‘We were here’: Sandy Springs elder reflects on Black life rarely highlighted by the city

At 83, Shirley Peters Pruitt believes she is the oldest living Black resident in the city of Sandy Springs, where the stories of early Black families have rarely been told as they have been in the neighboring cities of Roswell and Alpharetta.

Yet Pruitt and former schoolmates who attended the Bailey-Johnson School during segregation are a thread that connects the three cities.

Pruitt and her younger brother, Melvin Peters, who also lives in Sandy Springs, appear in a documentary about the school that was screened at Alpharetta City Hall last summer.

Pruitt said that while she votes regularly in general elections, she will be voting in Sandy Springs’ municipal election this year for only the second time. Her first time voting in the city’s municipal election was in 2021. That election resulted in the city’s first council member who is Black: Dr. Melody Kelley.

Pruitt grew up as the only daughter among seven sons in a community known as DeWald’s Alley off Barfield Road.

“A lot of younger people [today] never heard of DeWald’s Alley and didn’t know that Black people lived there,” she said. “We were here.”

She and her brothers used to walk to Burdett Grocery Store on Mount Vernon and Roswell Road, located on the triangle where Veterans Park is today, across from the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center.

Pruitt remembers when the prominent Spruill family of Dunwoody owned a large farm where Perimeter Mall stands today.

“They had cows, and my dad used to take me over there, and we used to buy buttermilk and butter,” Pruitt said.

Similar to schoolmates who appear in the MJM Productions documentary, “Bailey-Johnson School & Community,” Pruitt recalls the racial animus toward Black families during her youth and the presence of people who were in the Ku Klux Klan.

“Thank God we are still here because back then, they could’ve done anything and nothing would’ve been done about it,” she said.

Pruitt’s family left Sandy Springs and moved to Roswell when she was 13, following a near sexual assault by a man who took her into a wooded area on Johnson Ferry Road, she said. She returned to Sandy Springs in the 1970s. 

Bailey-Johnson was attended by Black students from Roswell, Alpharetta, Sandy Springs, and the Shakerag community in what is known today as Johns Creek. The school was named after George Bailey, a blacksmith and shop owner, and Warren Johnson, a former slave and advocate for the education of Black children. A historical marker honoring Bailey is located on the Citizen Soul restaurant in Alpharetta. The site where his shop was located.

When Pruitt was growing up, the only school available to Black children beyond the seventh grade was Washington High School in Atlanta. That changed in 1950, when Fulton County opened the Alpharetta Colored School, later renamed Bailey-Johnson School, which served grades 1–12.

Pruitt was crowned Miss Bailey Johnson in 1957 when she was in the 10th grade. Her brother Melvin played on the school’s celebrated basketball team, which won the state championship during the 1964–65 season against Ralph J. Bunche High School, a Black school in Canton.

The players didn’t receive championship rings at the time, but in 2023 the team was gifted rings by three lifelong friends who had grown up with Bailey Johnson team members. The men attended Roswell High School, a school of all white students during segregation.

The rings were presented to team members, including Melvin, who are now in their 70s, during a celebration and ceremony at Alpharetta City Hall. The moment underscored how far north Fulton cities have come since the days of segregation.

“I’ve seen this place change completely,” Pruitt said recently of Sandy Springs.

And while much has transformed, she believes the people who came before — families like hers — remain an essential part of the story.