That was the 1950s, when the area south and west of the intersection of Baxter Street and Finley Street was a predominantly Black neighborhood called Linnentown.
That changed in the early 1960s, when the University of Georgia and the city of Athens looked at Linnentown and saw space to add dormitories for the growing university.
What followed was a textbook example of the sorts of mid-20th century infrastructure projects called, somewhat euphemistically, urban renewal.
In neighborhoods outside white power structures, urban renewal led to economic loss. But now Linnentown residents and their descendants have won recognition and, in a first for any Georgia community, a promise of reparations for what they endured when the neighborhood was erased.
Before the college students, Thomas Whitehead said, the people who called Linnentown home held jobs as brick masons, janitors or nurses.
“All working people," she said, "but hard-working people for meager wages. Eight to 10 dollars a week.”
Thomas Whitehead said Linnentown was also a majority Black neighborhood where over half the residents owned their homes. Regardless, to get the ball rolling on the new dormitories, Thomas Whitehead said the city labeled the area a “slum.”
“But you got to remember that most of the people in this area, it took them years to accumulate enough money to get to be homeowners,” Thomas Whitehead said. “It took them years.”
The city used eminent domain to first acquire and then demolish those homes. When residents were paid for their loss, records suggest they only got about a third of market value. And Thomas Whitehead said the city would use the vacant homes to send unmistakable messages to the families left behind that it was time to move out.
“In some instances, they had the heavy equipment started up at 12 o'clock at night,” she said.
Once the bulldozers were rumbling in the dead of night, Thomas Whitehead said, they would push in the vacant homes. Or the fire department would burn the homes down, she said.
All of which, she said, was terrifying.
Thomas Whitehead's father was one of those homeowners who had saved for years, in this case to get the family out of their rented shotgun house in Linnentown into something they could call their own. But that second house was also in the urban renewal zone, up on Peabody Street. It, too, was lost to eminent domain.
