By Hannah E. Jones
Last weekend, about 210,000 people piled into the Mercedes-Benz Stadium for Taylor Swift’s three concerts. A staggering figure, yet unsurprising in Atlanta’s hub for sporting events and big-name musical performances. Before the glitz and the glamor, though, throughout the 1900s this was a neighborhood called Lightning.
Today, little physical evidence remains of Lightning, one of Atlanta’s oldest neighborhoods, but four years ago, Atlanta-based journalist Max Blau published “Lightning, Struck,” which sought to remember the working-class neighborhood. With the help of photographer Dustin Chambers, the piece memorialized the neighborhood that was wiped from the map for the Georgia Dome. Twenty five years after opening its doors, the stadium was demolished with Mercedes-Benz built nearby.
Now, this story is told in a new way, through a multi-media installation created by Blau, Chambers, former Lightning resident Rosalyn Dupree-Tullis and designer Sarah Lawrence. Housed at Kirkwood’s Pullman Yards, the project is one of more than a dozen installations that are showcased as part of Emory University and Science Gallery Atlanta’s JUSTICE exhibit.
Some have never heard of this neighborhood, and others remember the area and its close-knit community fondly. This is a story about zoning and redlining that led to the eventual demise of the Black neighborhood and families who were forced out after calling Lightning home for decades.
“We live in a city that is often called a Black Mecca and is touted as the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement,” Blau said. “But if we are leaving out one of the oldest Black neighborhoods from that history… It’s important to make sure that we correct that record.”
The installation is crafted so that visitors must walk through it — immersing them in the neighborhood changes over the decades, accompanied by photographs, historical documents and accounts from former residents.
The neighborhood itself was established in the early 1900s, or before, as an industrial community located just west of the city’s downtown. From the 1930s to the ‘50s, discriminatory practices led to a drop in property values and the neighborhood became increasingly industrial. In the ‘40s, the City of Atlanta opened the city’s only trash incinerator in Lightning.
Nonetheless, Lightning was an incredibly close community with families living there for generations and was home to two of Atlanta’s oldest Black churches, Friendship Baptist and Mount Vernon Baptist.
Dupree-Tullis’ grandparents bought a house in Lightning in 1930, and the family called the area home for several generations.
“It was such a close-knit community. Everyone was like family over there,” Dupree-Tullis said. “We would have so much fun. We would have field days in the community [and] play all kinds of games out in the street.”
She added: “It was a happy place. [Residents] didn’t have a lot, but they had love. They had family closeness.”
It was around this time, the early ‘60s, that photographer Rusty Miller began visiting Lightning and other nearby neighborhoods to capture everyday life. Several of his photos are included in the installation. His daughter, Elizabeth Stepakoff, describes him as a vivacious man with a larger-than-life personality but, when his camera came out, he was able to blend into the background to encapsulate the moment.
“To me, it’s just so remarkable because you can see that he caught people in very natural body stances,” Stepakoff said. “He stepped into these communities and found the glee, he found children just living and loving life.”
The photos were relatively untouched until 2012, about two decades after Miller’s death, when Stepakoff brought the images to the larger Atlanta community. Stepakoff has previously taken meetings with the Atlanta History Center with her photo historian, Susan Todd-Raque, who manages her dad’s work. They are taking a meeting there again later this month.
The beginning of the end came in the ‘70s and ‘80s when developers acquired four blocks in Lightning to expand the Georgia World Congress Center. Now industrially zoned, homeowners were pressured to sell their properties to the state or be forced to give up their land through eminent domain. Some residents tried holding out, and others held meetings and demonstrations to protest the encroachment.
“When they started asking for the land… it brought upon a lot of disagreement about ‘Let’s sell it, let’s don’t,’” Dupree-Tullis said. “You had some disputes within families, and not just mine.”
But the writing was on the wall. Eventually, the remaining property owners sold, but many felt they weren’t appropriately compensated for their land.
“It was market value but that’s also market value in the context of all the decisions that happened before,” Blau explained. “Market value is way less when your neighborhood is redlined and is deemed so invaluable that the city chooses to build and operate an incinerator there. Fair market value isn’t necessarily fair when you factor in those decisions.”
Dupree-Tullis’ family held off on selling but, after the growing pressure, threats of eminent domain and a house fire, her aunt sold her property — receiving just $14,000 for the land.
“They took advantage of the community,” Dupree-Tullis said. “They knew it was a poor community. The money that they offered, some might think that was a lot of money, but… they knew they were going to capitalize [and make] much more money in the long run.”
She added: “They took from the poor and made the poor struggle even more.”
Besides the monetary compensation, residents also lost intangible, invaluable things — the comfort of a childhood home, having family right around the corner and knowing their neighbors. As Blau puts it, “There is this loss of a social fabric that [residents] can’t get back and… in some cases, will never get back.”
The state broke ground on the Georgia Dome in November ‘89 and officially opened in September ‘92 — spending a total of $214 million on the development. At the time, it was lauded as the largest covered stadium in the world.
A decade and a half after the opening of the Georgia Dome, there was a new venue in town. The Mercedes-Benz Stadium opened in 2017, costing about $1.5 billion to build.
Despite the droves of people visiting the area each year, there’s little to remember Lightning by. In 2018, the Georgia Historical Society and the Georgia World Congress Center Authority erected a historical marker to commemorate the stadium that was demolished the year prior, highlighting its visitors and economic impact — 37 million and $7 billion, respectively. Notably, there is no mention of Lightning.
Councilmember Michael Julian Bond has shown support for installing a marker that honors Lightning. There was no response to SaportaReport’s request for additional information by the time of publication, but this story will be updated if one comes.
Until then, this project — a combination of historical documents, old photographs and resident interviews — serves as a way to preserve the fading memories of Lightning. Blau and Dupree-Tullis hope that elected officials can learn from Lightning’s story and do better in the future.
“This can serve as a cautionary tale for what it means when we are building a bigger city. How do we also make it a better and more equitable city for the future Lightnings of Atlanta?” Blau said. “Whatever the cause of the displacement is, how we treat residents during that process could and should include a remembrance of the place. Even if some people think it was blighted or had negative elements to it, at the end of the day, those places are still a community and home to many people. To lose sight of that is something we should avoid in the future.”
The Lightning, Struck exhibition will be on display through the summer, and those interested can visit Pullman Yards to see more. You can also click here for a digital account of the neighborhood under-documented in Atlanta’s history books.
I really want to visit The Lightning, Struck exhibition. It is said that it is awesome like geometry dash breeze. Thanks for sharing this great information.