Cover Story: The Disappearing Face of Black Atlanta

An awestruck Skip Mason stepped into the brick building on the corner of Courtland and Gilmer streets, grabbed a concert program, and made his way down the crowded aisle. It was a crisp Saturday afternoon several months after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and an uncertain but bustling mood had settled on Atlanta.

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That fall, Maynard Jackson, a twentysomething with coiffed hair and a round face, was campaigning for vice mayor, waving from the back of a convertible during a Peachtree Street parade. In a long-past-due decision, Atlanta’s public schools had begun to allow African-Americans to teach. Hippies from as far away as Alabama were streaming into Midtown on the weekends to party at the Stein Club. The scent of Ma Sutton’s fried chicken filled the sidewalks of Auburn Avenue near the newly built Palamont Motel. And the Memorial Arts Center, which would later become the Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center, had just opened in commemoration of the 106 art patrons who died in a plane crash just outside Paris’ Orly Airport six years earlier.</
The night before Mason came to the City Auditorium, its stage was host to a wrestling tournament, as was the case most Friday nights in the 1960s. But this afternoon, thousands of starry-eyed fans were cramming into the three-tiered hall packed with folding metal chairs to see James Brown perform.</
Mason’s mother, who was pregnant with his sister at the time, had wanted to get out of the house, so she drove her 6-year-old son to the $3 matinee show. When Brown took the stage, Mason couldn’t see above the sea of waving hands. His mother told him to wiggle through the crowds of screaming teenagers to get a better view. So he slipped through the fans, stood on a chair, and watched the Godfather of Soul from a couple of feet away.</
After the show, Mason took his wrinkled concert program and placed it in his wardrobe. The closet already held pennants from Morris Brown College football games, 45s by the Jackson 5 and the Supremes, and Hank Aaron baseball cards. The collection later would be fleshed out with newspaper articles about the Princess Theater, the first theater in Atlanta to show movies to “coloreds”; souvenirs from Sam Cooke and Gladys Knight concerts at Odd Fellows Auditorium on Auburn Avenue; programs from the Rev. Martin Luther King’s funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church; and countless other mementoes of Atlanta’s rich African-American history.</
In the past 40 years, Mason has collected more than 3,000 posters, newspaper clippings, weathered photos and other odds and ends in order to help tell the story of black Atlanta. He now stores his memorabilia in the basement of his Ellenwood home, his office at Morehouse College and a rented public-storage unit. A self-described “grassroots historian,” Mason’s passion for collecting and documenting the little-known facts and anecdotes of black history places him among the ranks of the late Franklin Garrett, perhaps Atlanta’s best-known historian, and local relics dealer John Sexton.</
Mason has crawled through the rumble of demolished buildings to find an original 1945 certificate granting a black man the right to argue a case in front of the Georgia Supreme Court. He has saved the metal and plaster letters of the Consolidated Mortgage and Investment building on Auburn Avenue, the premier African-American financial institution. His books have chronicled, among other things, the life of African-Americans in DeKalb County, the face of Atlanta’s black entertainment in the 1920s, and an extensive pictorial history of African-Americans from as early as 1850.

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But it’s not Mason’s knowledge of Atlanta’s history that makes him unique. It’s his eye for the hidden details — such as how the city’s only black shoe-shiner lost his business in 1966 when the state Capitol installed an electric shoe-shine machine — that elevates him to the ranks of cultural anthropologist.</
Mason’s not merely amassing documents; he’s out on the streets — digging through razed sites, exploring abandoned buildings and salvaging what others might consider trash — literally resurrecting the remnants of black Atlanta’s past.</
He goes to these lengths because he doesn’t want that history to die. And the history he’s trying to save already is marked by some significant casualties.</
Henry’s Grill on Auburn Avenue, a popular hangout for Royal Peacock entertainers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, has dissolved into a boarded-up building. The Palamont Motel was abandoned and is set to be demolished. The façade and lobby of the City Auditorium are now part of Georgia State’s Alumni Hall. And Ma Sutton’s has been sitting empty for some time.</
With the disappearance of so many African-American landmarks in Atlanta, all that’s left are memories — and the keepers of those memories won’t be around forever. That’s why Mason’s collection is so important. He has personally catalogued the pieces of black Atlanta that are vanishing. His assortment isn’t just a pile of dusty posters and yellowed pamphlets. It’s quickly becoming the only tangible link connecting the passing generation to generations to come.</
“Mason delves into things very deeply,” says Dan Moore, president of the APEX Museum. “He’s not a surface researcher but an avid collector of our culture.”</
With the recent death of Coretta Scott King and the internal riff between her children about what to do with the King Center she fought so hard to create, Mason sees an urgent need for someone to take the lead on preserving the history of African-American life in Atlanta.</
Mason believes it’s time for a new generation of black leaders to take charge — and it remains unclear who they will be. The original lieutenants under King — Andrew Young, Maynard Jackson and Jesse Jackson — already have fulfilled their duty as messengers of civil rights.</
In the midst of the uncertainty, Mason is clear on one thing: He must continue to document black Atlanta’s history so that future generations will understand — and take pride in — what Atlanta’s African-Americans have endured.</
“I see myself in a position to revolutionize,” Mason says. “We have to understand and know where we’ve been before we can move forward.”</
Herman “Skip” Mason Jr. was born in 1962 in an apartment just off Simpson Street in southwest Atlanta. At the time, Atlanta’s civil rights activity was at its height. Two years earlier, King had returned to Atlanta to co-pastor Ebenezer Baptist Church, lead sit-ins at Rich’s downtown department store, and preach peace to hundreds of blacks and whites in Hurt Park.</
Atlanta had come a long way. Nearly 100 years earlier, City Council had mandated that blacks be home by 10 p.m. and forbade them from walking with a cane, in fear of it being used as a weapon. But for every step forward, there was a step back.</
Around the time the first African-American was allowed to work at Grady Memorial Hospital, a student at Spelman College sat in jail for 60 days after she participated in a 1961 Freedom Ride. And just as the first African-American woman, Grace Towns Hamilton, was elected to the Georgia Legislature, acres of the thriving black neighborhood Summerhill were being razed to make way for the new Atlanta stadium, displacing hundreds of black residents.</
Growing up, Mason didn’t fully realize the significance of what was happening around him. But as an inquisitive, almost nosy child, he quickly grew enamored with the city and its intricacies.</
When Mason was 4 years old, his parents, who attended Morris Brown in the 1950s, divorced. Mason’s father moved to Michigan, and his mother remarried. Mason often would ride around Atlanta with his stepfather, whose family owned Quick Cab, the city’s first black-owned taxi company. From his shotgun seat, he asked questions about the African-American businesses and wood-paneled Victorians on Simpson and Hunter streets. When his uncle drove, he would slow the cab as they passed the Chicken Q on Simpson Street to let Mason gaze at the bikini-clad dancers elevated above the drive-in parking lot.</
Two years later, when Mason’s mother and uncle were preparing to march behind King’s casket, which was carted by mules down Auburn Avenue, he wanted to come along. But his mother refused, telling him the trek would be too much for a 6-year-old.

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As he grew older, Mason listened to his parents talk of jazz shows at the Waluhaje. It was the city’s first integrated — well, sort of integrated — jazz club, where blacks sat on one side of the aisle and whites on the other. His parents frequented $3 shows at Auburn Avenue Casino Club, where the Temptations and the Four Tops performed. And Mason often heard of singer Jackie Wilson’s high-energy performances, in which he would sprawl across the stage at the Magnolia Ballroom in crisp shirts and striped ties.</
During the summer, Mason attended Camp Blue Star in Henderson, N.C., with the King children. Yolanda, his drama teacher at camp, taught him acting skills that earned him the leading role in Rumpelstiltzkin in the seventh grade, and Bernice became one of his closest friends. It didn’t dawn on him until years later that these were the children of one of America’s most important leaders.</
In the late 1970s, an English teacher at Therrell High School made Mason watch the meticulously researched miniseries “Roots.” Mason kept a journal and made notes as he watched Kunta Kinte struggle with slavery and Tom Harvey relish in his freedom. It made him want to research his own family’s history. He’d flirted with the idea of becoming a mortician after a field trip to a funeral home peaked his interest. But then he started researching his family history and discovered that his great-great-great grandmother had been a slave on a plantation near Macon, married a slave from a neighboring plantation and given birth to six children. He became obsessed with the idea of uncovering and understanding the little-known facts of his family and of Atlanta’s African-American past. Instead of burying the dead, he chose to dig up their lives.</
“I’m still dealing with the dead,” Mason says, “just in a different capacity.”</
While at Morris Brown in the 1980s, Mason got a job as a tour guide at the Herndon Home Museum, a beaux-arts classical mansion that was the home of Alonzo Herndon, a slave-turned-business owner who founded Atlanta Life Insurance Co. Mason enjoyed walking on the same wooden floors that the Herndons did as he told visitors about Herndon’s barber shop on Peachtree Street that was outfitted with crystal chandeliers and gold fixtures. After graduation, Mason worked as a ranger and tour guide at the King Center. At the time, Andrew Young, Atlanta’s second African-American mayor, was turning Atlanta into an international city by attracting big business and cultural attractions, and 11,000 people came to town to hear Jesse Jackson highlight African-Americans’ achievements at the Democratic National Convention.</
“Atlanta was different from other Southern cities,” recalls Jim Bruns, director of the Atlanta History Center. “We were more willing to cross the color line.”</
By 1998, Mason had received a master’s degree in African-American history, worked as an archivist for the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, attended divinity school, and started his own research firm, Digging It Up, which unearthed and archived African-American memorabilia. He’d found a discarded ticket from a Jackie Wilson concert in the large ballroom of the late Auburn Avenue Casino Club. He received an autographed picture of Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers from a fraternity brother. And he managed to collect several bricks from black-owned businesses after the buildings crumbled.</
“Somebody referred to me as the black Franklin Garrett,” Mason says. “Maynard Jackson corrected them and said, ‘No, Franklin Garrett is the white Skip Mason.’”</
Soon after Atlanta’s integration, Auburn Avenue — the street that Fortune magazine once described as “the richest Negro street in the world” — began to devolve into a strip of vacant buildings, empty restaurants and streetwalkers. Many African-Americans wanted to put segregation behind them and began frequenting businesses that for so many years were forbidden. In the process, the once-treasured Sweet Auburn was left to decay.</
“I’ve watched our history crumble before my eyes,” Mason says. “In less than 100 years, those things that were important to the vibrancy of our existence have become unattended relics.”</
Mason wonders if the fall of Sweet Auburn is symptomatic of the struggle of black Atlanta to find its next group of leaders. When Andrew Young was elected to U.S. Congress in 1972 and Maynard Jackson beat Sam Massell the following year in a tight mayoral race, blacks and whites in Atlanta realized the demographics of politics were changing.</
“I was elected primarily by the black vote,” says Massell, currently president of the Buckhead Coalition. “But once Maynard was in the running, things changed, and black voters backed him.”</
Mason says Jackson’s inauguration was a pivotal point for African-Americans in Atlanta. It spawned opportunities for black leaders across the city, transforming Atlanta into one of the nation’s most powerful epicenters for African-Americans.</
But as many black politicos and businessmen were drafting legislation and heading companies, Sweet Auburn’s decay began to symbolize a larger cultural loss. Black culture in Atlanta came to be marred more than ever by poverty, drugs and violence. Mason believes that occurred because people became too wrapped up in self-success and abandoned the selfless mentality of the Civil Rights Movement.</
“The generation of Dr. King was a generation of sacrifice,” Mason says. “They lived modestly and taught their mission, which was much larger than their personal lives. But my generation doesn’t know what it means to sacrifice.”

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As a result, some say, the role models of today aren’t the followers of King, Young and Jackson; they are rappers such as T.I., Young Jeezy and Ludacris. Part of that, says state Rep. Alisha Thomas Morgan, D-Atlanta, stems from the fact that the beliefs espoused in the 1960s don’t always translate.</
“The messages of Dr. King aren’t as relevant to the lifestyle and issues that we face today,” Thomas Morgan says.</
Thus, the message has morphed from “the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence” to “by any means necessary” and, finally, to “get rich or die tryin’.”</
“[Rappers] have clout because of a lack of leadership in the community,” says Mr. ColliPark, aka Michael Crooms, the Atlanta producer behind the Ying Yang Twins. “I don’t see the equivalent of MLK for this generation. The closest thing to a leader is Tupac or T.I. We don’t have an alternative.”</
Atlanta DJ Rasta Root, who’s appeared with A Tribe Called Quest and regularly spins at nightclub MJQ, says there is a conscientious side to rap, such as the work of De La Soul and Common — and it’s being eclipsed by the record industry’s desire to push only one side of hip-hop.</
“Thug rap is in right now,” Rasta Root says. “Corporate America isn’t giving viewers options. They’ve changed rap into what they want it to be, and the artists who are more conscious are immediately pegged as backpackers.”</
Mason believes the tide will turn, however.</
“I used to tell my students, ‘One of your ancestors probably had a noose around his next at some point,’” Mason says. “That was the wake-up call that a lot of them need.”</
He also says he sees hope in several of Atlanta’s current politicos, including Thomas Morgan, state Sen. Kasim Reed, D-Atlanta, and City Councilmen H. Lamar Willis and Ivory Lee Young. Those leaders have the power to instill a sense of pride, to help spread the message that much can come of the struggle of African-Americans’ ancestors, Mason says.</
“We are a people who depend heavily on the messenger. When the messenger dies, it is left to the followers to try to carry the message.”</
There’s a crucial part of Atlanta’s black history that Mason believes is missing: a comprehensive museum that documents the life of Atlanta’s African-Americans. Other cities, such as Birmingham, Memphis and even Savannah, have told the story of the Civil Rights Movement from their perspective, while Atlanta, the birthplace of the movement, hasn’t.</
“We’re behind,” Mason says. “We have enough resources in this city to build a fabulous museum, but it hasn’t been a primary focus.”</
For example, APEX, a museum dedicated to the preservation of Atlanta’s black and African history, attracts approximately 70,000 visitors per year. But the unassuming brick museum on Auburn Avenue hasn’t received the money it needs to become a force within the community, says Moore, APEX’s president. Part of the problem, Moore notes, is that there’s a generation of blacks who want to forget about their history.</
“Many of the people who are in a position to help don’t see the importance of an institution that tells the story,” Moore says. “They’re in denial and that’s a major concern.”</
In December, Mayor Shirley Franklin organized a group of 150 people, by invitation only, to discuss the possibility of building a Civil Rights museum in Atlanta. Mason wasn’t invited. He says an assistant from Franklin’s office contacted him to apologize, calling it an oversight.</
At the meeting, Atlanta history experts threw around ideas of where such a museum could go and what type of impact it could have. Bruns, director of the Atlanta History Center, says two possible locations were identified: Auburn Avenue, the heart of black Atlanta, and Centennial Olympic Park, which would contribute to an effort to make the park more like the National Mall in Washington, D.C.</
“There is an absolute need for a Civil Rights museum in the city that’s the birthplace of the movement,” Bruns says. “The people we need to honor are going to God and won’t be here to lead the voice of how this happened and how they overcame. If not now, when?”</
But Mason believes the museum shouldn’t just focus on African-Americans’ hardships. It should display the colorful show posters of Nat King Cole and Count Basie from the City Auditorium and the Waluhaje. It should show pictures of Theodore “Tiger” Flowers, the first black middleweight boxing champion, who lived in Atlanta. And it should show pictures of girls in ruffled dresses posing for pictures at African-American beauty pageants at the Top Hat Club on Auburn Avenue.</
“We were not always about struggle,” Mason says. “We were people who entertained, who were educated, who were athletic, who were spiritual. Let’s tell more of the black Atlanta story.”

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