- Law & zoning
- Segregation
- 1910–1915
- City of Atlanta
- General area only
Jackson Hill and the 1913 segregation ordinance
White homeowners on Jackson Hill drew a racial boundary in 1910 and then pushed Atlanta's first residential segregation ordinance, adopted June 16, 1913. Georgia's Supreme Court struck it down in 1915.
The record
In October 1910 white residents of Jackson Hill, in the lower Fourth Ward, met to mark off a fourteen-block area with a racial boundary line and declared that selling property inside it to Black buyers would be 'a reprehensible and unfriendly act' (Lands). Sales from white to Black owners along Houston Street between Jackson Street and Boulevard had set off the campaign, and nearby Johnson Avenue went from all white to 54 percent Black between 1911 and 1912. Councilman Claude Ashley's ordinance, adopted June 16, 1913 and amended November 3, 1913, barred Black residents from living on blocks occupied by white residents and the reverse, with an exception for domestic servants. In Carey v. City of Atlanta (1915) the Georgia Supreme Court held that it destroyed the right to acquire, use and dispose of property and was unconstitutional.
Today: The blocks are part of the Old Fourth Ward, one block north of Auburn Avenue. Houston Street was renamed John Wesley Dobbs Avenue in 1994.
Where on the map: Jackson Hill: about 14 blocks of the lower Fourth Ward around Houston St (now John Wesley Dobbs Ave) between Jackson St and Boulevard, with Johnson Ave, Irwin St, Hilliard St and nearby streets. The exact 1910 line is not mapped here.