Westview Neighborhood Guide

The 50s and 60s saw Westview as a predominantly white neighborhood, shaped as it was by attempts to maintain a color line through urban development schemes, such as the creation of I-20 during the mid-1960s. However, local universities (close to Westview), primarily those that form the Atlanta University Center Consortium or AUC, such as Clark, Spelman, and Morehouse, all hosted young activists that participated in the civil rights movement. Student organizations like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and African-American civil rights organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had offices in the greater West End. Resident Patricia Perdew, a veteran of the civil rights movement, recalls her involvement in Atlanta-based civil rights activities. Janice Sikes Rogers, a historian of the West End, specifically, and local activist, also elaborates on her historical knowledge of the AUC Consortium and key figures involved with these Atlanta universities.

After legal segregation was ended, Westview experienced what many urban neighborhoods at the time experienced: a rapid racial change known as “white flight.” This means that as segregation was dismantled, white residents responded by leaving the neighborhood and moving to the suburbs, and for the first time African Americans were allowed to buy homes in the area. In oral history interviews with residents like Nelly Harmon, who moved into Westview in the early 1970s, you can hear how entire streets were left vacant by white families leaving the metropolitan suburbs and moving out of the Atlanta area. Nelly recalls ‘moving days’—where white families vacated entire streets all in the span of a few weeks. Mary Elizabeth Dukes speaks to the experience of newly arriving black families in the 1970s, describing the relationships she forged along the way with her neighbors in a post-segregation Westview. By 1969, Westview had transitioned and was a predominantly black neighborhood.