That same conversation about demolition was happening with the Daily World Building on Auburn Avenue, which is a historic site in journalism. It was this country’s first or oldest Black daily newspaper and a megaphone for the Civil Rights Movement. The community really came together and 1100 people signed a petition to deny the demolition permit of this building. I was someone who loved history and was paying attention to the news, and I said, This seems like something of value to this community. And I started to learn more and more, but I didn’t really do anything about it, although I knew that it was important to save — I knew from my experience seeing New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina what could be lost.

I wanted to do something with real estate and preservation here in Atlanta, and quite by chance, I met the granddaughter of the founder of the Daily World newspaper, Alexis Scott. She was selling the building because the developer who wanted to tear it down couldn’t anymore, because the demo permit was denied. So, I ended up being able to lead this historic preservation and did it in an open and welcoming and transparent manner, which is important in anything really, but especially in a neighborhood that has seen so much devastation.

The building was in such disrepair — the tornado blew the roof off, and then it rained in there for four months because the insurance company wasn’t playing nice. It was so damaged on the inside, but the outside was just beautiful. I mean, it needed some TLC — but the bones of the building were there and strong and beautiful, and it allowed us to do what’s called a historic rehabilitation, which is restoration or improvement with a standard that’s required by the National Park Service and other governing bodies. This was important because it allowed for us to get historic tax credits which helped make this financially viable.

The Daily World Building was built in 1912. It was home to a coffee company in 1918; it was home to the district five Girl Scouts, Atlanta’s first Black Girl Scouts troupe in 1944; it was home to a place called the Poinciana Club that had incredibly well-known and renowned musicians like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday playing there. It dawned on me relatively quickly that there was a whole other context to this place that people don’t know about. Those stories were the foundation for my development work and the future focus of Civil Sites.

There are some things that we as individuals have control over, like personal agency and community. And then there’s some things that we don’t, for better or for worse, and that usually has something to do with the law. It’s a shame, because part of that 47 per cent of the buildings lost in Sweet Auburn have been people just tearing down buildings, some have been demolition via neglect — the building just sits there until it falls down. Some of that is intentional. Sometimes people who own properties don’t know what to do, or can’t do it, or aren’t in the position to do it.

My decision to get involved in a project is based on a number of things. Firstly, does this building have the potential to support a contemporary program? Is it significant architecture? Is this something that I want to spend the next number of years of my life working on? Will I enjoy it? Can I afford it, and will it be financially successful? With historic preservation, you have to have political will, community will and financial viability. If you don’t have all three, it’s probably not going to be very successful. But to me, the idea of success has a broad definition.

In the US, it is very difficult to borrow money at an interest rate that works to combat inflation, to even get a bank to loan money on a real estate project, and especially one that has any office in it at all, because banks are risk averse. And so, how is it possible, en masse, to engage in historic preservation? Don’t do it the way that I do it. Do it in a more artistic and ethereal way. Do it by writing. Write a play, a poem, an article, sing a song, paint a mural. There’s so many different ways, with the only barrier to entry being someone’s personal passion. Preservation is just the continuing of a story. And so, with Civil Sites, I’m hoping that this is a resource for others to make their own.

Because this is a city, and these are buildings, and there are people, it is constantly changing. I thought, I don’t want the book to seem out of date. But it’s funny, because it actually makes it always right on time. And I think either cosmically or maybe randomly or by happenstance, because Civil Sites as a text concluded December 31, 2024, it’s frozen in time at that moment, which is also the 60th anniversary of the passing of the Civil Rights Act. So that’s pretty wild to me, and important, because something’s going to happen to one of these buildings, either for better or for worse, soon, and people in our generation or in future generations will be able to see what it was and why it was important, and hopefully be able to understand what they’re doing, and where they’re doing it, and why. The design of the book itself is also an exercise in preservation. With Clay Kiningham’s illustrations, he’s an architect, and the way that he sketches chronicles an exact moment in time, while explaining why it’s significant today.

The typeface, designed by a young Black graphic designer named Tre Seals, is another example.  In his mid 20s, he learns that only 3 per cent of all graphic designers are Black, which is a problem. And then he is like, Whoa — that means there’s not a representational voice in the world of design, which is a major, major problem. So he starts a type house called Vocal Type, and he derives fonts from social movements — civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, counter culture, pop culture. This typeface is called Martin, and it came from the I Am a Man poster that these were hand painted, and were used in the Memphis Sanitation Worker Strike, where Dr. King was killed in April of 1968. It wasn’t chosen specifically for that reason; it just was good design. Tre preserves history through the design of fonts, and then the application of them is having a representational voice, but he doesn’t have to be the one to do it alone. That’s powerful.

This is important history, which is why I want to share it. The book is full of citations pointing back to many, many people and their work. There is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 or more additional readings suggested. I knew I needed to do this in a thoughtful way and I didn’t have some of the perspectives that would allow for that. And so, after two years of asking, Dr. Jacqueline Jones Royster, who was the Dean of the Ivan Allen College at Georgia Tech, agreed to be the cultural editor of the book. I was a student in grad school when Jackie was the dean of the college that I was in, and I held her in the highest esteem and regard. At that time, she knew what I had been working on, and we share a love for preservation. And she grew up, in many ways, in Sweet Auburn although she didn’t live there. She wrote the afterword, and I cried when I read it. She lent the perspective of being a Black woman. I could study all day long for eternity and never understand what that means. She was born in the segregated South. Her father was a Mason, her mom was an Eastern Star. She understands fraternal organizations, she was born and raised in the church — there’s so many of the foundational cornerstones of Sweet Auburn perspective that I do not have. But fortunately, I had the mentorship and partnership of a rhetorical scholar who is Professor Emeritus at two different colleges and was the dean at one to help guide me. To be honest, I was humbled often. But I also learned a lot, and I appreciated what she was able to bring to this book. I know it’s a better book for it.

That if you think you know everything about history, you definitely don’t — I’ve learned things that I can’t even articulate yet about architecture through this process. But I’ve also learned that there’s a resilience in people that, when times are tough, really shines through. There’s so much positive history out there. A lot of people want to focus on the problem du jour, but it’s okay to learn and share something that’s positive and uplifting.

One of the historic preservation projects that we haven’t discussed is Constellations, which I founded six and a half years ago in Sweet Auburn in the Southern School Book Building. This building was built in 1910 as a beautiful book warehouse. It has this ethos of knowledge enlightenment and sharing. What’s really compelling about it on a personal level is randomly connecting with people coming and going from there. You never know who’s walking in the door and I’ve come to understand the diversity of experience. I’m likely going to lean into that with real estate much more — how to provide these platforms of support and let other people come together in a genuine way and see what happens.

I moved to Atlanta in 1995. In high school, I came here with some friends over a summer, and you could feel an energy and a promise and a sense of the place it was heading. In 2008, a tornado hit the city, which is very odd and rare. This one was big and powerful and carved a six-mile path of destruction through downtown Atlanta and went right through the Sweet Auburn Historic District. To give you an idea, since being designated a Historic Landmark District in 1976, Sweet Auburn has since lost 47 per cent of its buildings. Some of that has been to Mother Nature, like the tornado, some of it has been to fire — I mean, you see the devastation caused in Los Angeles right now.

But for Sweet Auburn, it wasn’t just this tornado. An interstate was built right through the middle of this neighborhood that divided it and started to send it on a downward trajectory. I knew about Sweet Auburn because I had been driving around Atlanta immersing myself, and I like history and architecture. There’s incredible, award-winning buildings here but I didn’t know that much about them. When the tornado hit, stories started to come up about what might be lost here. In historic preservation, you often hear, “This building has to be torn down.” Why does it have to? “Well, it’s not structurally sound.” Have you done a structural engineering report? “Well, no.” So, you just want to tear it down to build something bigger and make more money? That’s not okay.

That same conversation about demolition was happening with the Daily World Building on Auburn Avenue, which is a historic site in journalism. It was this country’s first or oldest Black daily newspaper and a megaphone for the Civil Rights Movement. The community really came together and 1100 people signed a petition to deny the demolition permit of this building. I was someone who loved history and was paying attention to the news, and I said, This seems like something of value to this community. And I started to learn more and more, but I didn’t really do anything about it, although I knew that it was important to save — I knew from my experience seeing New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina what could be lost.

I wanted to do something with real estate and preservation here in Atlanta, and quite by chance, I met the granddaughter of the founder of the Daily World newspaper, Alexis Scott. She was selling the building because the developer who wanted to tear it down couldn’t anymore, because the demo permit was denied. So, I ended up being able to lead this historic preservation and did it in an open and welcoming and transparent manner, which is important in anything really, but especially in a neighborhood that has seen so much devastation.

The building was in such disrepair — the tornado blew the roof off, and then it rained in there for four months because the insurance company wasn’t playing nice. It was so damaged on the inside, but the outside was just beautiful. I mean, it needed some TLC — but the bones of the building were there and strong and beautiful, and it allowed us to do what’s called a historic rehabilitation, which is restoration or improvement with a standard that’s required by the National Park Service and other governing bodies. This was important because it allowed for us to get historic tax credits which helped make this financially viable.

The Daily World Building was built in 1912. It was home to a coffee company in 1918; it was home to the district five Girl Scouts, Atlanta’s first Black Girl Scouts troupe in 1944; it was home to a place called the Poinciana Club that had incredibly well-known and renowned musicians like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday playing there. It dawned on me relatively quickly that there was a whole other context to this place that people don’t know about. Those stories were the foundation for my development work and the future focus of Civil Sites.

There are some things that we as individuals have control over, like personal agency and community. And then there’s some things that we don’t, for better or for worse, and that usually has something to do with the law. It’s a shame, because part of that 47 per cent of the buildings lost in Sweet Auburn have been people just tearing down buildings, some have been demolition via neglect — the building just sits there until it falls down. Some of that is intentional. Sometimes people who own properties don’t know what to do, or can’t do it, or aren’t in the position to do it.

My decision to get involved in a project is based on a number of things. Firstly, does this building have the potential to support a contemporary program? Is it significant architecture? Is this something that I want to spend the next number of years of my life working on? Will I enjoy it? Can I afford it, and will it be financially successful? With historic preservation, you have to have political will, community will and financial viability. If you don’t have all three, it’s probably not going to be very successful. But to me, the idea of success has a broad definition.

In the US, it is very difficult to borrow money at an interest rate that works to combat inflation, to even get a bank to loan money on a real estate project, and especially one that has any office in it at all, because banks are risk averse. And so, how is it possible, en masse, to engage in historic preservation? Don’t do it the way that I do it. Do it in a more artistic and ethereal way. Do it by writing. Write a play, a poem, an article, sing a song, paint a mural. There’s so many different ways, with the only barrier to entry being someone’s personal passion. Preservation is just the continuing of a story. And so, with Civil Sites, I’m hoping that this is a resource for others to make their own.

Because this is a city, and these are buildings, and there are people, it is constantly changing. I thought, I don’t want the book to seem out of date. But it’s funny, because it actually makes it always right on time. And I think either cosmically or maybe randomly or by happenstance, because Civil Sites as a text concluded December 31, 2024, it’s frozen in time at that moment, which is also the 60th anniversary of the passing of the Civil Rights Act. So that’s pretty wild to me, and important, because something’s going to happen to one of these buildings, either for better or for worse, soon, and people in our generation or in future generations will be able to see what it was and why it was important, and hopefully be able to understand what they’re doing, and where they’re doing it, and why. The design of the book itself is also an exercise in preservation. With Clay Kiningham’s illustrations, he’s an architect, and the way that he sketches chronicles an exact moment in time, while explaining why it’s significant today.

The typeface, designed by a young Black graphic designer named Tre Seals, is another example.  In his mid 20s, he learns that only 3 per cent of all graphic designers are Black, which is a problem. And then he is like, Whoa — that means there’s not a representational voice in the world of design, which is a major, major problem. So he starts a type house called Vocal Type, and he derives fonts from social movements — civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, counter culture, pop culture. This typeface is called Martin, and it came from the I Am a Man poster that these were hand painted, and were used in the Memphis Sanitation Worker Strike, where Dr. King was killed in April of 1968. It wasn’t chosen specifically for that reason; it just was good design. Tre preserves history through the design of fonts, and then the application of them is having a representational voice, but he doesn’t have to be the one to do it alone. That’s powerful.

This is important history, which is why I want to share it. The book is full of citations pointing back to many, many people and their work. There is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 or more additional readings suggested. I knew I needed to do this in a thoughtful way and I didn’t have some of the perspectives that would allow for that. And so, after two years of asking, Dr. Jacqueline Jones Royster, who was the Dean of the Ivan Allen College at Georgia Tech, agreed to be the cultural editor of the book. I was a student in grad school when Jackie was the dean of the college that I was in, and I held her in the highest esteem and regard. At that time, she knew what I had been working on, and we share a love for preservation. And she grew up, in many ways, in Sweet Auburn although she didn’t live there. She wrote the afterword, and I cried when I read it. She lent the perspective of being a Black woman. I could study all day long for eternity and never understand what that means. She was born in the segregated South. Her father was a Mason, her mom was an Eastern Star. She understands fraternal organizations, she was born and raised in the church — there’s so many of the foundational cornerstones of Sweet Auburn perspective that I do not have. But fortunately, I had the mentorship and partnership of a rhetorical scholar who is Professor Emeritus at two different colleges and was the dean at one to help guide me. To be honest, I was humbled often. But I also learned a lot, and I appreciated what she was able to bring to this book. I know it’s a better book for it.

That if you think you know everything about history, you definitely don’t — I’ve learned things that I can’t even articulate yet about architecture through this process. But I’ve also learned that there’s a resilience in people that, when times are tough, really shines through. There’s so much positive history out there. A lot of people want to focus on the problem du jour, but it’s okay to learn and share something that’s positive and uplifting.

One of the historic preservation projects that we haven’t discussed is Constellations, which I founded six and a half years ago in Sweet Auburn in the Southern School Book Building. This building was built in 1910 as a beautiful book warehouse. It has this ethos of knowledge enlightenment and sharing. What’s really compelling about it on a personal level is randomly connecting with people coming and going from there. You never know who’s walking in the door and I’ve come to understand the diversity of experience. I’m likely going to lean into that with real estate much more — how to provide these platforms of support and let other people come together in a genuine way and see what happens.

I bring them together, because historic preservation is not going to be accepted broadly if it doesn’t have a contemporary program. My philosophy is that if you’re on the planet, you’re in real estate — we’re all sharing it. We all have an understanding of place and its usability, and our interest in doing things there. And so, whether you preserve a national park, a building, a tradition or archival music, if it’s not relevant to today, no one is going to listen to it, camp in it or bring their business there.

We’re doing it right now in capturing this interview. The recording of “I Have a Dream” at the March on Washington is so powerful and profound as a recorded speech. I’m not taking anything away from the transcription, but it’s different. Hearing a voice can, in his case, move mountains, right? But I think that there’s all different types of things that you can do to further power a connection — that’s storytelling.

Sweet Auburn and the Civil Rights Movement altogether are an incredibly rich history, and it’s one that people around the globe know up to a point. We know about Martin Luther King, and Dr. King was a leader who changed the world for the better. But history is also exclusionary, and so there’s so many people who were part of the Civil Rights Movement. What people don’t really know much about at all are the other hundreds of thousands of people who came together, and in particular, women and Black women, because they have been excluded from history — and not just Civil Rights history. And so, I read like 12,000 pages to write my book, Civil Sites. It took a lot of research, and it didn’t take too long to figure out that this information was hard to find. So, at that point, I changed the focus of the book to really be about unknown, unsung and underrepresented heroes and heroines of the movement. These people were hiding within history, and so sharing their story is a form of advocacy — advocating for rights that go beyond the buildings that are representations of them in this district.

I moved to Atlanta in 1995. In high school, I came here with some friends over a summer, and you could feel an energy and a promise and a sense of the place it was heading. In 2008, a tornado hit the city, which is very odd and rare. This one was big and powerful and carved a six-mile path of destruction through downtown Atlanta and went right through the Sweet Auburn Historic District. To give you an idea, since being designated a Historic Landmark District in 1976, Sweet Auburn has since lost 47 per cent of its buildings. Some of that has been to Mother Nature, like the tornado, some of it has been to fire — I mean, you see the devastation caused in Los Angeles right now.

But for Sweet Auburn, it wasn’t just this tornado. An interstate was built right through the middle of this neighborhood that divided it and started to send it on a downward trajectory. I knew about Sweet Auburn because I had been driving around Atlanta immersing myself, and I like history and architecture. There’s incredible, award-winning buildings here but I didn’t know that much about them. When the tornado hit, stories started to come up about what might be lost here. In historic preservation, you often hear, “This building has to be torn down.” Why does it have to? “Well, it’s not structurally sound.” Have you done a structural engineering report? “Well, no.” So, you just want to tear it down to build something bigger and make more money? That’s not okay.

That same conversation about demolition was happening with the Daily World Building on Auburn Avenue, which is a historic site in journalism. It was this country’s first or oldest Black daily newspaper and a megaphone for the Civil Rights Movement. The community really came together and 1100 people signed a petition to deny the demolition permit of this building. I was someone who loved history and was paying attention to the news, and I said, This seems like something of value to this community. And I started to learn more and more, but I didn’t really do anything about it, although I knew that it was important to save — I knew from my experience seeing New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina what could be lost.

I wanted to do something with real estate and preservation here in Atlanta, and quite by chance, I met the granddaughter of the founder of the Daily World newspaper, Alexis Scott. She was selling the building because the developer who wanted to tear it down couldn’t anymore, because the demo permit was denied. So, I ended up being able to lead this historic preservation and did it in an open and welcoming and transparent manner, which is important in anything really, but especially in a neighborhood that has seen so much devastation.

The building was in such disrepair — the tornado blew the roof off, and then it rained in there for four months because the insurance company wasn’t playing nice. It was so damaged on the inside, but the outside was just beautiful. I mean, it needed some TLC — but the bones of the building were there and strong and beautiful, and it allowed us to do what’s called a historic rehabilitation, which is restoration or improvement with a standard that’s required by the National Park Service and other governing bodies. This was important because it allowed for us to get historic tax credits which helped make this financially viable.

The Daily World Building was built in 1912. It was home to a coffee company in 1918; it was home to the district five Girl Scouts, Atlanta’s first Black Girl Scouts troupe in 1944; it was home to a place called the Poinciana Club that had incredibly well-known and renowned musicians like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday playing there. It dawned on me relatively quickly that there was a whole other context to this place that people don’t know about. Those stories were the foundation for my development work and the future focus of Civil Sites.

There are some things that we as individuals have control over, like personal agency and community. And then there’s some things that we don’t, for better or for worse, and that usually has something to do with the law. It’s a shame, because part of that 47 per cent of the buildings lost in Sweet Auburn have been people just tearing down buildings, some have been demolition via neglect — the building just sits there until it falls down. Some of that is intentional. Sometimes people who own properties don’t know what to do, or can’t do it, or aren’t in the position to do it.

My decision to get involved in a project is based on a number of things. Firstly, does this building have the potential to support a contemporary program? Is it significant architecture? Is this something that I want to spend the next number of years of my life working on? Will I enjoy it? Can I afford it, and will it be financially successful? With historic preservation, you have to have political will, community will and financial viability. If you don’t have all three, it’s probably not going to be very successful. But to me, the idea of success has a broad definition.

In the US, it is very difficult to borrow money at an interest rate that works to combat inflation, to even get a bank to loan money on a real estate project, and especially one that has any office in it at all, because banks are risk averse. And so, how is it possible, en masse, to engage in historic preservation? Don’t do it the way that I do it. Do it in a more artistic and ethereal way. Do it by writing. Write a play, a poem, an article, sing a song, paint a mural. There’s so many different ways, with the only barrier to entry being someone’s personal passion. Preservation is just the continuing of a story. And so, with Civil Sites, I’m hoping that this is a resource for others to make their own.

Because this is a city, and these are buildings, and there are people, it is constantly changing. I thought, I don’t want the book to seem out of date. But it’s funny, because it actually makes it always right on time. And I think either cosmically or maybe randomly or by happenstance, because Civil Sites as a text concluded December 31, 2024, it’s frozen in time at that moment, which is also the 60th anniversary of the passing of the Civil Rights Act. So that’s pretty wild to me, and important, because something’s going to happen to one of these buildings, either for better or for worse, soon, and people in our generation or in future generations will be able to see what it was and why it was important, and hopefully be able to understand what they’re doing, and where they’re doing it, and why. The design of the book itself is also an exercise in preservation. With Clay Kiningham’s illustrations, he’s an architect, and the way that he sketches chronicles an exact moment in time, while explaining why it’s significant today.

The typeface, designed by a young Black graphic designer named Tre Seals, is another example.  In his mid 20s, he learns that only 3 per cent of all graphic designers are Black, which is a problem. And then he is like, Whoa — that means there’s not a representational voice in the world of design, which is a major, major problem. So he starts a type house called Vocal Type, and he derives fonts from social movements — civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, counter culture, pop culture. This typeface is called Martin, and it came from the I Am a Man poster that these were hand painted, and were used in the Memphis Sanitation Worker Strike, where Dr. King was killed in April of 1968. It wasn’t chosen specifically for that reason; it just was good design. Tre preserves history through the design of fonts, and then the application of them is having a representational voice, but he doesn’t have to be the one to do it alone. That’s powerful.

This is important history, which is why I want to share it. The book is full of citations pointing back to many, many people and their work. There is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 or more additional readings suggested. I knew I needed to do this in a thoughtful way and I didn’t have some of the perspectives that would allow for that. And so, after two years of asking, Dr. Jacqueline Jones Royster, who was the Dean of the Ivan Allen College at Georgia Tech, agreed to be the cultural editor of the book. I was a student in grad school when Jackie was the dean of the college that I was in, and I held her in the highest esteem and regard. At that time, she knew what I had been working on, and we share a love for preservation. And she grew up, in many ways, in Sweet Auburn although she didn’t live there. She wrote the afterword, and I cried when I read it. She lent the perspective of being a Black woman. I could study all day long for eternity and never understand what that means. She was born in the segregated South. Her father was a Mason, her mom was an Eastern Star. She understands fraternal organizations, she was born and raised in the church — there’s so many of the foundational cornerstones of Sweet Auburn perspective that I do not have. But fortunately, I had the mentorship and partnership of a rhetorical scholar who is Professor Emeritus at two different colleges and was the dean at one to help guide me. To be honest, I was humbled often. But I also learned a lot, and I appreciated what she was able to bring to this book. I know it’s a better book for it.

That if you think you know everything about history, you definitely don’t — I’ve learned things that I can’t even articulate yet about architecture through this process. But I’ve also learned that there’s a resilience in people that, when times are tough, really shines through. There’s so much positive history out there. A lot of people want to focus on the problem du jour, but it’s okay to learn and share something that’s positive and uplifting.

One of the historic preservation projects that we haven’t discussed is Constellations, which I founded six and a half years ago in Sweet Auburn in the Southern School Book Building. This building was built in 1910 as a beautiful book warehouse. It has this ethos of knowledge enlightenment and sharing. What’s really compelling about it on a personal level is randomly connecting with people coming and going from there. You never know who’s walking in the door and I’ve come to understand the diversity of experience. I’m likely going to lean into that with real estate much more — how to provide these platforms of support and let other people come together in a genuine way and see what happens.