Black Community Building: New Deal Programmatic Advocacy at Atlanta’s University Homes Free

Atlanta architect William Sayward numbered among the four thousand attendees at President Herbert Hoover’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership held in December 1931 in Washington, D.C. U.S. residential construction starts in that year tallied at just one-third of the number typical for a year in the 1920s, causing even Hoover, former commerce secretary and staunch free market advocate, to concede the necessity for state intervention in the housing market. One of the conference’s thirty-one committees, dedicated to Negro housing, consisted of twenty-two prominent Black women and men (largely academics) and was chaired by Nannie H. Burroughs, president of the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C.¹⁷

The Negro Housing Committee’s published report compiled grim statistics about the deleterious economic and social effects of housing segregation on Black residents. “What is the solution?” asked Hoover’s commerce secretary, Robert Lamont, at the conclusion of the conference. “It is not to supply homes to Negroes through public or private charity. It is to reorganize our practices in the planning and production of all housing. We must begin with the theory. The realization of community responsibility for housing must take the place of our present concept of individual responsibility.”¹⁸ The final recommendations issued by the committee aligned with Lamont’s sentiment. They argued for the creation of comprehensive neighborhood-scaled initiatives, which would involve “razing the deteriorated and condemned buildings near the business section” and replacing these with new modern housing projects for Black residents. The committee recommended that African American community leaders advocate for residential development funding themselves through Urban League affiliates, neighborhood associations, and women’s clubs, particularly in settings where “municipal or state regulations fall down.”¹⁹

As Sayward, the white architect of University Homes, recalled, “Very largely out of curiosity, I now admit, I strayed [during the conference] into one of these groups which was composed entirely of negroes, and whose topic was labelled ‘Negro Housing.’ I became very much interested in their discussion.” Upon his return to Atlanta, Sayward joined forces with like-minded civil engineer O. I. (Olin) Freeman, and together they “decided to make some real studies of the problem and to see what might be done in the way of financing.”²⁰ They settled on the Beaver Slide area, adjacent to Atlanta University and Spelman and Morehouse Colleges, as an appropriate site for slum removal and the creation of a rental housing project for working- and middle-class Black families. Photographs of Beaver Slide from the early 1930s show single-story wood-frame houses raised above the ground on short brick columns (Figure 3). Wooden stairs led up to open porches, often decorated with flowering potted plants. Typically built only four feet apart, the dwellings faced unpaved lanes. Residents obtained water for cooking and bathing from street hydrants, and two houses on average shared a privy.²¹ Pervasive racial segregation in Atlanta’s rental housing market led to the creation of Black neighborhoods like Beaver Slide, which were both uncomfortably dense and yet expensive to live in compared to city averages. This neighborhood was majority African American, though not altogether poor, as indicated by the map of the area subsequently produced by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. HOLC Area D17, inclusive of the AUC, was known as the “best negro area in Atlanta,” with the “highest percentage of negro home ownership.”²² Despite the mappers’ positive qualitative assessment, the HOLC map marked the neighborhood with the color red, thus “redlining” the area as one “characterized by detrimental influences in a pronounced degree, undesirable population or an infiltration of it.”²³ According to the metrics of density and utilities deficiency, Beaver Slide qualified as a slum, even though its residents, as Du Bois and his sociology students determined, represented a “stable, black working-class” population.²⁴

Sayward and his firm, Edwards and Sayward, in which he was partnered with William A. Edwards, worked with Freeman through 1932 on a scheme to meet the federal government’s definition of “low-rent housing,” namely, “decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings within the financial reach of, and available solely for, families of low income, and developed and administered to promote serviceability, efficiency and economy.”²⁵ These projects, intended not for the very poor but for upwardly mobile families, were also expected to include “all necessary or desirable appurtenances thereto, including administrative, educational, recreational, and other buildings and facilities.”²⁶ Early site plans for University Homes included one nonresidential building with stores and offices facing Fair Street, but no buildings intended to house educational or recreational facilities.

The design team finally approached AUC president John Hope to apply as a limited-dividend corporation to the PWA Housing Division for the proposed project, to tap into funding made available through the National Industrial Recovery Act, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law in 1933. Hope needed little convincing. Since he was first appointed to a teaching position at Atlanta Baptist College (later Morehouse College) nearly thirty-five years prior, Hope had “dreamed about this place [Beaver Slide] changing into something beautiful; not pretty but straight and clean and full of light.”²⁷ Hope had already that year undertaken an unsuccessful campaign to gather parcels in Johnsonville, a nearby neighborhood, for a low-rent housing development.²⁸ After agreeing to Sayward and Freeman’s handsomely rendered proposal, Hope drew up a development pro forma under the masthead of the newly founded Corporation for Improvement of Negro Housing and swiftly assembled a biracial board of trustees to apply for federal funding.²⁹

As Karen Ferguson argues, the University Homes project aligned with the desires of Atlanta’s elite Black reformers—paragons of leadership and learned respectability that Du Bois referred to as the “talented tenth”—to build a model middle-class neighborhood in their midst.³⁰ The West Side location of the future Black housing project also satisfied Atlanta’s liberal white elite, as it conformed with a racially segregated geography inscribed by the city’s controversial 1922 zoning plan. Although the Georgia Supreme Court declared the plan’s racial redistricting unenforceable in 1924, Beaver Slide nonetheless occupied an area that by the 1930s had been ceded to Black Atlantans and that could accommodate expansion away from the business center.³¹ The PWA’s limited-dividend program, to which Hope and his board of trustees applied with a commitment of 15 percent equity down and a promise to serve as local developers, was short-lived. In February 1934, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that all slum-clearance/low-rent housing projects would fall under the supervision of the PWA Housing Division and would receive full federal funding. As two Atlanta projects were already in the funding pipeline when this shift occurred, the PWA joined the projects together as a condition of their approval.

The University Homes housing project for Black families received funding with the proviso that for administrative purposes it would be paired with the Techwood Homes housing project for white families, located near the Georgia Institute of Technology. News of the arrangement was conveyed in a letter to Hope on 14 October 1933 by the organizer of the Techwood project, Atlanta real estate developer Charles F. Palmer. “It is a pleasure to confirm . . . the allotment the housing division of the United States Government has made totaling $1,062,500 (plus an additional $150,000 if necessary, under the NRA) with which to build approximately six blocks of fireproof negro apartments adjoining your campus,” wrote Palmer. “These will accommodate approximately 800 negro families. The buildings will be constructed with [a] large park and children[’s] playground areas in each block.”³² Hope celebrated the future project’s benefits in a press release picked up by Black newspapers throughout the United States. “The university housing project to be carried out under plans approved by the United States government will give unusual advantage to Colored people desiring good housing in a wholesome community at moderate costs,” the release declared. “A great immediate advantage is that employment will be given hundreds of skilled and unskilled Negro workers.”³³ Although Hope did not live to see the project’s completion, his enthusiasm about the construction labor prospects turned out to be warranted for University Homes. According to Spelman president Florence Read, two-thirds of the plasterers and one-third of the brick masons employed on the project were African American.³⁴

Architect Robert Kohn, the first director of the PWA Housing Division, visited Atlanta in December 1933, and while he declined to confirm the site proposed by Sayward and Freeman for University Homes (so as not to inflate real estate values), he did state that “it was the policy of the federal housing corporation to start such a project at a point where it would be protected on one side, at least, by some established development from encroachment and from deterioration of the neighborhood.”³⁵ He implied that the new federally funded housing would benefit from the respectability emanating from the university and colleges (Figure 4).

The forced marriage of these two racially segregated projects provided the federal government with antidiscriminatory cover, though the funds allocated to the projects, and their site densities, were far from equitable. The scale was always tipped in the white project’s favor: expenditures at Techwood Homes settled at $1,000 more per unit than at University Homes, in a project that was 10 percent less dense.³⁶ The pairing mattered little in practice, however, since different architects designed the projects for disparate clients, as Preston Stevens Sr., architect of Techwood Homes, confirmed. “We were friendly,” he noted of his relationship with the University Homes architect, Sayward. “Sometimes I’d see him at an American Institute of Architects meeting. . . . But that’s all. No, we didn’t discuss [the projects].”³⁷ Following a proposal to merge the two projects administratively, Charles Palmer demurred, noting that it was important for “negro housing” to be operated by and for “negroes.”³⁸ And while the white businessmen who sat on Techwood’s board were little concerned about their project’s relationship to social work, members of the University Homes Advisory Committee expressed clearly defined ideas about the role a dedicated community building would play. “[We] probably should not be influenced in our thinking much about what Techwood is doing,” the University Homes committee determined. “Our group interest [is] only in improvement of human welfare [of] Negroes who will live in this area. The whole thing of social welfare is wrapped up in this project.”³⁹ Administrative segregation between the two housing projects inadvertently allowed the aspirations for auxiliary programming at University Homes to flourish.

Block C, what might be characterized as the social condensing center of the University Homes housing project, occupied the center of the site plan (Figure 5). The block was divided into three zones: to the north stood the building that the architects designated for “stores and offices,” the Administration Building (later Roosevelt Hall), whose commercial storefronts and office lobby opened onto busy Fair Street. Immediately after construction was completed, eight shops opened on the street level, while offices for medical professionals and the project administration occupied the second floor. A triply segmented residential building stood at the block’s southern end, with a kindergarten and small recreation room at the basement level facing a play space for younger children. From late 1937 onward, the University Homes Library, run at first by tenant volunteers with books donated through a community book shower, operated just across from the playground on Roach Street.⁴⁰

The middle of Block C, a dedicated play space for older children that took up half of the block’s total area, experienced significant programmatic and design changes during the design process. In the first round it featured a formal garden, with orthogonal walking paths meeting at a central fountain, a layout that gestured to Edwards and Sayward’s background as campus planners for nearby Agnes Scott College and as architects for various structures in Piedmont Park (the largest urban park in Atlanta).⁴¹ Once landscape architect William C. Pauley joined the team, the design for the open space on Block C became simpler and more utilitarian, in response to the future tenants’ needs (Figures 6 and 7). Pauley proposed to ring the open space with shade trees and to level its center to accommodate ball games, swing sets, and slides. Following the construction of the playground, tenant children from University Homes, as well as children who lived in the unremediated blocks of Beaver Slide across Maher Street, climbed up steps to enter the playground over a bermed border. For the first couple of years of operation this large play space—the only one for Black children within a mile-and-a-half radius of University Homes—also had a full-time playground director funded by the WPA.⁴²

The completed residential buildings of the University Homes project bore no resemblance to the dense, stick-built urban fabric that they replaced (Figure 8). Edwards and Sayward’s flat-roofed two- to three-story brick buildings covered just 25 percent of the site.⁴³ Composed of a limited number of standardized housing units—each from two to five rooms—the building design featured articulated segments that sheltered block-based play spaces and courtyards. Frameless steel casement windows punctured the walls of the housing blocks on all sides, some turning the corners in modernist fashion, and the architecture was minimally ornamented (Figures 9 and 10). Architectural richness was found in the details, such as the decorative cast-aluminum balcony rails and the brass doorknobs, doorbells, and mail slots that graced the residential buildings. PWA projects often exhibited this combination of massing austerity and tactile luxury. As Gail Radford writes, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was a stickler for high-quality work, and though he was not particularly fond of modernist design, “he employed many architects who were and allowed them budgets generous enough to achieve handsome results.”⁴⁴

The recreational and social programming established on Block C of University Homes predated the PWA housing project by three decades. In 1908, Lugenia Burns Hope and eight other prominent Black women affiliated with Spelman and Morehouse Colleges founded the Neighborhood Union, an organization intended to “develop a spirit of helpfulness among the neighbors” and encourage them to “co-operate with one another . . . for the best interests of the community, city, and race” (Figure 11).⁴⁵ Burns Hope, originally from Chicago, had ample experience with social service before marriage. Her welfare work commenced with her appointment as the first Black secretary to the board of directors of Kings Daughters, a charity organization for working girls and women, and she served as personal secretary to a wealthy Chicago woman who volunteered once a week at Jane Addams’s Hull House, taking Burns Hope with her.⁴⁶ She married John Hope in 1897, and the couple moved to Atlanta shortly afterward for his faculty appointment at Atlanta Baptist College. Upon their arrival, W. E. B. Du Bois, only one year into his Atlanta residence, invited Burns Hope to participate in the conference “The Welfare of the Negro Child” at Atlanta University. This experience, along with the birth of her first son in 1901, jump-started her local advocacy and activism focused on providing kindergartens and playgrounds for African American children, and led to the foundation of the Neighborhood Union.⁴⁷

The Union’s constitution stated the charitable organization’s goals and proposed specific programming to improve the community, and in particular to benefit the women and children in its midst:

While Burns Hope’s volunteerism in Chicago informed this detailed litany of social programming, the bleak conditions of Atlanta’s West Side spurred the organization to expand its efforts beyond those seen at most white settlement houses. One of the group’s first activities in 1908 was to conduct house-to-house visits. Assisted by Morehouse students, the women knocked on doors and gathered information from approximately one hundred neighborhood residents.⁴⁹ Through their surveys, they determined that poor housing, lack of recreational spaces for children, and inadequate sewage, water, and street lighting systems all contributed to the West Side’s social problems.⁵⁰ One pamphlet about substandard housing conditions published by the Union’s Home Investigation Committee persuaded the municipal government to make modest civic improvements in the neighborhood.⁵¹

The women cut up maps of the city to divide their service areas into large zones, neighborhoods, and districts, and assigned each one a leader (Figure 12). The Neighborhood Union’s work was conducted in a series of West Side properties on or within a few blocks of the eventual site of University Homes.⁵² One, the Neighborhood House, served as a health clinic, day-care and recreation center, citizenship school, and occasional fund-raising and party venue (Figure 13).⁵³ The modest wood-frame house conformed materially and typologically to its neighbors, nestling unobtrusively among the homes of the people it served. In the house, nurses in crisp aprons taught healthy baby courses, social workers led “citizenship school,” and volunteer librarians lent books, all activities intended to “elevate the moral, social, intellectual and spiritual standards” of the neighborhood.⁵⁴ In 1926, after seventeen years of expansive social work in every Black neighborhood in Atlanta, the Neighborhood Union opened its new Health Center at 706 West Fair Street to great fanfare.

Harold Ickes, FDR’s secretary of the interior, visited the AUC in September 1934 to set off the blasting machine that inaugurated the demolition of the Beaver Slide neighborhood. In his remarks on the occasion, Ickes praised the “systematic work towards the improvement of housing conditions over a long period of years,” referring, Neighborhood Union members surmised, to their ongoing efforts. “The Neighborhood Union is due the credit,” the Union’s secretary noted after Ickes’s visit, “for the choosing of the Federal Government of the Beaver Slide Slum District for its first national housing project.”⁵⁵ The federal government offered to purchase the Neighborhood Union Health Center, which was located within the area designated for the University Homes project, and the Union’s board agreed to the sale.⁵⁶

Librarian Hallie Brooks, a member of the Neighborhood Union board in the early 1930s, later maintained that the federal government “told us that we could remain there.” Board members understood that the Union’s activities would be reinstalled in new buildings within the housing project, and that they would be directly involved in planning the facility. In a 1979 interview, Brooks remembered:

Despite informal promises that the Neighborhood Union’s assistance and social welfare programming would be retained, the organization was sidelined in the PWA Housing Division’s takeover of the University Homes design process.

The University Homes Advisory Committee also envisioned a dedicated community building in the housing project, but the committee’s aspirations were more tempered than those of the Neighborhood Union. In July 1934 Spelman president Florence Read visited the PWA Housing Division headquarters in Washington, D.C., and met with federal staff assigned to the project, including the director, Colonel Horatio Hackett, who seemed “relieved” when Read presented a modest list of desired community facilities. The PWA agreed that a simple building (without a pool or dedicated auditorium) would be “within the range of the project to supply” to Atlanta University as a kind of social work laboratory, at a rent of one dollar per year. The spaces requested by Read included a large multipurpose room for use as a day nursery and an evening meeting space for adults, a kitchenette, two club rooms (one for boys, one for girls), a storage room for games and playground equipment, and a single room for a health clinic. In a letter to John Hope, Read promised to relay these directives to architect William Sayward when she returned to Atlanta.⁵⁸

When presenting the University Homes project to colleagues at a conference on low-cost housing in 1935, Sayward focused on the typological designs of the residential units and their aggregation on the site plan, and discussed the material selections for unit interiors at length. Only at the very end of his talk, and in passing, did Sayward mention the so-called community center that would hold administrative offices, shops, and a health clinic.⁵⁹ The social life of the neighborhood was not his purview.

Federally funded limited-dividend housing projects completed in 1935, while University Homes was in the design phase, provided emergent examples of community-rich planning that the Atlanta architects might have consulted, although we have no concrete evidence that they did.⁶⁰ At 252 apartments, Neighborhood Gardens in St. Louis was a much smaller project than University Homes, but it boasted extensive exterior play spaces and a community center with club rooms, a library, a meeting hall, and a communal kitchen.⁶¹ The Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia featured a community hall facing onto a large swimming pool, playgrounds, and a nursery school built into the modernist superblock.⁶² However, unlike University Homes, neither of those projects benefited from proximity to academic institutions eager to assist with social programming for those spaces. University Homes board member L. D. Milton, a prominent Black businessman and professor of economics at Atlanta University, noted later that “the outstanding success of University Homes was due to the fact that University Homes had a highly intelligent board of directors . . . people who had been engaged in education for years and who took housing to be one of the steps of education that was worthy of their time.”⁶³

In May 1934, at the behest of AUC president John Hope, newly reinstated sociology professor W. E. B. Du Bois and his graduate students at Atlanta University conducted a sociological survey of Beaver’s Slide.⁶⁴ Surveys of the economic and dwelling conditions of future housing tenants were common in Europe (particularly in Germany) in the late 1920s, and although such surveys also began to appear at this time in the United States, they were not typically conducted among Black tenant groups.⁶⁵ Du Bois’s Beaver Slide canvassers posed thirteen standard questions to 315 residents and businesspeople, aiming to provide project architects and administrators with quantifiable data about the existing residential stock, the neighborhood occupants, and their desires for housing.⁶⁶ In responding to a question about future housing on the site, residents of the soon-to-be-demolished single-story bungalow and shotgun houses expressed their aversion to apartment house types. Du Bois surmised that this was because “the only apartment houses which they knew of are a few wretchedly arranged places in various colored sections of Atlanta, which are the abode of considerable vice and crime.”⁶⁷ Within the inner wheel of Atlanta’s Black community, the stand-alone house (even if divided into spaces for multiple families) represented higher class status than an apartment building or a boardinghouse. Architects Edwards and Sayward took this typological concern to heart, and in the final design each University Homes unit boasted its own ground-level entryway.

In addition to recording answers, Du Bois’s student canvassers made qualitative—highly judgmental—observations of their subjects. “In the heart of the area, known as ‘Beaver Slide,’ is to be found most of the undesirable qualities,” wrote one student volunteer. “Something definite will have to be worked out to either prohibit or limit these individuals in returning to the new housing settlement. . . . [Some people] are too far down the scale of poverty, ignorance, and vice to be lifted up.”⁶⁸ Du Bois arrived at a more sympathetic conclusion, writing that “it is a slum area because of poverty, and not by reason of vice or crime.”⁶⁹ Nevertheless, stringent screening calculated to fill the new apartments at University Homes with solidly middle-class tenants did displace the vast majority of Beaver Slide’s residents, who were forced to scatter into other poor majority-Black neighborhoods following the site clearance.⁷⁰

Housing research at the AUC continued in September 1934, when John Hope convened an all-university assembly so that faculty and students could meet “five distinguished visitors.”⁷¹ The five housing experts who addressed the AUC assembly were the renowned English garden city architect Sir Raymond Unwin; Miss A. J. Samuel, manager for municipal housing in Bebington, England; Mr. Ernest Kahn, deputy chairman of municipal housing for Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany; Ernest J. Bohn, president of the National Association of Housing Officials (United States); and Henry Wright, American architect and planner. “International Group Says Negroes Need Good Housing,” read a headline in the Black newspaper Atlanta Daily World the following day. The European experts stressed the economic and social benefits of government-led slum-clearance and housing programs, which were already well established in their own countries. They identified architectural quality and planning as paramount concerns. “We must get away from ‘warehousing’ people,” Unwin declared, asserting that “it is necessary to regard housing as the clothing of a human family, in which the element of individual personality must be encouraged.” Wright urged the university “to take full part in the development [of] the Atlanta University housing project [to make] a better life in city surroundings.”⁷²

Following on Du Bois’s survey and the session with the European housing experts, John Hope solicited faculty suggestions for programs involving cooperation between the academic institutions and the new housing project. While the faculty he tapped hailed from various departments across the AUC, including education, home economics, social work, and sociology, all of these disciplines employed fieldwork as a critical curricular activity. Faculty members proposed programs intended to bolster and solidify respectable middle-class status on-site while also cautioning against heavy-handed oversight that might offend those tenants receiving guided services. In response to Hope’s request, Hattie V. Feger, professor of education, recommended adult education classes in business fundamentals, citizenship, and “mental hygiene.” She noted that the “masses as a rule are cooperative and appreciative,” but all of the work proposed would be successful only if instructors could make the residents “feel at home”; she added that “a patronizing attitude will kill the whole program.”⁷³ Sociology professor Ira De A. Reid, later founder of the People’s College adult education program, warned that well-intentioned programs planned by academics for University Homes would fail if tenants felt forced to participate:

Du Bois submitted to Hope a list of directed activities and services aimed at achieving more than mere uplift within the existing socioeconomic system: he sought to create a self-sufficient, self-sustaining Black community at University Homes. Du Bois’s recommendations included work training conducted by the Atlanta University Economics and Sociology Departments, better community policing, and medical care. Most radically, he advocated for a separatist cooperative economy at University Homes, in which tenants could barter goods and services among themselves and thus escape from dependence on capitalist white Atlanta.⁷⁵

By the time he returned to Atlanta in 1934, Du Bois was a Marxist convert, although his alliance with the Socialist and Communist Parties was limited and his views continued to evolve over time.⁷⁶ Du Bois’s relationship with the specifically Soviet strain of socialism was solidified in the mid-1920s, when he was befriended by a Russian couple who, he later noted, “were probably clandestine agents of the communist dictatorship” sent to investigate whether an American communist revolution might be provoked on racial grounds.⁷⁷ The couple offered to finance a visit to Russia so that Du Bois could experience socialism in practice, an offer that he accepted, with the proviso that he was not indebted to act on their behalf upon his return.⁷⁸

During his Soviet travels in 1926, Du Bois read Marx and Lenin (after all, Du Bois’s “talented tenth” is closely related to Lenin’s “revolutionary vanguard”), and he experienced the beginnings of Soviet isolationism, a campaign of short-term tactical entrenchment for long-term gain. Following his return to the United States, Du Bois published a series of articles in The Crisis—the NAACP’s monthly magazine, for which he served as editor from 1910 to 1934—in which he shared his growing conviction about Marxism’s potential to address the “Negro Problem.”⁷⁹ As The Crisis was financially self-sustaining, it effectively functioned as Du Bois’s personal platform, but, as he later wrote, this arrangement was “bound eventually to break down” in the event that “there arose any considerable divergence of opinion between the organization and editor.”⁸⁰ Du Bois’s stunning reversal on segregationist policy marked precisely such a divergence of opinion and triggered his retreat from New York to Atlanta in 1934.⁸¹

“I fight Segregation with Segregation,” Du Bois asserted in one of his final editorials in The Crisis in May 1934, “and I do not consider this a compromise. I consider it common sense.” As he intimated, his radical shift from antiaccommodation to self-segregation emerged from the University Homes housing project:

That Du Bois, the standard bearer of anticompromise, should now advocate on behalf of segregation dumbfounded his colleagues. Pastor Francis J. Grimke, who had worked alongside Du Bois in the Niagara Movement and at the foundation of the NAACP, lamented Du Bois’s change of tune: “Why Dr. Du Bois has reopened the question of segregation in The Crisis I am at a loss to know. Can it be possible that in the remotest part of his brain he is beginning to think, after all, that it is a condition that ought to be accepted, a condition that we ought to stop fussing about? If so, then his leadership among us is at an end; we can follow no such leader.”⁸³ In his response to Grimke, Du Bois finally laid out the intellectual justification for accepting the segregated housing project, and he used the success of Grimke’s church to do it. “Dr. Grimke is perfectly right in stressing the evil of segregation, and the assumption of inferiority upon which it is based,” Du Bois wrote. “But on the other hand, and just as strongly and enthusiastically, he should say to the world that the 15th Street Presbyterian Church [in Washington, D.C.] is a success. . . . We must make our segregated institutions so fine and outstanding and put so much of belief and thought and loyalty in them, that the separation upon which they are based, and the doctrine of inferiority which led to them, will be confounded and contradicted by its inherent and evident foolishness.”⁸⁴ Du Bois’s sociospatial proposition thus rested on the idea that Black institutions (churches, universities, housing projects), temporarily detached from white-dominated society, would become seedbeds for political education and would ultimately prove the absurdity of segregationist policies through their unimpeachable excellence.

In the spring of 1934, during the conceptual design phase of University Homes, Du Bois resigned his editorship of The Crisis when the NAACP board censured him for his editorials on self-segregation; he then accepted John Hope’s long-standing invitation to return to Atlanta University. He went back to Atlanta, a city in which he had lived and taught for thirteen years early in his career, with some trepidation. As he noted, “The South is not a place where a man of Negro descent would voluntarily and without good reason choose to live,” but he concluded that “the place to study a social problem is where it centers.”⁸⁵

“The Atlanta Housing Project,” a short, unattributed article printed in the final issue of The Crisis with Du Bois’s name on the masthead, described social programming planned for the self-reliant Black neighborhood adjacent to the AUC (Figure 14):

The racial segregation that the article’s author (we can safely assume this was Du Bois) reoriented as a university settlement suggests a spatial strategy proposed by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, a so-called war of position, in which a counterhegemonic site is planted within an existing society to enable a gradual, nonviolent transition from one cultural state to another. In Atlanta, the article proposed, the extraordinary Black enclave would thrive in the short term, and in the long term it would ultimately pave the way for a racially integrated society.⁸⁷ Rather than trying to fight the system, it would be better to turn inward and make the West Side of Atlanta a shining example of Black autonomy.⁸⁸ Du Bois identified the close relationship between the Atlanta University Center and the University Homes project as a critical element, because “the university throws around its professors and students a certain protective coloration. It is an inner community surrounded by beauty with unusual chances for intellectual and social contact.”⁸⁹ When the project finally opened, University Homes assistant housing manager Alonzo Moron, a trained social worker, also strongly advocated for social contact between the universities and the tenants.⁹⁰

The first tenants of University Homes, retired railroad worker Oscar Banks and his wife, moved into their federally funded apartment on 15 April 1937.⁹¹ Banks and all new tenants received a welcome letter from Moron that was generated in the second-floor staff offices of the Administration Building. “Your presence here shows that you are interested in obtaining decent, safe, and sanitary housing at [a] price you can afford to pay,” wrote Moron, who also moved into the project with his wife. “We hope that you will like it here and you will find this a friendly community in which to live.”⁹² Attached to the letter was a dense three-page list of protocols for the tenants to read and adhere to, including how to pay their rent; how to use the electric ranges, iceboxes, and steam radiators; and how to take care of the linoleum floors.

The Administration Building, like the housing blocks, was architecturally austere yet materially rich, outfitted with bronze kickplates and sashes, brass star rails, and a Luxfer prism glass grid above the storefronts that reflected natural light deep into their interiors. The one bold architectural gesture on the Fair Street elevation of the building marked the location of the monumental stair leading to the second floor (Figure 15). Set slightly in front of the main body of the building, the brick-and-cast-stone portal stretched the entire height of the building, and even a little above, interrupting the parapet and three lines of projecting brick at the belt course that otherwise emphasized the building’s broad horizontality. The portal created a deep vertical recess that marked civic, rather than commercial, activity.

Moron received instructions to fill the eight storefronts with the types of commercial tenants recommended by the University Homes Advisory Committee and advising faculty. By September 1937 the ground floor held three grocers, a dairy, a five-and-dime store, a barber and hair salon, and a Yates and Milton Drugstore, a branch of the well-known Black-owned pharmacy chain.⁹³ Civil rights activist and lawyer Vernon Jordan, who lived at University Homes as a child, later recalled that “these were all Black businesses serving the Black community.”⁹⁴ They were not the cooperative businesses of Du Bois’s vision, but shops that nonetheless supported the neighborhood. However, the second-floor office spaces proved difficult to lease (Figure 16). Following federal protocols, prospective tenants had to bid for their rent, but it was difficult for them to anticipate how successful a new practice might be in this location or what constituted an appropriate payment. Further, the plan organization, with multiple-practitioner suites, was inconsistent with local practice, and medical professionals who toured the interior spaces deemed them too small.⁹⁵

Moron meanwhile pressed the federal government to build a dedicated auditorium at University Homes. In July 1937, he wrote to PWA director of housing H. A. Gray to report that he had measured the large playground on Block C as a potential site for an auditorium, but construction of such a building would require the dismantling of most of the existing play equipment, which was already highly popular with children in the community. Thus Moron favored a proposal suggested by engineer O. I. Freeman:

Nothing seems to have come of this proposal for a third-floor addition. Undaunted, Moron persisted, regularly leavening his procedural letters to Gray with endorsements for a large gathering space. “We have been receiving many requests from the tenants for meetings to discuss matters of interest to all tenants,” Moron noted in August, “but so far I have tried to postpone these meetings because the little space we have available cannot accommodate a sufficiently large number of tenants to be representative of the project.”⁹⁷ In his first “Report on Tenant Activities,” written in August 1937, he lamented that such activities suffered because of “the inability to find in the project space large enough to accommodate more than fifty tenants at one time.” Concluding on an aspirational note, he wrote, “We still have hopes that pretty soon we shall have a much needed auditorium which will allow us to encourage wider participation by the tenants in whatever activities they want to sponsor.”⁹⁸

By September 1937, Moron’s relentless urging for a dedicated auditorium convinced Gray—just four months after University Homes opened for move-in—of the need for a dedicated community space. Although Moron continued to push for a stand-alone building, Gray proposed that the unleased medical office spaces on the upper floor of the Administration Building be converted to an auditorium, and this was the solution that ultimately prevailed.⁹⁹ The removal of the office partitions revealed a simple square grid of concrete columns, and the eastern half of the plan was transformed into a 60-by-60-foot auditorium with an elevated 20-foot-wide stage, a club room, a fully equipped kitchen and pantry, and additional storage space. The University Homes administrative offices remained on this upper floor as well.¹⁰⁰ Moron celebrated his victory in an end-of-year letter issued to University Homes tenants: “A major benefit with which we have been blessed here in 1938 is our new Recreation Center[, which] . . . ought to provide us with many opportunities for good, wholesome recreation, for self-education, and for the growth of fellowship.”¹⁰¹

Early concerns about tenant aversion to “guinea-pigging” by administration and AUC representatives proved to be unfounded. Although Moron and his assistants, the WPA recreational staff, and students from the Atlanta School of Social Work organized some activities, tenant-led groups were encouraged to pursue their own initiatives and also made regular use of the space. In interviews conducted in 1978, two long-term University Homes residents (tenants from 1937 into the 1970s) both remembered that it was the Tenants Association, not the administration or university-affiliated volunteers, that organized activities in the project. As Clara Gipson noted simply, “It’s a nice contact [that we have] with the universities. It makes you want to take care of yourself.” When asked whether there was much oversight of tenant life by university representatives, Clara Render noted that “there could have been, and I just didn’t know it.”¹⁰²

The hard-won citizen-building space supported numerous clubs, children’s activities, dinners, dances, and voter drives for the University Homes community into the following decades (Figures 17 and 18). The Tab: The Voice of University Homes Newsletter, a tenant-run publication produced out of the second floor of the Administration Building, reported intensive use of the space soon after the renovation, including for such events as the Harvest Moon Ball in October 1939. The Tab communicated the solidified middle-class values of the “older set,” which included the newsletter’s authors. A high school student, Miss Jacqueline Allen, was crowned queen of University Homes, and dance contests were held in the space, although evidently “the waltzing contest was a ‘no go’ with the younger set in attendance and as a result the prizes had to be given to the gay young jitterbugs.”¹⁰³

Du Bois’s vision of a Black enclave with a cooperative economy at University Homes did, to a certain degree, come to pass. In July 1938, the U.S. Farm Credit Administration helped to set up a cooperative bank—a credit union—for tenants. In 1940, the University Homes Federal Credit Union, a critical institution for Black citizens in a city with persistently segregated lending practices, held its annual dinner in the auditorium, with Alonzo Moron, president of the credit union, presiding (Figure 19). The architectural simplicity of the large modern space, crowded with more than one hundred reveling investors, masked the arduous effort that its creation had required.

The Administration Building was renamed Roosevelt Hall (in honor of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt) in the mid-1940s. The building’s uses, too, changed over time in ways that mapped onto broader political currents and that further realized the original aspirations of the University Homes Advisory Committee. In 1946, after the landmark federal court decision in the case of King v. Chapman, which deemed Georgia’s white primary unconstitutional, 750 new Black voters registered at Roosevelt Hall in just the first three hours of a massive voter drive.¹⁰⁴ Atlanta’s WERD, the first Black-owned radio station in the United States, periodically broadcast tenant events from the stage of Roosevelt Hall in addition to publicizing the activities of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1960, AUC students Julian Bond and Lonnie King organized sit-ins from the soda fountain at the neighboring branch of Yates and Milton, two blocks away.¹⁰⁵

By the 1990s, however, the ground-floor stores of Roosevelt Hall had been replaced by an Atlanta Police Department precinct office, and by 2009 the building was the only University Homes structure still standing. The housing project’s decline over the course of seven decades is another tale, but not the one of concern here. This story, rather, highlights how local activists and AUC faculty coaxed key New Deal figures and harnessed federal funding to secure the project they needed to support their community.

Roosevelt Hall’s transformation into the sociopolitical nucleus of University Homes was not a foregone conclusion. The design and constructed form emerged as products of federal bureaucratic expectations combined with southern white architectural practices. A building intended for commercial and office activity assumed a new identity as a center for social work, citizenship training, and tenant-run initiatives as the result of tenacious advocacy by a heterogeneous African American constituency committed to programmatic excellence. Roosevelt Hall became a community building for building community, an architectural vehicle for Black elevation and organization, a space shaped by its users to concentrate and celebrate “the educational, cultural, and aesthetic enjoyments” of Atlanta’s West Side.¹⁰⁶