Historian Marni Davis counts fifteen grocery stores on Georgia Avenue, Summerhill’s commercial heart, in 1950. That number dropped to eight by 1960 and four by 1970. At the time of the rebellion in 1966, the handful of grocery stores in the neighborhood offered little sustenance to residents, many of whom lacked the means to travel further in search of affordable, nutritious food. Making matters worse, those shop owners were predominantly white, their prices were high, and their food was often of poor quality. Racist treatment by certain shop owners added insult to injury.[7]
What structural forces account for Summerhill’s rather rapid descent from a thriving neighborhood replete with bakeries, groceries, repair shops, churches, synagogues, schools, a butcher shop, a dental clinic, an icecream shop, and a movie theater to a neighborhood devoid of steady access to affordable, nutritious food? How have residents and supporters sought to reverse the trend since that rebellious inflection point, including during the neighborhood’s ongoing, convulsive round of gentrification?
One context certainly not shared by all cities from which urban rebellion sprang during the 1960s was the disruption caused by the construction of massive stadiums, arenas, and athletic complexes dedicated to the consumption of sports. The intersection where Officer Harris shot Prather and at which residents gathered in protest sat four blocks south of Atlanta Stadium, just beyond the southern edge of its expansive surface parking, capable at the time of hosting 4,000 vehicles. During the rebellion, hundreds of Georgia state troopers occupied the stadium’s tunnels and adjacent lots awaiting orders to assist APD in bringing “rioters” to heel.[8]
Atlanta Stadium opened for Major League Baseball just five months before the rebellion. Led by sluggers Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews, the Braves dramatically became the first franchise to relocate to the former Confederacy. The stadium and the successful courting of the Braves were the crowning infrastructural and civic achievements of Mayor Allen’s first term. It followed on the heels of his predecessor William B. Hartsfield’s massive urban renewal projects that included slum clearance for an ultimately failed whites-only public housing project in the 1940s and interstate highways in the 1950s. Summerhill and its western neighbor, Mechanicsville–once seamlessly mapped to each other–were now bisected by a walled expressway. Summerhill had been a thriving mixed-class, multiracial, multiethnic neighborhood from the 1920s through the 1940s, composed of African Americans and European émigrés from Russia, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Syria. But by the mid-1960s, the neighborhood had been reduced to a Black slum through redlining, white flight, and urban renewal. Then, in 1966, it got a professional baseball stadium.