The Peyton Wall: A Lesson in Barriers

On December 19, 1962, the mayor of Atlanta built a wall.

He didn’t build it himself, of course. He had it erected by city construction crews. And it wasn’t exactly a wall. Rather, it was more of a barrier — wooden boards stretched across a road, bolted to I-beams sunk deep into the pavement. Not so troublesome to scramble over, but impossible to drive past. He built two of them on the edges of southwest Atlanta, blocking access down Harlan and Peyton Roads. 

Ivan Allen Jr. had taken office almost a year earlier. In a later interview, he would remark, “By the time I got into the mayor's office, I became convinced that there wasn't a single decision ever made in the South that wasn't warped or misused some way or the other on account of the race issue.” At the top of his mind might have been the fraught desegregation of Atlanta’s public schools, a dominant news story during his campaign. He was an advocate for school integration, saying of Atlanta’s future, “We must break down the barriers” — in contrast to his opponent, Lester Maddox, one of the most infamous segregationists in the country.

Allen built barriers nonetheless. In 1962 Harlan and Peyton roads ran southward from an east-west artery to an all-white neighborhood, Peyton Forest. The surrounding area had been transitioning rapidly from white to African American during the previous decade, and the white residents of Peyton Forest were nervous that their streets would do the same. To stop the residential mixing of races — fearing Black buyers and white flight — Allen himself became “warped on account of the race issue.” And so he had barriers erected on the fault line between the two neighborhoods: “Road Closed” signs made of concrete and steel signaling to Black Atlantans precisely where they were and were not wanted.

It might not have been a wall, but it worked well enough.

~~~

Just a few miles away, I teach math at Mays High School, working with students who live near the intersection of Harlan and Peyton. Today, just as Allen suspected, the neighborhood and school is all-but-completely Black.

For several decades, Peyton Forest and the surrounding area served as a bastion of the African American middle class — Andrew Young, John Lewis, and Hank Aaron were among the many luminaries to call it home. In recent years, however, the neighborhoods have suffered from unkind economics, and these days, more than 95 percent of Mays students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches under federal poverty guidelines. Black families worked hard to get into Peyton Forest, pushing out from an overcrowded city center, seeking a better life. Now white flight, income inequality, and the uneven expansion of Atlanta have left many of them behind.

Neighborhoods in poverty typically house schools saddled by high transience, low test scores, overworked parents, and inexperienced teachers. Mays is no exception; we have spent most of my career under the looming threat of state takeover. Every year, I watch teenagers struggle to balance their responsibilities against these obstacles, many of them attending to schoolwork even as they care for younger siblings or work to help make rent. They are distracted, exhausted, and see little evidence around them that education will help them manage the necessities of their day-to-day lives.

~~~

I was headed home last year, down a long road flanked on both sides by low-income apartment complexes, when I saw one of my former students. I had taught Ericka her sophomore, junior, and senior years; she had been one of my favorites. Funny, studious, smart, she was easy to teach in an environment that often proves difficult for students and teachers alike. I hadn’t seen her since she graduated almost a year before, so I stopped to chat. She was waiting for a bus, headed to work.

“And where did you end up going to school?” I asked. College is not a given for Mays alumni; many of my seniors begin working full-time, even prior to graduation. But Ericka had been a driven student — I was certain she was taking classes somewhere even as she held down a job to pay for them.

“Nowhere,” she replied, glancing away. This surprised me. She explained that something had gone awry with her paperwork at the end of senior year and the money never came through for her to attend college downstate. She had spent all of fall semester trying to navigate the system alone, finally applying to a different school in town. Something was amiss with her online application, however, and she couldn’t get anyone in admissions to return her calls. The deadline passed for spring semester, and now she worried about not being enrolled by the start of summer.

I could tell that the thought of going to campus and taking on the bureaucracy by herself was paralyzing — an action that would also cost her a day’s pay — so I told her to email me, thinking we could get her old counselor involved. It wasn’t technically our job, but Ericka was both talented and eager; it felt like we needed to help however we could. After making sure she still had my email address, I headed home, wondering whether I could actually make good on my offer to assist.

I have taught at Mays for 14 years, long past the shooting-star arc of the typical white savior. I have wrestled with this demon, of course — how could I not? I am a white person raised in the Deep South, a middle class kid who ran through neighborhoods and schools separated by de facto segregation; I started my work as a high school teacher all-but completely unprepared to interact with Black people. I thought I was doing "good work," helping out on the "wrong side of town."

Teachers with this attitude don't last long: either they burnout and quit or they learn how to work alongside students and schools rather than try to fix them. I wasn't trying to save Ericka from anything here — I just knew that sometimes the school’s job isn’t quite finished at graduation.

~~~

The Peyton Wall stayed up for 72 days. A judge declared it unconstitutional in March of 1963, probably much to the relief of Mayor Allen, who had been pilloried in the national press for his ad hoc efforts at apartheid. The optics alone were brutal, but, to make matters worse for Allen, as the case was moving through the courts, citizens on both sides took action. One night, black residents of the neighborhood ripped down the barriers and discarded them in a creek; the next day, white residents rebuilt them out of trees and rocks. After this line of defense was burned to the ground, Allen sent construction crews to install new concrete and steel. That night Atlanta Klansmen geared up in their robes to maintain watch on the scorched road. In a move instantiating a century of white fragility, they carried signs proclaiming: “Whites Have Rights, Too.”

After just 10 weeks of political and domestic pressure, the city of Atlanta lost the lawsuit filed against it, and a judge ordered the walls removed. Mayor Allen announced there would be no appeal, and 20 minutes later the barricades were gone; the demolition crew must have been on standby. Allen may have hoped his misguided efforts at racial détente would signal to his white constituents that he had their interests at heart, but within a month half the neighborhood had their houses on the market. Each home was listed with a black broker, thereby ensuring a black buyer. Allen had failed: White flight had begun.

 ~~~

A few days after seeing Ericka I got a call to our school’s office. Classes hadn’t started yet, and so I weaved through hallways filled with socializing students as I made my way to the front of the building. Expecting to find a concerned parent, I was surprised to run into Ericka standing in the lobby, rocking from foot to foot as she scanned the crowd. A year ago, she was just another teenager in the crowd; today, she was a young woman cautiously navigating adulthood. She looked out of place.

She stepped into my path. 

“Mr. Wamsted, can you print something for me?” Realizing that she was the one who called me to the front, I said sure, and we headed back to my room. She explained that she had a job interview in a few minutes and needed copies of her resume. Walking down the hall, I overheard her take a phone call and say she had only 20 minutes to get her potential employer. I hoped she wasn’t planning on the bus this morning.

She fidgeted as I connected my computer to the printer. We had been emailing about her school situation — me trying to find out all the facts, her sending me screenshots from her application — but so far, I had not gotten a handle on the problem and thus had not yet gone to the counselor. She wasn’t interested in college today, however. I tried to pose a follow-up question, but as soon as the resumes printed she took off out the door, promising to let me know how the interview went.

I glanced at the clock. It seemed all but impossible she would be on time; going out of her way to come to Mays had been a hit on her day. But it was unlikely she had a computer at home; clearly, she had no working printer. With the closest FedEx Office store 10 miles away, what else was she supposed to do — ask someone at her current workplace for a favor in trying to find a new job? Feeling anxious and helpless, I went back to her emails in search of something I could do.

~~~

A year and a half after the Peyton Wall came down, Ivan Allen did an honorable thing: At the request of the Kennedy administration he flew to Washington, D.C., to testify about the urgent need for the Civil Rights Act. He was the only elected official from the South to do so. Historian Kevin Kruse writes that Allen “was sure that supporting it publicly would end his political career.” Perhaps the mayor felt he had no choice but to advocate for the Bill — business interests in Atlanta depended on a tenuous, multiracial coalition, and the sit-in movement was wreaking havoc on the local economy. Picturing Allen in that committee meeting, however, I like to imagine that as he stumbled his way toward a solution to Jim Crow, he was remembering his failure with the Peyton Wall.

Allen won reelection despite his support for civil rights, but several years later, a statewide backlash determined the race for Georgia’s governor. In the days immediately following the law’s passage, Allen’s old mayoral opponent, local restaurateur Lester Maddox, refused to integrate his place of business, instead chasing out African American patrons at the barrel of a pistol. After losing his lawsuit against the federal government — one of the very first legal challenges to the Civil Rights Act — Maddox sought revenge through a quixotic, openly racist campaign for governor. He lost the popular vote but won the governorship when a technicality kicked the election to the largely rural General Assembly. Most legislators saw no need to negotiate within a multiracial coalition like Atlanta’s, and they eagerly supported the segregationist. 

Ivan Allen belatedly tried to make good on his promise to break down Atlanta’s barriers, and in the process, he helped an openly racist businessman walk into the governor’s mansion.

~~~

After seeing Ericka the day of her interview, I decided to skip our counselor and write an email to her contact at the local college. I pulled out all the stops in formality and tone, upping my language and even putting lines in the signature for both my master’s degree and Ph.D. Normally, I keep these pedigrees on a need-to-know basis, but it felt like Ericka’s contact might need to know that, on paper at least, I was somebody at Mays High.

In sharp contrast to Ericka’s experience, I heard back pretty quickly: She was accepted and would start in the summer. It was good news, if not unexpected; she should have been accepted long before. But now the process could go forward — she could start the long work of getting her finances together, apply for grants and scholarships with confidence that the money had a destination. There was much still to be done, but that old adage about the journey of a thousand miles is entirely appropriate. The first step was a big win for her.

~~~

In April 1968, toward the end of Ivan Allen’s final term as mayor, native son Martin Luther King Jr. was buried in Atlanta. Governor Maddox, who had once called the Rev. Dr. King “an enemy of our country,” did not attend the funeral; rather, he hid out in the Capitol, separating himself from the cortège with close to 200 armed guards. Atlanta elder Benjamin E. Mays — longtime president of Morehouse and mentor to King — gave the eulogy, admonishing a nation fractured by race. He urged his listeners to look past King’s assassin and into their own thoughts and actions, saying, “We, too, are guilty of murder. It is time for the American people to repent and make democracy equally applicable to all Americans.” Mays had moved recently to the Peyton Forest area, and it is tempting to read between the lines of his address: In Atlanta, the burdens of democracy are elided with the gritty history of things like the Peyton Wall.

The triumph of the Civil Rights Act notwithstanding, by 1970 white residents had almost entirely abandoned the Peyton Forest neighborhood. The government could legislate certain things, but it lacked the power to tell people where to live. Mays, now struggling with school integration as the first African American head of the Atlanta School Board, put it this way, “I just don't know what you can do to keep white folks from being scared if you move into their neighborhood.”

A decade later, the all-black high school that bears his name would open its doors. Thirty-five years after that, off one of its back hallways, I would teach math to Ericka in room 2308.

~~~

What was an unmitigated victory for Ericka felt more equivocal to me. I was pleased to have helped, but troubled the system responded to the two of us in such a biased manner. We wrestle ghosts in southwest Atlanta, ghosts of slavery and Jim Crow that haunt our streets in ways both obvious and subtle. This instance felt more slippery even than most, a wisp of a ghost: An intelligent young woman struggles to get into college not because of explicit racism or any lack of qualifications, but seemingly only because she lacks time, money, and institutional savvy. And yet I cannot help but wonder what her experience navigating these troubled waters would have been like had she been white. It is almost certain that were she white she would not live anywhere near Mays High.

Sixty years ago, the walls in her way were solid and heavy; now they are abstract and structural. They are equally real, however, these ghosts of our racist history that trouble Ericka’s story. The complicated legacy of Atlanta contributes to her uncertain future — Ivan Allen and Lester Maddox still playing out their campaigns to dictate her opportunities. There are so many walls in her way, and she has so far to go.

She did, however, get that job. I heard from her a week or so after the college acceptance — better pay, better hours, easier to work around school.

One less “Road Closed” sign blocks her way past the new Peyton Wall.

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