9/16/2020
‘The Right Kind of Neighbors’ – Race and the Origins of Avondale Estates
Rounduptags: racism, Atlanta, Nathan Bedford Forrest, urban history, Gutzon Borglum
Kathryn Wilson is an Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University, where her research and teaching focus on public history, race, and the urban landscape. She has lived in Avondale Estates for 11 years and is married to Lionel Laratte, the city’s first Black commissioner.
Avondale Estates, GA — Local history has it that self-professed “capitalist and human benefactor” George F. Willis discovered the land that would become Avondale Estates in 1923, traveling along Covington Highway from the tony neighborhood of Druid Hills to Stone Mountain, where he attended meetings as a member of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association.
The next year he purchased 950 acres in the community of Ingleside, GA, just east of Decatur, with the aim of creating a model planned community, “an ideally perfect social and political life.” Combining the “best of city and country” Avondale Estates married its pastoral setting with progressive urban planning to create an idyllic Anglo-inspired enclave with racism and white supremacy at the foundation.
Willis was a master huckster who turned to real estate later in his career after amassing a fortune hawking dubious patent medicines through his company International Proprietaries, Inc. specifically a concoction called Tanlac, a “splendid effective stomachic tonic” of wine, herbal bitters, a laxative, and glycerin, amounting to 17% alcohol.
As a Stone Mountain Association member and officer, Willis was in the company of many prominent Atlantans of the time (bankers, lawyers, educators, newspaper editors, executives, and politicians, including Atlanta Mayor J.N. Ragsdale) as well as governors of Southern states and prominent Klan members such as Nathan Bedford Forrest II (grandson of the Klan founder) and Samuel Venable.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It
- Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
- Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions
- New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson
- Ohio Unions Link Academic Freedom and the Freedom to Strike
- First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth
- British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"
- Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking
- Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"
Trending Now
- New transcript of Ayn Rand at West Point in 1974 shows she claimed “savage" Indians had no right to live here just because they were born here
- The Mexican War Suggests Ukraine May End Up Conceding Crimea. World War I Suggests the Price May Be Tragic if it Doesn't
- The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of