digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

Since the beginning of the daguerreotype, Black women photographers have been historically excluded from history and underrepresented in major art galleries, mainstream media, and archives. Featured here are Black women photographers in Atlanta who ran studios, captured portraits, and helped shape the city’s visual history. This “digital museum” serves as both an educational resource and a public history archive, ensuring that the stories of these Black women photographers are not forgotten but are shared with scholars, the creative world, and future generations.

Newly revised! This map-based digital essay explores the history of Georgia Avenue, which once served as an important commercial thoroughfare in the neighborhoods south of downtown Atlanta and is now the southern edge of Georgia State University’s campus. Using the concept of the city as palimpsest – the idea that transformations of a built environment leave traces of the past – we can rediscover a multiethnic, multiracial neighborhood that was entirely erased by massive urban development projects, and see how Summerhill, and other “stadium neighborhoods” in Atlanta, were so thoroughly transformed over the course of the twentieth century.

This online exhibit contains original materials donated to GSU Library’s Special Collections & Archives. These items are comprised of correspondence, legal documents, notes and research materials, photographs, and artifacts belonging to the late Civil Rights leader Lonnie King, Jr. They chronicle his life, career and involvement with the Atlanta Student Movement, NAACP, Morehouse College, and Georgia State University.

Mapping Atlanta’s Jim Crow Era Women’s Basketball Community. During the era of legalized segregation, Black Atlantans created their own economic, educational, and recreational institutions. In Black schools, community centers, and entertainment venues, Black women played basketball. Sarah Almeta Hill captained a title-winning basketball team while teaching full-time. Then, she became Atlanta’s most successful coach. She won titles, trophies, and temporary stardom. Reporters even described her as a tennis queen and basketball veteran. Despite the five consecutive city titles, two back-to-back state championships, and consistent press during her playing days, Hill barely shows up in an internet search. Neither do the women she competed with in Atlanta’s Jim Crow Era Black women’s basketball community. Those women played basketball and represented their schools, women’s clubs, and sometimes their employers. Sometimes they were models of respectability, sometimes they entertained, and sometimes they simply played because they were competitors. There are traces of their lives and careers made visible through digging through archival documents, yearbooks, and news reports. Most information is not easily accessible, but understanding their participation in basketball is an important part of sports history.

Celebrating 50 years of hip-hop! The Rap Map visualizes metro Atlanta’s influence on hip-hop and hip-hop’s influence on the region over the last three decades. The Rap Map highlights the disconnect between the rapid pace of development in the city and its negligible impact on how hip hop music engages with the city’s geography. It is as if Atlanta’s economic renaissance skipped whole portions of the city and that is where hip hop in Atlanta was born. Project goals are to show the significance of music as a source for an aural history of cities and towns as well as to explore the symbiotic relationship between art and space. The Rap Map is available through ATLMaps, https://atlmaps.org

GSU professor Taylor Shelton’s blog exploring all of Atlanta’s oddities and inequalities with maps. Issues covered are fundamentally about geography, about how places are the way they are and how they change over time and how all of that matters to the people that occupy those places. Atlanta is one of the most interesting and unique cities in the US, if not the world, but it’s also one that’s been chronically understudied relative to other large cities. Even if more were written about Atlanta on a consistent basis, the city’s rapid changes necessitate ever more investigation of what’s happening, where and why. Atlanta consistently has some of the highest levels of income inequality of any city or metro across the entire United States. And while the city had a reputation for being one of the most affordable large metros, the last several years have seen some of the most rapid housing price increases of anywhere across the country, with unchecked gentrification running rampant in some historically Black neighborhoods.

Beginning in 1960, the Atlanta sit-in movement took over the downtown area of the city. Follow this tour to see where student activists conducted their peaceful protests and sat down to stand up for what they believed in. You’ll learn about major players and events of the movement while visiting the actual sites where they happened. Historic photos and descriptions will help you see what the protestors saw and take you back to this time of energy and passion in Atlanta’s past. Created Spring 2019.

The ATLMaps platform, a collaboration between Georgia State University and Emory University, combines archival maps, geospatial data visualization, and user contributed multimedia location pinpoints to promote investigation into any number of issues about Atlanta. While currently focused on one city to demonstrate the power of stacking thousands of layers of information on one place, this innovative online platform allows users to layer an increasing number of interdisciplinary data to address the complex issues that any city poses. The project looks to offer a framework that incorporates storytelling reliant on geospatial data and for normalizing input across a range of data sets about so that material can be cross-compared in novel ways, allowing users to make connections between seemingly unrelated data sources and ask questions that would not be apparent when only looking at one particular project. The ATLMaps project will also encourage knowledgeable members of the university and local communities to curate data on the site to demonstrate the possibilities for synthesizing material across projects and data types.

Complete list of ATLMaps contributors and past and present team members at https://atlmaps.org/about

Recorded stories from Dr. John Burrison, Folklorist and Professor of English at Georgia State University, who has collected stories of folk music, pottery, legends, medicine, and religious practices in Atlanta. This walking tour will guide you through folk sites downtown, specifically around locations which now make up today’s GSU campus. This project was developed under the guidance of Dr. Brennan Collins for the Student Innovation Fellowship program at Georgia State University, Spring 2019.

Leading up to and after the Women’s March of 2017, Georgia activists, Lucy Hargrett Draper, and her niece, Chrisy Erickson Strum documented emerging and ongoing activism through what they are calling their U.S. Women’s Protest “Reckoning” collection, which includes events and activities occurring in Atlanta. What they have given Georgia State University is a remarkably rich resource that will continue to grow as movements and campaigns evolve. The collection serves as a companion to oral histories, photographs, textiles and artifacts that have been donated by March participants since 2017. This online exhibit highlights some of the themes from the “Reckoning” collection.

Founded in 1913, Georgia State University grew as it supported the educational needs of Atlanta and the state of Georgia. Originally an evening program intended for the Atlanta business community, the school achieved university status in 1969. With this new phase of academic growth, the administration focused on expanding the University Library’s ability to support advanced research. The Library’s Special Collections and Archives launched formally in 1971, with the mission of collecting rare and unique primary source material to support teaching and scholarship. Our first collections directly engaged the research needs of our faculty and students focusing on the people, communities, and events that shaped modern-day Atlanta, Georgia, and the New South. This focus on documenting the sometimes contentious, too often racist and sexist, but always fascinating story of modern-day Atlanta has led us to seek out and preserve the stories of everyday people. The stories maintained in our archives are not just of the powerful and famous, they are the stories of everyday people who recognized injustice and organized their peers, family, coworkers, and lives around rectifying that injustice and making Atlanta a more equitable city. Fifty years ago, our collections started with one box and a single collecting focus on southern labor unions. As our collecting areas have grown from one to nine, so has the department. Today our collecting areas — Southern Labor, Photographs, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality, Music & Radio Broadcasting, Social Change, Rare Books, Pulp Literature, and University Archives — consist of 8 miles of materials and several terabytes of digital content. Georgia State’s Special Collections & Archives gives researchers an in-depth view of life in 20th and 21st Century Atlanta and the Greater Southeast Region. This expansion of collecting has been possible only through creating connections to passionately engaged community partners. From the LGBTQ Institute and We Love BuHi to the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the AFL-CIO, Special Collections builds relationships with communities all over Atlanta and the South. The collections entrusted to us document the stories, accomplishments, and struggles of those communities. Bridging Communities introduces a few stories found in our collections, such as the women who organized domestic workers for basic work protections; a woman who recognized a need to support families of incarcerated mothers; a sanitation workers’ strike protesting continued discrimination in hiring and promotions, poor working conditions, and low pay; women fighting for equal rights; the University’s struggle with racial tensions on campus; a grassroots campaign to retain the musical director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra; and organizations working to assist the homeless and other marginalized groups. This exhibit is a testament to the important role archives play within the communities they serve.

Black Neighborhoods and the Creation of Black Atlanta explores the history of Black neighborhoods in Atlanta. It provides an overview of several of these neighborhoods: Summerhill, Vine City, West End, Lightning, and Johnsontown. The exhibit highlights archival collections held in the Archives Research Center at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library. Collections include the Maynard Jackson Mayoral Administrative records, the Atlanta Urban League papers, the Atlanta Community Relations Commission collection, the Grace Towns Hamilton papers, the Neighborhood Union collection, the John H. Calhoun, Jr. papers, the Samuel W. Williams papers, the Atlanta Neighborhood Planning vertical file, the Johnsontown Neighborhood collection, and the Vivian W. Henderson papers. Exhibit created by Brittany Newberry.