Walk along Foundry Street today and the future home of the Center for Racial Justice and Black Futures (CRJBF) still looks like an empty retail space. There are no exhibits or interactive displays, and construction has not begun. But the space sits at a historical and cultural crossroads, where a story nearly erased from Athens’ history helped fuel a movement that would result in the first act of reparations in the state of Georgia.
The Center, located on the ground floor of the Classic Center, facing Foundry Street, and scheduled for a phased opening beginning in December, grew out of the campaign to seek recognition and redress for the descendants of Linnentown, the self-sustaining, vibrant Black community near the University of Georgia’s campus that was erased by urban renewal in the 1960s.
Finding Linnentown
In 2019, UGA graduate student Joey Carter began doing research for the United Campus Workers of Georgia on how wage suppression and high rent prices in Athens relate to each other. This led him to the UGA Special Collections Libraries where he found a “treasure trove” of documents relating to urban renewal, and in particular, to the neighborhood of Linnentown.
Out of that research, he connected with Athens native, former resident and Linnentown first descendant Hattie Thomas Whitehead who pulled together other former residents, descendants, graduate students and researchers to form the Linnentown Project in 2019. Their goal to raise awareness of how the city of Athens, the University of Georgia and the federal government destroyed the neighborhood to expand UGA’s campus — later building parking lots and the high-rise dormitories Brumby, Creswell and Russell – culminated in “7 Key Demands,” including reparations, a wall of recognition, a formal apology, participatory budgeting powers and a “local center on slavery, race, and racial justice.”.
Remembering Linnentown
Whitehead, who was born and spent part of her childhood in Linnentown, witnessed firsthand the destruction of the roughly 22-acre neighborhood south of Baxter Street, where “eminent domain” meant workers arriving with nighttime bulldozers and setting vacant homes ablaze, according to former residents. (Whitehead identifies herself as a “first descendant,” a term the project uses for the children of Linnentown property owners.)
In 2020, Whitehead had just retired from a management career and threw herself into the fight for recognition and redress. She eventually wrote her memoir, “Giving Voice to Linnentown,” which detailed her upbringing there. Her parents had worked hard to purchase their home on Peabody Street, and she and her six siblings had a good life, despite living under the yoke of segregation. That all changed for the Thomases and the 50 Black families forced to relocate in the name of “progress.”
In her book, Whitehead describes the devastation her family and other residents faced when they were forced out of their homes. The Thomases had little choice but to move into public housing, her parents separated and the family never owned a home again. “I wrote the book because I didn’t want that part of history to get lost,” she says. “So, I took that year to just write while still advocating for getting the resolution passed.”
The resolution, which was developed in 2020 and passed by the Athens-Clarke County Board of Commissioners in 2021, formally acknowledged and apologized for the city of Athens’ collaboration with the University System of Georgia in Linnentown’s erasure.
From Apology to Redress
Getting to that point was not easy. Athens-Clarke County Mayor Kelly Girtz first learned of Linnentown “in miniature” when he was teaching eighth-grade social studies at W.R. Coile Middle School in the early 2000s. Fast forward and he found himself convening the Athens Justice and Memory Project, made up of commissioners, former Linnentown residents, researchers and graduate students, to find ways to undo some of the economic damage done to people in Linnentown and their livelihoods. There were some stumbling blocks, Girtz and Whitehead say, primarily around naming the harm as “terrorism” and “white supremacy.”
“As is often the case with advocacy interests, there was a great fervor in the room and certainly some level of friction,” says Girtz, who was elected to his first term in 2019. “What I’ve come to learn over time is that you have to just hang on, even through tense periods of time, because everyone is going to learn something and learn where people are coming from.”
According to Girtz, the advocates wanted the resolution passed in the words of the survivors, but the task was making the language more comfortable for some commissioners.
“It took the county commission some time to understand just the facts of the history,” Girtz says.
To move the resolution forward, Whitehead and other members of the committee worked to find a compromise, which meant keeping the word “terrorism” but replacing “white supremacy” with “white racism.”
Another issue was that county officials interpreted the Georgia Constitution’s gratuities clause as preventing direct payments to individuals or families. Researchers estimated that Black property owners had lost approximately $5 million in present-day value compared with the compensation paid to white property owners. With the University System of Georgia declining to participate in the redress effort, Athens-Clarke County committed $2.5 million to remedies that would benefit the community. Of that amount, $1.25 million was designated for the Center, with the remainder supporting down-payment assistance and home repairs for Athens residents.
Researchers have spent the past several months gathering materials for the Center’s exhibits, including a stand-alone display devoted to Linnentown. Plans also include a bookstore, a meeting space for truth-telling sessions and exhibits designed to “illuminate, ignite and inspire” visitors through the history of Black Athens. Whitehead also envisions the Center as a nonprofit hub, particularly for those organizations serving young people.
Finding a Home
Classic Center Executive Director Paul Cramer first heard about Linnentown at commission meetings while working toward the development of Akins Ford Arena. He says he wanted to learn more, so his assistant set up a meeting with Whitehead, who carried him a copy of her book, and left him with a plea: “‘Paul, just read it, and I’ll be back in about a month,’” Whitehead says.
Cramer found an unexpected connection in the book. Tanyard Creek, where Linnentown’s children often played, reminded him of growing up near Stone Quarry Creek in upstate New York, where he and his siblings played. The similarities helped him see “a lot more ways that we were closely related than we were further apart,” Cramer says. That connection encouraged him to get to know Whitehead and become involved in the project.
Whitehead made another ask at the second meeting with Cramer a month later. She proposed locating the history center on the Classic Center campus. The location carried additional historical significance, as the campus occupies part of the area once known as The Bottom, another Black and working-class neighborhood also razed by urban renewal. Cramer presented the Classic Center Authority with the idea of leasing the Center a ground-floor retail space that had been vacant since the pandemic. The board unanimously approved.
To raise money for operating funds in 2024, Cramer’s staff and Whitehead collaborated to produce a musical based on her memoir in the Classic Center Theatre. “Linnentown: The Musical,” drew more than 3,500 people across several performances in 2024. A second run in 2025 drew more awareness to the effects of urban renewal.
At the county’s request, the Classic Center is overseeing the project, Cramer says. Warner Museums, a Birmingham-based museum design-build firm, was selected to design, build and install the Center’s interior spaces and exhibits.
Cramer says the Center, which will be located across from one of the main entrances to Akins Ford Arena, is a great fit for the campus, particularly when paired with the university’s Georgia Music Collection, which the arena houses. The partnership fulfills the Classic Center Authority’s mission to enhance the quality of life in Athens-Clarke County and serve as a cultural, civic and social center, says Cramer, who has been with the Classic Center for nearly 32 years. Cramer says the Center will provide local residents with historical context while giving visitors “a richer understanding of who we are as a community.”
For Athens to improve, Girtz says, it must understand and publicly acknowledge its full history. As he approaches the end of this final year in office, Girtz said he views the Center as part of the city’s legacy—not his own.
“It’s Athens maturing and becoming more conscious of its multifaceted nature,” Girtz says. “The Center helps us tell a more complete story about Athens.”
Both men have received awards for their leadership. Cramer was selected as Georgia Trend Magazine’s 2025 Most Respected Leader and Girtz was inducted into the Georgia Municipal Association’s Municipal Government Hall of Fame in June.
Remember the past to build the future
For Whitehead, the Center represents more than the culmination of years of advocacy. It is a way to preserve stories that displacement nearly erased and to use them to help shape what Athens can become.
She believes her parents and other family members who lived through Linnentown’s destruction would support her work “giving voice to what happened decades ago”—not only in Athens, but as part of a broader national history of Black communities destroyed by urban renewal.
For now, the Foundry Street storefront remains unfinished. But the history it will hold has already moved from memory into a book and a musical, from a book into public policy and from public policy toward a permanent place in Athens.
When the doors open, Whitehead says she hopes visitors will leave with a fuller understanding of Black life in Athens—not only what the Black community endured, but what they built and contributed.
“We’re going to start with African American history and then build out,” she says. “A lot of that history has gotten lost, and we’re trying to retrieve as much as we possibly can.”
What the Linnentown Resolution Has Meant for Affordable Housing
The Linnentown Resolution’s impact cannot only be counted in dollars, but also measured in new roofs, windows, accessible bathrooms—and families able to remain in or purchase homes in Athens. Athens-Clarke County government officials determined that the state’s gratuities clause prohibited from making direct payments to the descendants of Linnentown homeowners. Instead, of the $2.5 million in ARPA funding allocated for Linnentown Redress, $1.25 million went toward building the Center for Racial Justice and Black Futures; the Justice and Memory Team allocated the other half to affordable housing initiatives.
Two new programs received funding. One of the programs, the Historic Athens Equitable Home Preservation (EHP) Initiative aims to show that historic preservation can be effective in preserving affordable housing and preventing community displacement, according to the initiative’s impact report. Athens-Clarke County awarded $531,000 to Historic Athens for home repairs and improvements. Taneisha Brooks, the organization’s preservation impact director, says that 12 homes were originally projected to be repaired, but with additional support, 15 homes are projected to be completed by the end of the year, which is 125 percent of their goal. The 13th project is currently underway.
But preserving existing housing is only one part of the housing problem Athens faces. Another program that came out of the Linnentown Resolution helps residents become homeowners.
Athens-Clarke County awarded First American Bank and Trust $718,000 to start the HOME (Helping Overcome Mortgage Encumbrance) Program to assist low- to moderate-income residents in becoming homeowners by offering a 0 percent interest revolving loan of up to $25,000. As of Sept. 9, 29 people have submitted applications, and 22 households have been approved for down payment assistance. Jeff Bishop, the mortgage division director at First American, says that $468,300 has been distributed, with the remaining funds to be allocated to a pipeline of homebuyers by the Dec. 31 deadline, assuming buyers qualify.
“Down payment assistance is very helpful. It saves people dollars and cents,” Bishop says. “It’s frustrating to see that down payment assistance doesn’t overcome the larger problem, which is cost.” Kimberly Davis
Kimberly Davis is an Athens native and serves on the board of the Center for Racial Justice and Black Futures.
