This is where we should ask what we can learn from the past.
In this 2024 AJC file photo, Praise House pays tribute to Decatur’s old Beacon Hill community. (Julie Yarbrough/AJC)
More than 150 years of history reside on a grassy patch of land at the intersection of West Trinity Place and Electric Avenue in the city of Decatur. This is what’s left of “The Bottom” or Beacon Hill, a community established by freed slaves in the late 1860s at the end of the Civil War.
At the time, the area was a thriving Black community with homes and businesses supported by a network of churches. But for more than a decade, since 2014, when the city demolished the Allen Wilson Terrace apartments, a public housing complex, the land has been vacant.
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Doris Sims Johnson leads a press conference on Friday, Jan. 16, 2026, asking the city of Decatur to grant a historic designation to the vacant land on Electric Avenue where the school district is proposing to build an early learning center. The open area was part of the historically Black neighborhood of Beacon Hill. (Ben Gray for the AJC)
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Nedra Rhone is a lifestyle columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution where she has been a reporter since 2006. A graduate of Columbia University School of Journalism, she enjoys writing about the people, places and events that define metro Atlanta. Sign up to have her column sent to your inbox: ajc.com/newsletters/nedra-rhone-columnist.
