Cassandra E. Hawkins
Figure 1: Lugenia Burns Hope poses on the steps with the Neighborhood Union women (Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Digital Exhibits, auc.050.b14f6.00000000.pho0033, https://digitalexhibits.auctr.edu/items/show/204).
Long before the New Deal or the first discussions to plan what would become the University Homes housing project, Lugenia Burns Hope and her fellow members of the Neighborhood Union (NU) were on a mission to clean up and clean out the West Side of Atlanta. In the wake of hardening lines of segregation and at the height of the progressive reform movement, Lugenia Burns Hope formed the Union in 1908 to address the social needs and municipal neglect of the neighborhoods around Atlanta University [Figure 1]. The Neighborhood Union’s efforts were as focused on the built environment as on the social one, and in their ideology one could not be separated from the other: cleanliness and godliness were co-constitutive categories. Through educational programs, alliances with local police, and clean-up campaigns, the Neighborhood Union’s moral, religious, and racial ideals radically altered the West Side of Atlanta and paved the way for the slum clearance projects of the 1930s.
As the first Black women’s social work organization in Atlanta, the NU sought to “improve the social conditions of the city” and “co-operate with one another in their respective neighborhoods for the best interests of the community, city, and race.”[1] The Union’s work was shaped by their dedication to racial uplift, an ideology that positioned the Black elite as responsible for the social, moral, and economic betterment of the entire Black community in an effort to quell white racism.[2] To that end, the women of the NU saw themselves as moral crusaders on a mission to clean up their neighborhoods both literally and figuratively—a view that caused friction when community members failed to meet the Union’s standards.[3]
In their founding constitution, the NU stated their objective to be the “moral, social, intellectual and religious uplift of the community,” and had clear ideas of how to enact that uplift.[4] Burns Hope and many of her fellow Union members subscribed to the morals and values of Victorian America and worked to impress those values on the inhabitants of the West Side.[5] They considered amusements such as dance halls to be places of vice that stood in the way of virtue and racial uplift. Burns Hope envisioned that the NU and its community programs would create alternative amusements for children and young women by providing “playgrounds, clubs, good literature, and neighborhood centers for the moral, physical, and intellectual development of the young.”[6] To better understand the needs of the West Side and to keep tabs on its residents, the Union mapped their neighborhoods into zones and conducted door to door surveys to track matters like church attendance among residents, condition of houses and premises, “evidences of music, literature,” and local involvement in clubs and societies.[7] Other surveys tracked recreation, and asked questions like “Do you belong to lodges?... go to movies? How often?…sing at home? Go to church? …listen to radio?”[8] The Union wanted to know what their neighbors needed to be happy and healthy, but they also wanted to monitor what they did in their free time.
In many ways, the NU worked tirelessly for the health and wellbeing of their communities. They fought against exploitative landlords, called attention to municipal neglect in their communities, lobbied for new public schools and higher pay for Black students and teachers, and developed health programs for children and young mothers.[9] They worked to protect women and children from abuse, and fought to pass laws against incestuous rape and for the indictment of men who abused their families. However, their involvement in the community and close relationship with local law enforcement did not suit everyone, and inhabitants who failed to meet the Union’s standard of morality fared poorly. The Union vowed “generally to co-operate with city officials in suppressing vice and crime,” and local officials were happy to oblige by arresting Black individuals who the NU reported as wrongdoers.[10] The Neighborhood Union formed an Investigation Committee whose purpose was to report “everything that seems to be a menace to our neighborhood.”[11] A person could be considered a “menace” for infractions like breaking the Sabbath or gambling.[12] The NU even had correspondence templates on official Neighborhood Union masthead for the removal of “undesirable” members of the community, and at least some of their petitions were successful [Figure 2].[13] To deviate from the Union’s standard of respectability, then, could result in expulsion from the community or imprisonment. As historian Tera Hunter argues, the NU’s work was thus a double-edged sword for residents of the communities in which they worked.[14]
Figure 2: Correspondence template to remove undesirable community members on official Neighborhood Union masthead, c. 1930 (Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0121/).
As the Union worked to “clean up” the morals and inhabitants of the West Side, their ideals were extended to a focus on the built environment. The NU directly connected their social ideals to their understanding of the physical environment and believed hygiene and morality to be co-constitutive. In addition to a dedication to improving the sanitation of homes and lobbying the city for municipal improvements, another stated aim of the NU was to “abolish slums and houses of immorality,” a statement that directly connects poor living conditions to crime and vice.[15] To rectify the situation, the Neighborhood Union launched campaigns in the first decades of the twentieth century to train young mothers in what members considered proper homemaking, instruct children to be upstanding citizens, and—just as important to them—to remake the physical fabric of poor, Black neighborhoods to match the NU’s image of proper family environments and thus break up what they perceived as “dens of immorality and crime.”[16] The Union’s surveys of the physical environment and sanitation often made claims about the supposed moral status of the inhabitants simply “judging from the general external appearance.”[17]
So, for the NU, to tend to the righteousness of the community was also to tend to the built environment. In their first year of existence, the Union began conducting yearly neighborhood-wide clean-up campaigns.[18] While these programs focused on diminishing the spread of disease through sanitation, remaking the built environment aesthetically was also deemed crucial. To rally support for their campaigns, Union members championed the motto “Burn, Bury, Beautify” and “begged everyone” to follow it.[19] To bring more attention to the campaigns, the NU placed school children on street corners and instructed them to chant the mantra to passersby.[20] Though the motto was intended to refer to the practices of burning and burying trash while beautifying the area through painting, repair, and landscaping, it invoked a powerful and violent imagery.[21] The Union marshalled everyone in the community from the oldest to the youngest to participate in their clean-up campaigns and entered schools to hold contests, asking each student to list the number of tasks they completed. These tasks ranged from painting fences and building flower boxes to killing rats and cleaning vacant lots [Figure 3].[22]
Figure 3: “Burn, Bury, Beautify” campaign form, c. 1920 (Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0531/).
The Neighborhood Union saw the clean-up campaigns as a way to clean up crime and address other moral issues while also attacking sanitation hazards. With detailed maps that split neighborhoods into zones, the Neighborhood Union went door to door conducting surveys about sanitation and the built environment. They recorded everything from building type, size, and occupancy, to how residents disposed of their trash, what animals they owned, and whether or not the inhabitants showed “any degree of pride in appearance of dwelling place”—though how they measured this sort of pride is unclear.[23] Further demonstrating the connection NU organizers drew between social issues and environment, screenings of a film titled “Solving the Boy Problem in Beautifying Vacant Lots” became a clean-up week staple.[24] The 1921 clean-up campaign alone reached over 23,000 individuals, or nearly 40% of Black Atlantans.[25]
The Neighborhood Union also impressed their ideas of moral homemaking on the West Side through participation in the national Better Homes demonstrations. Launched in 1922 as a partnership between Herbert Hoover and Mary Meloney, the editor of women’s magazine The Dilenator,“Better Homes Week” was an annual program designed to aggrandize individual home ownership and characterize homemaking as an act of civic duty. Local chapters across the country were directed to create their own model homes that were “suitable for families with modest incomes” and furnish them in a way that was “suitable, comfortable and economical.”[26] The Better Homes guidebooks depicted homemaking as a moral imperative and sought to “promote character training in the home, and reading, music, and other forms of wholesome recreation.”[27] Organizers claimed that the demonstrations were intended to “bring to the attention of the community…the best that each community can do to promote and strengthen wholesome, normal family life” and stated that they should illustrate “that which is believed to be basically good.”[28] Some of the identified target audiences of the campaign were those who were “suffering from unsanitary housing conditions or unwholesome living conditions.”[29] As Manisha Claire has demonstrated, it was a push for a sort of “assimilation through architecture.”[30]
The ethos of the Better Homes Campaigns fit squarely within the goals of the Union, and they were quick to join the first Atlanta chapter in 1924. In 1925, the NU hosted the local Better Homes Committee meetings and decided to use high school girls as hostesses for their model home, grade school boys as their gardeners, and they accepted flower boxes donated from the high schools.[31] The model home was so successful that it helped the Atlanta chapter win first place, which was showcased in the national 1926 Better Homes Guidebook [Figure 4].[32] The Better Homes secretary even sent Burns Hope a personal letter expressing her thanks for the NU’s work.[33]
Figure 4: Selection from the National Better Homes Guidebook showcasing the Neighborhood Union’s demonstration (Better Homes in America, Guidebook of Better Homes in America: How to Organize the 1926 Campaign 10 [1926], 44 ).
In 1925, the Union began to focus their efforts more squarely on the West Side, near Atlanta University and the location of one of their Neighborhood Houses. University leaders and Union members saw Beaver Slide, one of the so-called slum neighborhoods on the West Side, as a threat to the respectability of the adjacent universities and colleges. They were particularly concerned with the perceived immorality of Beaver Slide’s residents.[34] In cooperation with Atlanta University and local police—organizations with whom the Union had long established relationships—the NU formed a “Beaver Slide” committee to serve as a “moral force” to control the area. They reopened a Neighborhood House on Leonard Street to serve as a local hub for their efforts “on the development of the immediate neighborhood that surround [the house].”[35] In the same year, the Union conducted a survey of the sanitary conditions surrounding Leonard Street Orphanage that included areas that would later become the sites for University Homes and John Hope Homes. In addition to collecting information about sewage issues, toilets, and gardens in the neighborhood, the surveyors were tasked to determine whether residents had pride in their dwellings with answers ranging from “these people seem to have pride in their dwellings,” to “there is definite lack of pride” to “it is questionable whether the families had in pride in their dwellings.”[36]
Figure 5: Humphrey Street houses bought to raze for new Leonard Street Home playground, captioned “the first slum clearance”(Leonard Street Orphan Home and Chadwick Home and School, Scrapbook One, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A1043/).
By 1928, the NU’s activities on the West Side expanded to include their heavy involvement in the Leonard Street Orphan’s Home and their own slum clearance project. A scrapbook kept by the Union shows a row of so-called slum homes bought by the Home that were slated to be razed and replaced with a playground [Figure 5].[37] The photographs emphasize trash and the poor conditions of backyards [Figures 6, 7]. The scrapbook carefully details the progress of the demolition and names the effort the “first slum clearance.”[38] When the ground was broken for the University Homes project six years later, the Neighborhood Union secretary would declare that the NU was “due the credit… for the choosing of the Federal Government of the Beaver Slide Slum District for its first national housing project.”[39]
Figure 6: Scrapbook page emphasizing the conditions of the “slum” backyards on Humphrey Street, c. 1928 (Leonard Street Orphan Home and Chadwick Home and School, Scrapbook 1, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A1043/).
Figure 7: Scrapbook page with a photo tracking the progress of the Humphrey Street slum clearance (Leonard Street Orphan Home and Chadwick Home and School, Scrapbook 1, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A1043/).
When the Union declared six years later that University Homes was the culmination of their own programs, they were right [Figure 8]. In 1934, the housing project made an offer to buy the West Side Neighborhood Union House that was planned for clearance. As the NU discussed the offer, the meeting minute keeper wrote that “while the work of the Neighborhood has accomplished much in the immediate section, they felt that this great University housing project was a God send to them in that it was a realization of one of their pet schemes.”[40] The Union further claimed that the project would be a “great economic and social advantage for the people in this section and would promote the aims and objects for which the Neighborhood Union is striving,” language that would make it into the official sale agreement for the property.[41] Once University Homes was publicly announced, the NU took up their own familiar lobbying work to pressure the government to make social rehabilitation programs part of the project.[42] The same complicated—and at times contradictory—ideals of racial uplift, morality, and slum clearance that characterized much of the Union’s social work would be transferred to the housing project in the 1930s. In this way, the activities of the Neighborhood Union should be understood as precursors to the large-scale federally funded clearance and reconstruction projects on the West Side in the coming years.
Figure 8: Photograph kept by the Neighborhood Union of the construction progress of the University Homes project, August 15, 1935 (Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A1012/).
***
Cassandra E. Hawkins is a Ph.D. Student in American Religious History at Emory University whose research focuses on race and education in twentieth century Atlanta.
Keywords: Neighborhood Union; University Homes; Beaver Slide; Racial Uplift; Clean-up Campaigns
Notes
[1] “Neighborhood Union Brochure, 1911,” 1911, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0210/.
[2] For more on the ideologies of racial uplift and respectability politics, see Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (UNC Press Books, 2012); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
[3] Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom': Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997), 139.
[4] “Constitution,” 1908, Neighborhood Union Collection, box 2, folder 5, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library.
[5] Jacqueline Anne Rouse, “Lugenia D. Burns Hope: A Black Female Reformer in the South, 1871-1947” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1983), 193.
[6] “Neighborhood Union Brochure, 1911.”
[7] “Neighborhood Union Questionnaire, circa 1930,” Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0480/.
[8] “Questionnaire for Survey of Standards of Living in Colored Districts in Atlanta, circa 1910,” Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0527/.
[9] Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom', 104, 138; Katie Marages Schank, “Producing the Projects: Atlanta and the Cultural Creation of Public Housing” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2016), 43.
[10] “Neighborhood Union Brochure, 1911”; Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom', 139.
[11] “Neighborhood Union Minute Book, 1908-1918,” Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, 38, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0128/.
[12] Ibid., 66.
[13] “Correspondence Template to Remove Undesirable Member of Community, circa 1930,” Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0121/.
[14] Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom',139.
[15] “Neighborhood Union Brochure, 1911.”
[16] “Constitution.”
[17] “Survey by Sociological Department Morehouse College, 1928,” 1928, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0446/. Though one particular study continues “Of course external appearances cannot be used as barometers of moral status but might give some evidence of existence of conditions undesirable,” such a qualification did not stop the same surveyor from making such a judgement nonetheless.
[18] These campaigns would later merge with Negro Health Week, began by Booker T. Washington in 1915, and involve a coalition of Black social-service agencies. See Karen Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002), 192.
[19] “Report on Mitchell St. Branch of Neighborhood Union and Clean Up Week Campaign, March 16, 1916,” 1916, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0330/.
[20] Brittany L. Hancock, “The Neighborhood Union and the Transformation of the West Side of Atlanta” (PhD diss., University of Houston, 2015), 184.
[21] Ibid., 159.
[22] “Atlanta Clean-Up and Paint-up Campaign Questionnaire for the School Children of Atlanta, April 14, 1924,” 1924, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0437/.
[23] “Sanitary Survey, January 22, 1925,” 1925, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library , https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0441/.
[24] Minutes of the Executive Committee of Clean-Up Week: Colored Branch of Anti-Tuberculosis Association, March 21, 1921, Neighborhood Union Collection, box 10, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library.
[25] Hancock, “The Neighborhood Union,” 183.
[26] Better Homes in America, Guidebook of Better Homes in America: How to Organize the 1926 Campaign 10 (1926): 9.
[27] Herbert Hoover, “Foreword,” in Guidebook of Better Homes in America: How to Organize the 1926 Campaign 10 (1926): 5–6.
[28] Better Homes in America, Guidebook of Better Homes, 8.
[29] Better Homes in America, Guidebook of Better Homes, 11.
[30] Manisha Claire, “The Latent Racism of the Better Homes in America Program,” JSTOR Daily (2020), https://daily.jstor.org/the-latent-racism-of-the-better-homes-in-america-program/.
[31] “Neighborhood Union Minutes, February 12 - June 23, 1925,” 1925, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0152/.
[32] Guidebook of Better Homes, 10:41–42.
[33] “Correspondence Between Better Homes in America and Mrs. John Hope, May 27, 1925,” 1925, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0307/.
[34] Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta, 189.
[35] Ibid., 189–90; Walter R. Chivers, “Neighborhood Union: An Effort of Community Organization,” Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life 3, no. 30 (June 1925).
[36] “A Survey of the Sanitary Conditions in the Neighborhood, circa 1925,” 1925, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0439/.
[37] “‘Thy Neighbor as Thyself:’ Neighborhood Union Collection,” Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://digitalexhibits.auctr.edu/exhibits/show/womenwhochangedatlanta/neighborhoodunion. The homes in the photographs were in the zone that would later become John Hope Homes.
[38] “Leonard Street Orphan Home and Chadwick Home and School, Scrapbook One,” Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A1043/.
[39] Neighborhood Union secretary, quoted in Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope, Black Southern Reformer (University of Georgia Press, 2004), 73.
[40] “Neighborhood Union Minutes, May 8 - 11, 1934,” 1934, Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.050%3A0158/.
[41]“Neighborhood Union Minutes, May 8 - 11, 1934”; “Agreement of Sale, Atlanta University Housing Project, May 11, 1934,” 1934, John Hope Records, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/auc.020%3A0016/.
[42] Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta, 206.
CITATION
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Cassandra E. Hawkins, “To Burn, Bury, and Beautify: Racial Uplift and The Neighborhood Union’s Remaking of the Urban Fabric,” Atlanta Housing Interplay, ed. Christina E. Crawford, accessed [the date accessed], https://www.atlhousing.org/burn-bury-beautify
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