Garden Hills, the idyllic name of my childhood neighborhood in Atlanta, didn’t have a lot of gardens, just lawns, except at my house where my mother and grandmother wielded spades, clippers and weeding forks. My chores were in the garden too, removing Virginia creeper vines, and something called love-in-a-tangle. Voices of neighborhood kids made me eager to pull a few weeds and get to them quickly.
Eighteen children within two blocks, and others a few blocks further, we went to Garden Hills school, except for the Catholic kids, who went to Christ the King. No lack of playmates until slowly they began moving to pricier, newer neighborhoods. By the time I was ten there were only a few left. If I complained, my mother sent me to Bagley Park, where on the hottest days, sun punished the bored. I’d walk over, not hopeful. No trees, no creek, it gave off a feeling of desolation. Better to be bored at home.
A generation later, back in Atlanta to see my family, I watched my nephew play Little League there. Renamed, Bagley Park was now Frankie Allen Park and resodded, with a picnic area, groomed ball fields, bleachers, lots of green. More appealing, but still, the park held a bad feeling, a ghost of loneliness or heat. I felt a small sense of victory—I got away from here.
I’ve learned the backstory of Bagley Park.
***
The territory was home to the Creek (aka Muskogee) people. Whites kept migrating from Virginia, North and South Carolina, driving them out, and in the 1830s land was confiscated and native people “relocated.” The Indian Removal Act, urged by Andrew Jackson, began their forced march to Oklahoma known as the Trail of Tears.
White people settled a town called Terminus, then called Marthasville, that grew into the city of Atlanta. When the Civil War freed Black people, some found work in the area as maids or carriage drivers or yardmen for white families. They camped on the northern edge of the city in a settlement called Macedonia Park. Houses were built, churches and stores opened. Macedonia Park became a community.
Neighboring Forsyth County began a campaign of “racial cleansing.” They burned Black schools and churches, terrorized the Black population. By 1912 every Black person in Forsyth County was gone. (Forsyth County is also the home of Marjorie Taylor Greene.) Some fled to Macedonia Park. William Bagley, one of those people, established his family there, bought land, opened a rib joint and became the unofficial “Mayor.” The settlement began to be called Bagley Park.
This area wasn’t entirely safe either—the Klan rode through sometimes, shooting pistols, clearing the dusty streets—but it had a relatively higher degree of security. More homes were built and the neighborhood rooted deeply. There were several churches, including Mt. Olive, as well as two grocery stores, a barber shop, and a blacksmith. Photos of Macedonia/Bagley Park in the early 20th century show white-washed houses with small porches, residents gathered on a lawn, a soldier saluting before he heads off to serve. It looks like a good place to live.
In the 30s and 40s a developer built new homes on land that bordered Bagley Park. He called it Garden Hills and sold the houses to middle-class whites. The new white residents were not happy to have a Black community close and the Women’s Club urged the city to move them out. Finally the city agreed. Twenty-one acres of land were taken, all the Black families evicted, leaving only Mt. Olive Cemetery. More racial cleansing.
***
Everything that mattered to me for eighteen years happened in Garden Hills. My school, my church, my creek, my woods, where all my friends lived. I had no idea of where I lived. Maybe the adults knew, but the children knew nothing. Except, I knew I hated Bagley Park.
When the county confiscated Bagley Park, families that owned property were threatened if they didn’t sell. Their homes were condemned and the land undervalued. Nothing was paid to people who rented. In a few years Black families were gone. Some landed in public housing. Some took their meager buy-outs north of Atlanta where money stretched further—communities later displaced as well, taken over or “gentrified” in time. Some were left homeless.
The houses were razed and that unlovely spot with its empty scrappy field took their place.
Other Black communities disappeared from the north side of Atlanta in the 1950s, as they did all over the country. Johnsontown near Lenox Rd. was taken for a MARTA station. The summer before college I worked at Lenox Square, the adjacent shopping mall, as unaware of its history as I was of Bagley Park.
I was searching for information on redlining in my former city when I stumbled on the history of these seizures. Unpleasant memories of the park, of being hot, bored, lonely, lingered. A public health center stood at the entrance. Every summer we were hauled off to that place for our shots before school started, another reason not to like the park. Dislike took a new turn when I learned its history and realized our pleasant neighborhood was the source of misery and loss, of legally-sanctioned theft.
***
In 2006 a new developer bought the cemetery plot, the last piece of the original settlement. He purchased it cheaply too—property taxes hadn’t been paid—and planned to build pricey apartments. The area, Buckhead, had become affluent.
One of Bagley’s granddaughters, Mrs. Elon Osby, sued along with other descendants. Her grandparents, aunt and uncle were buried there. The city admitted that cemeteries are not required to pay property taxes, and development was prohibited, the graveyard declared an historic site that could not be disturbed. Members of the old families still came to pay respects to their kin. Some graves held remains of people who had once been enslaved. Few headstones existed and those that remained were illegible, but descendants knew who and where they were.
***
In 2022 after the pandemic years of no travel, my wife and I flew from California to Atlanta to see family again. We settled into my brother’s home in Buckhead. I told him what I’d learned about Bagley Park and we drove over through neighborhood streets. I shared early memories with my wife, pointing to homes where my friends had lived, our high school, now a private international school, and our grammar school, twice its old size. I was unearthing the old neighborhood for my wife.
The park had been upgraded again: freshly paved tennis courts, a resodded soccer field as well as a new baseball field. Fully gentrified. Bagley’s name was dropped in 1980. Now it was Frankie Allen Park, renamed for a policeman who served as umpire for Buckhead Baseball teams. The name of a Black business owner had been replaced by the name of a white cop.
The health center was still there. We parked by the athletic field and walked the grounds in search of the cemetery, peering over chain link fences, thinking it might have been secured to keep vandals out. We found nothing. I’d read that headstones had been restored and thought perhaps a historic marker had been added. As we returned to our car a man walking his dog passed and we asked if he knew of a cemetery. Beside the health center, he said. A neighborhood group was pushing the city to place an historic site marker there, something I hoped had already happened.
We drove back, spotted a few headstones on a small hill, so obscure we’d driven past them the first time. What remained was in decline again. One restored headstone read, Come Ye Blessed/Savannah Barnes Holmes (1882-1927). I’d read about her. A graduate of Morris Brown College, she taught school and with her husband founded an institute for homeless children.
From a photo I’d found we located Essie Davis’s headstone too, now so overgrown with moss it was hard to read. Davis worked as a maid in Buckhead and died in her twenties. A heart surrounds her name, a lamb was carved on the top of the stone. She was an early widow, her husband’s grave apparently there as well but not marked as far as we could see. We made out the beginning of one more name: Roose… Perhaps Roosevelt. Other headstones lay on the ground or their inscriptions were worn away. Sometimes only the original base remained, no headstone at all. Crinkly brown leaves covered the ground, remnants of past years, new leaves just appearing on the trees.
I saw only one Black man in the park. He stared at us from a pickup truck, possibly wondered what we were doing there. What were we doing there? Trespassing?
Recovering history? We didn’t belong and some might consider us insensitive intruders. The site has been vandalized more than once.
***
These people were being moved out, their homes destroyed, as our families settled in. The houses I’d pointed out where childhood friends lived—we were the reason they were being displaced. Harm like this still happens around us. Neighborhoods disappear—where do the people go? Urban renewal and “gentrification” offer owners a pittance. The history of Bagley Park is the history of this country. Displacement, theft. Sodding over. Updating, then adding a memorial plaque.
Why did white people not want to live with or near Black people? In a video I found online, Mrs. Osby gives an oral history of the park. She speculates that because they lacked indoor plumbing, the white residents felt they were unsanitary. What if, I wondered, the city had extended the sewer system they were building for the white neighborhood? Later I learned they declined to do so, putting money into eminent domain seizures instead.
Mrs. Osby’s mother, Mr. Bagley’s daughter, was deeply upset by the name change. She made calls, talked to city people, but nothing happened. They had promised it would remain Bagley Park forever. Mrs. Osby took the old Bagley Park sign to her mother’s house.
The mayor at the time, William Hartsfield, was quite pointed about why Bagley Park should be destroyed. In his words: “Our Negro population is growing by leaps and bounds. They stay right in the city limits….the time is not far distant when they will become a potent political force in Atlanta….Do you want to hand them political control of Atlanta?”
Atlanta honored Hartsfield by naming its airport after him. In the new millennium that name was changed to Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, honoring Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor. In fact, from 1973 to the present every mayor except one has been Black. Hartsfield’s fears came true anyway. Atlanta is a thriving center for Black family life, Black political power and Black culture. Not in time for Macedonia Park however.
***
The South is marked by oppression and the oppressed, on many sides. In school and home I was taught a history of suffering and loss, that is, white suffering and loss. People remember poverty and which ancestors lost their homes to the war as well as their lives. The history of Black suffering and loss was not taught. How many Black homes have been lost? Black families remember this.
Atlanta is a city of wealth now. Through the wide reach of Buckhead one sees sweeping lawns and elegant homes, dense trees, deep and varied shades of greens, beautifully manicured expanses. In the spring it’s a spectacle of redbuds, dogwoods in bloom, pink and white azaleas, teeming flower beds. Most of the Black people in these neighborhoods are there because they work for white families.
There are also many well-off Black people in Atlanta, but neighborhoods are segregated and I saw little of their homes. Where do we mingle? In offices and stores, museums, theaters, on public transportation. We also mingle in restaurants, sharing the same cuisine. Great restaurants, rich culture, complicated politics. A few Buckhead residents started a drive to secede from the city, to create their own town, largely white, apart from the thriving Blackness of Atlanta, apart from the struggles of brown people. Apart from crime, it is promised—a thinly disguised wish to separate whites and Blacks again.
Disquieted by loving this place and the people, I’d rather hate Bagley Park than myself, my kin, my home base. Bagley Park signifies our racist history.
When I think about how to look squarely at what white people did and do to Black people, I wonder what is required. The dialogue about how we have harmed, and still harm, witnessed, and been party to harm scares white people. It awakens the sense of “moral injury,” injury to notions that we are the good people, the way wars injure even soldiers unharmed physically. They suffer from what they did and saw, their beliefs are damaged. Some prefer dissociation.
Risk of recoil looms, of stumbling back to disavowal, the rhetoric against being “woke,” as white guilt devolves into self-pity and backlash. I keep thinking of where James Baldwin’s words point. He had no use for white guilt, writing that what white people don’t know about Black people is what we don’t know about ourselves.
____________
I can’t fully imagine Bagley Park families as they got the devastating news. Disbelief. Outrage. Resistance. Fear. Despair. The houses they built, memories they held. Some wanting to fight, others supporting or stopping them, aware of how their fury could bring more harm. I wonder about their feelings as they packed their things. What did they tell their children? What was the struggle for new housing like?
No turning away from consequences that linger to haunt us and come back to harm us too. Disowning is the root of racism as well as its seed. Bagley Park’s history is all about disowning, dissociating, separating people to preserve an illusion of goodness, purity, the claims Whiteness makes for itself. Is hating Bagley Park a form of disowning, setting myself apart from it, or is it just hating that I am born to a disturbing legacy? Perhaps some things need to be hated.
After visiting the park, we walked back to the car, not saying a lot, leaving old Mt. Olive cemetery behind. On the drive to my brother’s house a fierce sunset lit the horizon. Roofs of distant houses looked on fire.
***
In the fall of 2022 Atlanta restored the name Bagley Park, leaving Frankie Allen’s name on an athletic field. Some descendants of the former community, including Mrs. Osby and her family, brought a large floral wreath to honor their ancestors at the renaming ceremony. February 2023, the Fulton County Commission funded a Reparations Task Force to propose compensation for harm inflicted on Black residents, specifically naming convict labor camps and Bagley Park. Its recommendations will be issued in October 2024. This commission is the first county-led reparations program in the country. What will its recommendations propose and how will they be received by Atlantans? I am hopeful and wary.
