The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Avondale Estates stands up to its history
Residents, leaders aim to shed city’s divisive origins with open arms.
Shelton Davis steps toward the edge of South Avondale Road, the side opposite the English Tudorstyle shops that have stood here for nearly a century. His T-shirt reads “empathy.”
As he gets near the street, he raises his hand, extends his index and pinky fingers and sticks out his thumb.
I love you, the 40-year-old is silently telling the passing drivers.
All around him, neighbors and friends wave posters, eliciting solidarity honks from the car horns. If you want change, vote, the signs say. Black lives matter, they say.
“It’s impressive, knowing the history of this city, to be able to see this type of stuff happening here,” Davis, who describes himself as half Black, says on this recent Saturday.
The city is Avondale Estates, a small DeKalb County town that’s home to the original Waffle House, some 3,100 residents and a racist past it’s now trying to reckon with.
A former mayor once called the city “as much a tradition as it is a city,” and that’s probably true. But that tradition has meant wildly different things to different people.
The city was born in the 1920s, the dream of a pharmaceutical
magnate who consorted with white supremacists and is at least partly responsible for the Confederate carving on the side of Stone Mountain.
George F. Willis built exclusion and racism into the very foundation of Avondale Estates, and his legacy was for decades expanded upon with local laws and rules that made generations of nearby Black residents fearful of traveling through the city, let alone trying to live there.
Today, Avondale is still predominantly white and still has a negative reputation for some. But as the city slowly begins to diversify and embarks upon its next phase — which includes luring in new development that’s vital for long-term survival — many Avondale residents and officials are pushing for a more inclusive future.
A consultant will soon be brought in to review policies and procedures at the local police department, which has a long-held reputation for being heavy-handed and, to some, discriminatory. Officials have declared it their mission to make Avondale Estates more welcoming. A growing, well-organized group of residents called the Avondale Alliance for Racial Justice is holding demonstrations and keeping everyone’s feet, including their own, to the fire.
Some of it has been in the works for a while now, but much more is a reaction to the reignited national discussion about police shootings of Black people and systemic racism.
“Maybe there are things there that we have to face in order to move on from them,” said Kathryn Wilson, a history scholar and 12-year Avondale resident. “If we don’t look back at that, then we can’t really see ourselves.”
The ‘prominent capitalist’
George Francis Willis, born in 1879 in Waynesville, North Carolina, made his original fortune hawking Tanlac, a tonic advertised as “the greatest medicine ever given to the people.” A concoction of alcohol, herbs and a few other substances, its medicinal value was, in fact, questionable at best.
But it sold.
By the early 1920s, Willis had moved to Atlanta. He’d led the very public fundraising campaign for a mass reunion of Confederate soldiers. He’d made another pharmaceutical fortune off an antiseptic called Zonite. And he’d entered the real estate game, building and buying apartment buildings in various parts of the city.
The Atlanta Constitution had labeled Willis a “prominent capitalist” even before he announced his most ambitious endeavor.
Local lore has it that Willis first eyed what was then the Ingleside community while traveling between his home in Druid Hills and Stone Mountain, where he worked with the group trying to make a Confederate carving on the mountain a reality. It’s hard to say that for sure but, regardless, Willis announced in January 1924 he had purchased 1,000 acres in the area.
And on that farmland about 7 miles east of Atlanta, Willis said, he would build the South’s very first planned community, a “model residential suburb” with new streets, new sidewalks and new, beautiful homes accented by flowers and shrubs from the city’s very own nursery. There would be a dairy and a pool and a lake, and a business district with architecture reminiscent of old England.
Avondale Estates would be a place where families could raise their children away from the grime of the city but still get there with a half-hour trolley ride — and it would be a community where, as one advertisement put it, folks could rest assured they had the “right kind of neighbors.”
In public statements and newspaper ads, Willis repeatedly pitched Avondale Estates as an exclusive community, where only “families of proven standing and financial responsibility” would be able to take advantage of its many splendors.
The Atlanta Constitution would find — some six decades later — that Willis had also attached a series of restrictive covenants to the land on which he built the city.
One of them prohibited the sale or lease of property “to any person or persons of color, or to any corpora