Atlanta Through the Archives

Introduction

The project is an ambitious digital research initiative that archives and presents the discriminatory experiences people of color had to live with at their places, including where current Georgia Tech students reside and study. Specifically, this project looked at urban development as told through the historical archives of The Atlanta Daily World, the oldest African American newspaper in Atlanta.

This website contains individual pieces of data found through our extensive archival review, with additional sources, for context, woven throughout.

We added a unique lens to the historic storytelling of Atlanta's urban development by spatially mapping events from the archives and overlaying them with Atlanta's redlining map, an embodiment of systemic racism, designed and implemented by the government in the 1930s to grade risky neighborhoods for federal mortgage loans based on the race of residents. Redlining has often been cited as having lasting impacts on the disparities we are still facing today. Redlining as a research frame is highly relevant to the higher education goals expressed above, and partnering it with historical archives allows the experiences of the disenfranchised to not be forgotten. Our maps can be found by clicking the "Story Maps" tab above.

Read more about the project on the about page, including our process, the team, and how you can contribute to this project.

Organizations to Support

Decades

Neighborhoods

Major Events in Public Housing

Data Index

*Any additional sources that were used in each data index entry will be cited. If others are not listed, all the information was sourced from our ADW archive research. A sorting feature to identify events by tag will also be implemented soon.