Atlanta walls off a street
Barriers ordered 17 December 1962, removed 1 March 1963Peyton and Harlan roads, Peyton Forest, southwest Atlanta, Fulton County, GA
When a Black doctor bought a house in Peyton Forest, Atlanta barricaded Peyton and Harlan roads to keep other Black buyers out. The national press called it the Atlanta Wall. It stood ten weeks.
Atlanta called itself the city too busy to hate. In December 1962 it put barriers across two public streets to stop Black families moving into a white neighbourhood.
Southwest Atlanta had been changing block by block for a decade, under a set of informal understandings between white and Black real-estate interests about which streets were open to Black buyers and which were not. Peyton Forest, a prosperous white subdivision in Cascade Heights, was supposed to be closed. When Dr. Clinton E. Warner, a surgeon and a Morehouse graduate who had been wounded in Normandy, bought a house there, white homeowners went to the mayor and asked him to stop what came next.
Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. agreed. On 17 December 1962 the city ordered Peyton Road and Harlan Road closed where they met Gordon Road, and city crews put up wooden barriers reading "Road Closed" early the following morning. Allen had been elected with Black support and had taken the segregation signs down at City Hall; this was a different thing, and it was indefensible in public. The national press named it Atlanta's Berlin Wall, the original then sixteen months old, and the comparison followed the city around the world.
A Fulton County court held the barricades unconstitutional on 1 March 1963 and the mayor had them taken down within minutes. Peyton Forest turned over almost entirely inside two years - which is what the barriers had been built to prevent and what they did most to cause, since a wall across a street tells every white homeowner on it that the block is about to change. Allen wrote later that it had been an attempt to block Black residential expansion, and that he had been wrong to do it.
Two public streets closed to keep one neighbourhood white. The shape is the Peyton Forest area of Cascade Heights, drawn indicatively around the barricaded roads; it is not a surveyed neighbourhood boundary.
Sources
- Ivan Allen Jr. (1911-2003)New Georgia Encyclopedia, Georgia Humanities and the University of Georgia Pressgeorgiaencyclopedia.orgBacks the 1962 barrier closing Peyton Road to Black home seekers at Gordon Road, the courts ruling it unconstitutional, and Allen's own description of it as an attempt to block Black residential expansion.
- AtlantaNew Georgia Encyclopedia, Georgia Humanities and the University of Georgia Pressgeorgiaencyclopedia.orgThe Peyton Road affair as part of the city's postwar racial geography, and the national attention it drew to the "city too busy to hate".
- White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern ConservatismPrinceton University Press (2005)Kevin M. Kruse's account of the Peyton Road barricades, the real-estate understandings that preceded them, and the turnover of Peyton Forest afterwards.