this was all white. We called it Crackerville.

Christopher Johnson:
I wanted to see Collier Heights for myself – especially the frontline that was once called Hightower Road, and how the whole area changed when it became all Black. Clarence Luckett Senior was more than happy to show me around. He’s a deacon at Ebenezer Baptist Church. And he moved to Collier Heights in 1959.

Clarence Luckett Sr:
All this you see now, you passing, didn’t no Blacks live up this way. All down through here was white. All down, everything, left to right.

Christopher Johnson:
He takes me past the wood frame houses that belonged to the white community that used to live here. It really is like looking at the ruins of a segregated front line. It’s when we turn and head west into Collier Heights that I can really appreciate the checkmate – that “jumping the whites” pincer move.

Clarence Luckett Sr:
You can see the difference. And we’re gonna make a left. You see the brick house on the hill up there?

Christopher Johnson:
Luckett says right there in the architecture is proof that the squeeze tactic was a success.

Clarence Luckett Sr:
You just keep in mind all the brick was basically built by Blacks for Blacks. And you can see ‘em as you come down, to your right.

Christopher Johnson:
These narrow asphalt roads roll and bend under a hunter green canopy of magnolias and dogwoods. We drive by one ranch home – peach-colored brick, a window wall with cream curtains drawn against the sun. It sits like a crown on top of a grassy hill. The lawn is manicured and crisp.

Clarence Luckett Sr:
And this used to be a cool dude here and he had a convertible. He was a playboy. He lived here.

Christopher Johnson:
It looks like a playboy house.

Clarence Luckett Sr:
He was definitely – he had a fancy little car. And, this was Dr. Roberts. We used to sit down on the porch and talk about everybody in the neighborhood.

Roman Mars:
In the mid-1950s, this neighborhood became Atlanta’s finest development for Black people, where houses went for 20 to 50 thousand dollars. Today, the most expensive houses would run you more than 500 thousand dollars. By the mid-1960s, Collier Heights was the dream – a modern, 4,000 acre oasis.

Christopher Johnson:
Black suburbanization was happening fast – especially across the South. But in terms of its sheer scale, its newness, and its status as a middle- and upper-middle class neighborhood, there was nothing else like Collier Heights anywhere in the country.

Minnette Coleman:
Watching this house – my house, my house – be built was exciting.

Christopher Johnson:
Minnette Coleman was in seventh grade when her parents had their house built from scratch.

Minnette Coleman:
Sometimes when my father and mother would go look at it, I got to go look at the progress they were making with the house. And every day when we went to school, we took a bus that drove past the property.

[MUSIC]

Christopher Johnson:
When the Colemans moved in in the 1960s, they joined a community of more than 52 hundred Black Atlantans living in Collier Heights. Minnette remembers her family’s backyard, shaded by enormous Georgia pines.

Minnette Coleman:
My cousin would come down from Washington, D.C., we’d get our books and we’d read for hours, just sitting under these big pine trees. And then as we got older, we’d sit down in those pine trees and talk about boys. So… (laughs)

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
Collier Heights came to encompass 54 subdivisions – places like King’s Grant, Miami Heights, Crescendo Valley. Black Atlantans who drove out looking for their dream homes would park and take footpaths up through vast front lawns. They’d tour split-level homes that sometimes went 3, 4, 5 storeys down the back of a hill.

Christopher Johnson:
Collier Heights had a whole rainbow of ranch styles: compact, linear, linear with clusters, bungalow, alphabet. Some of them designed by the best architects in the game. There were homes with pagoda-inspired roofs, and others designed in a style called “The Woodland Master Deluxe Split-Level.” Whoo! There was one house – it’s still there – built in the round for perfect acoustics, custom made for the local high school band director. As for Minnette Coleman’s home – she can still picture it on the inside.

Minnette Coleman:
How could I forget it! First of all – it was back in the days when avocado green was popular. So every damn thing in that house, almost everything, was green. The main bathroom was green. The living room, kitchen was painted green…

Roman Mars:
Never has a style and a color complemented each other so perfectly as mid-century modern and avocado green.

Minnette Coleman:
…and then there were steps going down to the basement. The basement was the full length of the house. That basement was so big, we would do races on bikes and scooters and wagons and stuff like that. We would go around the stairs. It was like the chariot race in Ben-Hur or something like that.

[MUSIC]

Christopher Johnson:
In an Ebony magazine feature from 1971 titled “Atlanta – Black Mecca of the South,” Collier Heights was described as one of just a few “verdant neighborhoods that are the true pride and joy of the city’s Black citizenry.”

Roman Mars:
The neighborhood had also become a who’s who of successful Black Atlanta.

Clarence Luckett Sr:
If you was anybody, somebody that had a dollar, you lived in Collier Heights. All doctors, you could find them in Collier Heights. All preachers had their big churches in Collier Heights.

Christopher Johnson:
My tour guide Clarence Luckett – one of his mentors was Reverend Martin Luther King Senior. Around Collier Heights, they call him Daddy King. He had a house there. And so did Ralph Abernathy – the civil rights leader who was a best friend and close advisor to Martin Luther King Junior.

Roman Mars:
Minnette Coleman’s dad is George Coleman, editor of the “Atlanta Daily World,” one of the oldest Black newspapers in the country. There was a bank president, at least two state congressmen, Grady Hospital’s medical director, several architects and lawyers. Myrna Clayton remembers her neighborhood got so famous for its illustrious residents and gorgeous homes, it became a straight up tourist attraction.

Myrna Clayton:
When I was younger, tour buses used to come down the street, people wanting to see, you know, Collier Heights. And so I’d be waving, waving at the bus going past! But there would be big, Greyhound-sized buses.

Roman Mars:
Not everyone in Collier Heights was famous, or part of the wealthy elite. Some were HBCU professors, laborers, clerks, and librarians. Some were strivers who’d scraped together just enough to buy themselves and their families some of the good life out there.

Minnette Coleman:
A lot of those people got in those houses by doing jobs that were menial. They built up a business. But before that, in college, a lot of them waited tables. Some of them may not have even gone to college. Some of them had worked for white folks, saw how they lived and said, “hmmm, this is how the better half lives, this is how I want to live.”

Christopher Johnson:
By the early 1970s, the community had grown to include two thousand homes built from scratch. This was peak Collier Heights. For the people who lived there, the neighborhood had become more than just a solution to a housing crisis in a segregated city. Black folks wanted in on the suburban dream, and Collier Heights had promised to make it come true ten-fold. Along with peace and fresh air, this cloistered all-Black suburb offered even a small break from white racism.

Roman Mars:
Collier Heights was also a space where some upwardly mobile Black people could distinguish their community from lower income neighborhoods. And in general, Black Atlanta was proud that a space so grand had been made for and by Black people.

Christopher Johnson:
Collier Heights was also celebrated for showing the world a vision of Black progress: proof that Black folks wanted to and could live well – even luxuriously – in suburbia. For its residents, Collier Heights represented the epitome of self-determination and dignity in a world of entrenched anti-Blackness. A world where white Atlantans worked very hard to exclude them from certain communities.

Myrna Clayton:
Black folks said, “Well that’s fine! you don’t want to associate with us? Fine! We don’t have to associate with you. And we can survive and be okay, you know?” And, so, we don’t have to be in your world. We’ll create our own world. We already know how to build! We got the skills.

Minnette Coleman:
Black people get a lot of hand-me-downs – from laws and legislation, to clothes and shoes and everything like that. My parents deserved a brand new house. They deserved new. They deserved everything that that house had to offer – a good neighborhood, good schools, close to the church, and a house that didn’t come with somebody else’s memories. They created everything in there on their own.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
In 2009 – nearly 50 years after the Colemans moved into their home – Collier Heights was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The community was officially not new anymore. It was also a lot smaller than it used to be. The neighborhood boundaries were redrawn, shrinking Collier Heights down to a historic core that’s less than a quarter of its original size.

Christopher Johnson:
There’ve been other changes, too. In recent decades, some residents have put ornate, wrought iron bars on their windows and doors for safety. Lawns have gotten a bit shaggy. Some of the houses could stand a little TLC.

Clarence Luckett Sr:
… And he had a big old swimming pool in the back of his house. And these so-called elite Black folks…

Christopher Johnson:
As Clarence Luckett drives me around, pointing out this doctor’s home here and that lawyer’s house over there, we talk about probably the biggest change in Collier Heights. Its greatest resource – that first generation of homeowners – is passing away. Sometimes the younger generations can’t or don’t really want to take care of the house. Which can lead to neglect.

Clarence Luckett Sr:
Now this is the doctor’s house over the right. He’s the one that built all of these. He’s dead and his family won’t move in the house. But you see how it’s weeded up a little…

Roman Mars:
Many of those kids have their own homes, and they’re not interested in living in Collier Heights. Minnette Coleman explains that parents like hers wanted their kids to be among the best educated, to get great jobs, and to have zero limits on where they could travel and live.

Christopher Johnson:
The plan worked, and for a while it was hard to convince those kids and other younger families to move back to the neighborhood.

Minnette Coleman:
You see houses that went up for sale and nobody has bought them because they look like mansions, but nobody who wants to live in a mansion wants to live in Collier Heights.

Roman Mars:
But that’s changing, too. Minnette’s family just sold their home to a man who has big plans to renovate. Neighbors say they’re seeing more and more strangers – both Black and white – pass through the community – not tourists, but people who want to buy.

Christopher Johnson:
With as much intention as it took to build this jewel of the Black Mecca, Clarence Luckett believes they’ve got to preserve it by re-telling and handing down the epic of Collier Heights.

Clarence Luckett Sr:
It’s going to have to be parents like me. Let their kids know there always should be a home/house or old church that you can bring your great great grandson — this is where Grandmama lived.

[MUSIC]

Christopher Johnson:
Collier Heights may not have the conveniences of a trendy Atlanta neighborhood. But what gives this community its weight is that powerful origin story – everything that went into carving out a space that was, as the locals say, “for us, by us.”

Clarence Luckett Sr:
Now, you take my dad, he was born in 1898, maybe. My granddad was a slave. They didn’t have nowhere to go back to to show their kids, see? So what we have to tell our kids about this neighborhood is the history of what your grandparents had to do just to live in this neighborhood. The only way things can be history, somebody’s got to pass it on.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
When we come back for the coda, we’re going to talk about the thing everyone talks about in the suburbs, even historic groundbreaking suburbs, we’re going to talk about lawns. After this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
We’re back with Christopher Johnson. Hey, Christopher!

Christopher Johnson:
Hey, Roman. So obviously, I went to Atlanta to work on this story. And this was my first time out in the field since before the COVID lockdowns.

Roman Mars:
And so what was that like? What did you do?

Christopher Johnson:
One of my first stops was barbecue! I hope that’s alright.

Roman Mars:
That’s perfectly fine.

Christopher Johnson:
But I also got to hang out in Collier Heights, which was really great because I got to meet some pretty wonderful people and just spend some time. Some folks, I sat down with them in their living rooms and we just talked. Classic southern hospitality. And in the course of talking to a lot of different people, I came across a whole other part of this story about Collier Heights that I didn’t get to talk about earlier. As I chatted with some folks, they are people who are from Collier Heights, people who grew up, there was one thing kept coming up over and over again, which was lawn care.

Roman Mars:
Huh!? Okay, this is interesting. Lawns are very fraught subjects when it comes to homeownership, so I’m intrigued to how it… the flavor of it in Collier Heights.

Christopher Johnson:
A lot of it was prompted by me asking people how Collier Heights had changed in the last few decades.

Roman Mars:
Mm-Hmm. (affirmative)

Christopher Johnson:
And the grass kept coming up over and over again. So for example, you remember Myrna Clayton from the story?

Roman Mars:
Yeah, she’s our opening anecdote. She’s the one who’s like dad bought her house in Collier Heights because she had magical sleepovers there.

Christopher Johnson:
Yeah, exactly that Myrna Clayton. So I asked her about changes in the community in the last few decades. And one of her issues was the grass and neighbors just not taking care of their front lawns anymore.

Myrna Clayton:
People parking on grass. That’s not something that we did. You know, people not cutting their grass. This is not something we did. You know, we always took care of our lawns. You know, that’s just not something that a number of people know how to do.

Roman Mars:
Yes, I’ve heard this before. I mean, lawn care or like, lack of it is probably the most suburban complaint ever. And it’s like, driven plenty of neighborhood associations to, you know, draft bylaws about upkeep and all kinds of things to control people and what they do with their lawns.

Christopher Johnson:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of it is about class values. So like, for example, in Collier Heights, from the beginning, this neighborhood was a space for Atlanta’s middle and upper class, and one of the things that held that together is middle and upper class values. And you know, it’s like you go to those old-school houses with those old-school living rooms. I used to see this when I would go visit my aunts and uncles in suburban Maryland and in D.C., where they have these living rooms that aren’t touched unless you have company. There’s a family room and the playroom. But the living room is for a special company and otherwise for display. Front lawns are preserved for show. They capture the way that you wanted to present your family to the world. It’s like putting on your best outfit to step out into the world or go to a job interview or whatever. Right? And I think that in a lot of ways, that’s part of what’s going on with the front lawn.

Roman Mars:
And you mentioned everyone, not just Myrna, was talking about lawns. What are other people saying about it?

Christopher Johnson:
Yeah, I mean, I met this wonderful couple and they had some pretty strong feelings about lawns, too. This is Harold and Juanita Morton. Juanita is the vice president of the Collier Heights Community Association. Harold is the former president, and they were really helpful with this story and they were super generous. They gave me a tour of their home and they introduced me to a lot of wonderful neighbors, including Clarence Luckett Senior. And when we sat down in their living room to talk about Collier Heights, this neighborhood that they love, Harold Morton went even further than Myrna about lawns.

Harold Morton:
Even something as simple as cutting your grass. I just don’t get it. And you get neighbors that like to park their cars on the grass. So… I’m not elitist, but you’re not supposed to park on the grass. Collier Heights, you never park your car on the grass. You never had barbecues in the front yard. That’s why we have backyards. Some people are front yard people. Some people are backyard people. I mean, but Collier Heights were built for backyard people. I mean, you may have a few front porches, but the majority of entertaining – your grilling, your swimming pools, your trampolines – everything’s in the back. You invite your neighbors to the backyard to party. But now, you know, you got front yard people.

Roman Mars:
There’s a lot to unpack there. Front yard people and backyard people. I have never heard that before. But I totally know what he’s talking about. I mean, so… I mean, I guess what I’m interested in when it comes to Harold here is like, how he can talk and think in this way and also not want to come off as elitist. You know what I mean? Like, what is that contradiction about?

Christopher Johnson:
Yeah, it’s so elitism and class are really complicated things in places like Collier Heights, which is partly why you hear this balancing act in Harold’s voice. It’s connected to the community’s origin story because on the one hand, Collier Heights has deep ties to the civil rights movement. I mentioned the Kings, also the Abernathys. Civil rights activists would hold fundraisers out in Collier Heights because that’s where the money was. And also that’s where they found folks who empathized with the struggle. And as we said earlier, many of the folks in Collier Heights came straight from the struggle. They were strivers, or at least their parents were. So that’s on the one hand. On the other hand, Collier Heights has long prided itself on its ties to the black elite. And there’s no real reason why black folks wouldn’t be elitist. So it’s a delicate thing — upholding middle class values that can sometimes smack of elitism, while not coming off as elitist because that could betray the spirit of the community.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, yeah. How does race tie into all this talk of elitism and trying to, like, create a space, but also not make it an exclusive space because exclusive spaces is the very thing that you’re trying to get away from? Tie this all together for me because it’s really complex.

Christopher Johnson:
It is complex. And historian Maurice Hobson helped me understand some of this. We talked a lot about race and class, and he said there’s something unique about how they intersect in a city like Atlanta, especially during Jim Crow, which is when Black Collier Heights was first being developed.

Maurice Hobson:
There’s one particular feature of the American South that basically made all Black folk know each other, and that is white supremacy and segregation. Which means that you could be the richest Black man in Atlanta and you could be the poorest, y’all know each other. Based on– you live in the same spots, you worship at the same spots, you eat barbecue, you go to the barber shop. I mean, like, you know, you go to the hair salon, you know, you know who the hustlers are. You know, you just know the people.

Christopher Johnson:
So whatever your station in life, because of the way that racism and segregation worked for so long, you were probably going to mix with other classes of Black folks. And if they didn’t mix, they certainly knew people and had connections and relationships and sometimes even kinfolk who were not in Collier Heights, who were in other communities, other neighborhoods and in other class ranks. And so to disparage folks who aren’t part of your immediate class circle, you would be potentially disparaging your own folks, your own people. And a version of you, possibly just a couple of years ago.

Roman Mars:
Right, right.

Christopher Johnson:
We’ve seen all these studies about how precarious wealth is when it comes to Black people in America. And I think that a lot of Black folks understand that there but for the grace of God and this little bit of scratch in my pocket, go I. And so it’s important, I think, for a lot of people to maintain, certainly from this older generation, to maintain some sense of respect and empathy for people who may be of a different class rank because they’re still folks.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, you’re talking about the nature of that balancing act as the sensitivity to the idea that you don’t want to come off as elitist because, you know, elite-ism is an -ism that is extremely close to racism and they recognize that.

Christopher Johnson:
Right.

Roman Mars:
And that’s an interesting thing that they’re going through, but also knowing that they want things to be a certain way.

Christopher Johnson:
Right. Right. At least from the perspective of old-school Collier Heights. They wanted things to be properly middle class, partly because as they saw it, that was how they would get to a place where they could lift up the entire race. Like, there’s a version of elitism that could be valuable, one that could actually overcome racism, and it’s still tied to front yards. Now, Minnette Coleman actually brought a lot of this home for me.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. She’s our other emcee. I remember doing this in the edit, that we had Myrna Clayton and Minnette Coleman. We had to keep them straight. And so Minnette is the daughter of George Coleman, and he wrote for the “Atlanta Daily World.”

Christopher Johnson:
And her parents, they had their house built from scratch. They had this beautiful backyard with the massive trees. And in Minnette’s mind, there’s a through line from lawns and yards to middle class values, all the way to W.E.B. Dubois and his formula of racial uplift.

Minnette Coleman:
Black people talk about the fact that, you know, we’re trying to be what Dubois referred to as the talented tenth. 10 percent of the Black population that’s going to be responsible for raising people up.

Christopher Johnson:
And so, as Minnette explains it, folks felt like if we’re going to achieve that lofty goal, then we have to do all of the middle class things like stay out of the front yard, play in the backyard, and that will help create the ripest conditions for class ascent.

Minnette Coleman:
So, you never saw the children in the front yard. Sometimes you don’t even know if people had children in their house. We played in the backyard. You played when your friends came over, you played in your backyard. But who were your friends? Your friends were kids who were probably going to grow up and go to college. And have professional jobs, and this was what? Our middle class parents’ viewed as fulfilling Dubois prophecy for having sired members of the talented tenth. So whenever I think of Collier Heights when I was a kid, I think you had to play in the backyard.

Roman Mars:
Wow. Yeah. I mean, we covered lawns and the sort of politics of lawns and the sort of like, ethics and design of lawns. When you add in a whole other element of race to it, when you’re talking about values and mixing that all together, it gets very complicated, very quickly. You can see the balance that there, you know, that they’re all sort of walking, you know?

Christopher Johnson: Absolutely. And you know, Roman, this is a great question for yet another episode about lawns in the suburbs and whatnot. But you know, for several folks, including Minnette, they were pretty candid about Black families embracing white ideals of how to look and act and be middle class.

Roman Mars:
Right.

Christopher Johnson:
But look, it makes sense in another way, too. So Collier Heights is huge, and it used to be even bigger than 4000 acres. And the thing that binds this massive space that’s otherwise a pretty ordinary looking middle class suburb, the thing that binds it together is its origin story. I mean, Collier Heights needs its story, and it needs everyone to show that they’re on board with that story. And although it was a middle and upper class community, not everybody can park an expensive car or several expensive cars in their driveway. Not everybody can get a swimming pool put in, but the way that many of the folks that I spoke to saw it, what their neighbors can do is go out, get themselves a lawn mower, cut their grass, park in the driveway or on the street. Definitely not on the front lawn. And in that way, they signal that they’re on board with preserving this vision.

Roman Mars:
Right, right. I can totally see that. But that’s the, that’s the payment for entry. It doesn’t have to be the biggest house. It doesn’t have to be the nicest car. But, you know, if you deserve to be there, you are supposed to mow your lawn. Well, this was great. Thanks a lot, Christopher.

Christopher Johnson:
Yeah, anytime, Roman.

———

CREDITS

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Christopher Johnson. Edited by Joe Rosenberg. Mix and tech production by Jim Briggs. Music by our director of sound Swan Real. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Emmett FitzGerald, Chris Berube, Sofia Klatzker and me, Roman Mars.

Special thanks this week to Juanita and Harold Morton of the Collier Heights Community Association. Janice Sikes Rogers. Serena McKracken at The Kenan Research Center – part of the Atlanta History Center. And Kevin Kruse, professor of history at Princeton University and the author of “White Flight: Atlanta and The Making of Modern Conservatism.”

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building — in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.