White residents renamed their street to escape a ‘black’ address stigma

Evidence

For these working-class whites along Mozley Place, the first sign of “transition trouble” appeared in 1948. William A. Scott Jr., son of the Atlanta Daily World founder, had returned from overseas service to help his uncle run the paper. For two years, Scott scoured Atlanta for a home but, like many of his fellow veterans, failed to find one in the tight housing market. Therefore, he decided to build one himself, on two lots he had inherited at the corner of Mozley Place and Chappell Road. Although the part of the block along Mozley was completely white, blacks occupied all but two homes on the remainder and owned virtually everything to the east. Nearby whites had apparently accepted this arrangement, though in a less than neighborly manner. When blacks began “taking over” blocks of Hunter Street to the east, for instance, white residents convinced the city to change the name of their part of Hunter to Mozley Drive, so they could avoid the stigma of having a “black” address. The exact dividing line was Chappell Road. Building a home a block below this borderline, at the corner of Chappell and Mozley Place, but still on the “black” side, must have seemed to Scott an uncontroversial extension of earlier expansion. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 149

Categorization

• CANDY: A piquant nugget: whites renamed their street to Hunter-to-Mozley Drive ‘so they could avoid the stigma of having a black address’.
• XREF: Address/name-stigma maneuvering parallels gentrification-era street renaming and the semiotics of place identity. — connects to: Racial architecture shapes neighborhoods and the habitus of their residents — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1846; The same neighborhood is judged good with White residents and bad with Black ones — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 917; White residents who could not remove a black neighbor instead sold and fled — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 150 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Racial architecture shapes neighborhoods and the habitus of their residents #expands (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1846
• Black segregation rose from white avoidance, not black housing preferences #corroborates (0.80)
• Whites abandoned prized public spaces rather than see them integrated #corroborates (0.80) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 433
• The same neighborhood is judged good with White residents and bad with Black ones #exemplifies (0.78) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 917
• Racial architecture helped fabricate the lived spaces that shape residents’ dispositions #expands (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1846
• White residents who could not remove a black neighbor instead sold and fled #complicates (0.75) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 150
• Black people also mask racial difference in white-dominated spaces #corroborates (0.72) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 163