Category Archives: Peoplestown Project Blog
A person’s hand print (part 2)
Then, for maybe two or three Saturdays, I would stand out on the street and anyone who would walk by, I’d say, “Would you help me paint this wall? You can have this square.” All the squares were already painted, [but] I said, “what color square would you like to have?” They’d say, “Oh I like the blue one.” And I’d say, “Well, what color would you like your hand?” Read more
A person’s hand print (part 1)
Columbus Ward was the one that said, “That bus stop out there, that wall is atrocious.” Well, he didn’t use the word atrocious, but he said it’s really awful—something needs to be done to help clean that up. Read more
Eva Spratling, Jimmy Spratling, and Teresa Williams
In August 1973, three Peoplestown children drowned while swimming off the coast of Mississippi. Eva Spratling, Jimmy Spratling, and Teresa Williams had been on a trip to New Orleans with Emmaus House to observe the court proceedings related to one of the many school desegregation cases of the period. Read more
Emmaus House News
The Emmaus House News reveals the range of activities undertaken at Emmaus House in the 1970s and 1980s. Read more
Muriel Lokey Papers
Selections from the Muriel Lokey Papers, including the Poor Peoples Newspaper and Poverty Rights Office materials, are provided courtesy of Atlanta History Center. Read more
David Morath Papers
David Morath worked on staff at Emmaus House from September 1970 until August 1972. The letters in this collection — from David to his parents in Westminster, Maryland — were saved by his mother. Rich with descriptions of neighborhood conditions, welfare rights meetings, and staff activities, the Morath letters provide a glimpse in to the day-to-day experience of working for social change in the urban South. Read more
The History of The Peoplestown Project
We are particularly interested in the “storied” experience of Peoplestown and its community-based organizations. We know that stories help bind many people to this place and to each other. Stories are told and re-told, creating a local lore that links people over time and space. We’ve already heard many: the strength and tenacity of a welfare rights leader, vans breaking down at Zesto’s, sleep-ins at the Model Cities offices, singing hymns in the visitor gallery during a General Assembly session. Read more
Photographer Boyd Lewis
The Peoplestown Project website features the photography of Atlanta journalist Boyd Lewis in its banner. The photos shown here — of Peoplestown, its activists, and the neighborhood’s families — were taken while Lewis worked for the black newspapers, The Atlanta Voice and the Atlanta Inquirer in the 1960s and 1970s. Read more
MyPLACE
From June to December 2010, the MyPLACE segment of The Peoplestown Project worked with neighborhood middle grades and high school students to use visual and performing arts to explore overlapping themes of self, community, and civic life. At Emmaus Houses’s Summer Arts Camp, then-KSU graduate student Gwendelyn Ballew worked with artist-campers to create and perform stories relevant to and reflective of their lives. With Assistant Professor of English Jennifer Dail, the artist-campers crafted personal narratives using digital story techniques. And with photographer Mary Stuart Hall, the artist-campers studied composition and used digital photography to document and interpret personally-significant places. Read more
How many green stamps does it take Ginny Tuttle to buy a bus?
And Ginny Tuttle—her father was Judge Tuttle in Atlanta—was a volunteer who collected 3,000 books of green stamps so we could buy a bus. We bought one of those big Bluebird yellow new buses. One of the first trips the bus took was to Reidsville Prison. Read more
