Historic South Atlanta History

When Historic South Atlanta was founded as “Brownsville” in the late 1800s, it grew into one of Atlanta’s hubs of black education, thought leadership, and culture. 

Clark University designed and created the Brownsville Neighborhood with the campus anchoring the northern tip of the community in about 1883. The university quickly drew in businesses, religious leaders, academics, and young people. Its affluence burgeoned quickly. 

Journalist Ray Stannard Baker visited Brownsville in 1907 and remarked,

“I was surprised to find a large settlement of negroes practically every one of whom owned his own home, some of the houses being as attractive outside and as well furnished within as the ordinary homes of middle-class white people… The schoolhouse…was built wholly with money personally contributed by the negroes of the neighborhood… They had three churches and not a saloon.”

 In Historic South Atlanta, the ground we walk on every day featured the premiere African-American thinkers, artisans, and professors. A movie theater hosted entertainment nearby, and Clark Atlanta University welcomed swaths of students each year. Brownsville existed as a radical, post-civil war partnership between majority and minority cultures. Even today, when we walk down streets like Gammon, we need to remember that the names of those streets mark the flourishing that’s already embedded in this land. Honoring the neighborhood means recognizing the people who built this place, whose impact lives on.