ATLANTA — The spacious ranch and split-level homes with manicured lawns spreading for block after block in northwest Atlanta’s Collier Heights were the picture of midcentury American suburbia. The black families who moved into them were not.
Built at the end of the Jim Crow era, Collier Heights stood as a testament to Atlanta’s black elite and powerful, home to civil-rights leaders, educators, lawyers and entrepreneurs. Today, supporters of the neighborhood are vying to put the first major black suburb built after World War II on the National Register of Historic Places.
“It was one of the first in the country created by and for African Americans,” said Richard Laub, a preservationist at Georgia State University. “The African-American community was flexing [its] muscles.”