- Law & zoning
- Segregation
- 1916–1917
- City of Atlanta
- Location approximate
The 1916 ordinance and Harden v. City of Atlanta
After the 1913 law fell, the council passed a second segregation ordinance in 1916. Frank Harden, a Black tenant at the corner of Linden and Myrtle streets, was told to leave a 'white block', and the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the law in 1917.
The record
After the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the 1913 ordinance in Carey v. City of Atlanta (1915), Jackson Hill leaders formed a committee that met at Westminster Presbyterian, and the city adopted a new ordinance in 1916 copied from Louisville's (Atlanta Through the Archives). Police notified Frank Harden, a Black man renting a house at the corner of Linden and Myrtle streets, to vacate because the house was in what was known as a 'white block', one where more houses were occupied by white residents than by Black residents. He asked the courts to stop the city from removing him; the trial court refused, and in Harden v. City of Atlanta, 147 Ga. 248 (1917), the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed, upholding the ordinance as a valid use of the police power over Justice Atkinson's dissent. On November 5, 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Buchanan v. Warley that Louisville's ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment, and in 1918 the Georgia Supreme Court declared Atlanta's ordinance invalid in Glover v. City of Atlanta. Atlanta turned next to racial zoning.
Today: Myrtle St NE now stops short of Linden Ave NE, so the corner is gone. The blocks were later reshaped by the Civic Center and Bedford-Pine redevelopment.
Where on the map: Point only; the 1916 ordinance applied block by block citywide.