Here's why historians say some Atlanta streets have 2 names

If you've driven around Atlanta and noticed street names changing, you're not alone.

Local historians say some of those street name changes may have been rooted in racial discrimination.

Take Whitefoord Avenue in Southeast Atlanta.

According to Paul Crater, the Atlanta History Center's vice president of Collections and Research Services, part of the street's name was changed in the 1960s to Memorial Terrace.

"In the past, white citizens of the city decided through official channels to change the name of the street because they did not want their neighborhoods to be associated with African Americans who were moving in areas close to them," Crater said.

Crater said some of the first signs of racial discrimination in housing came in 1913.

That was the year Atlanta City Councilmember Claude Ashley tried to segregate residential areas by race.

"The Ashley Ordinance was meant to ensure that city blocks would be segregated," Crater said.

A couple of years later, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled the ordinance was unconstitutional.

"That was the first attempt to codify segregation," Crater said. "But oftentimes White people would take matters into their own hands to ensure that their spaces were not associated with African-Americans who were seeking housing."

And yet, the reasons weren't always so obvious.

"What you see often in the documents and in official documents is no real explanation given," Crater said. "That doesn't mean that there aren't examples - that there could be examples, in newspapers and in other documentation that illustrate that this, that they were being very explicit about their reasons for wanting to change street names.  I don't doubt that those things exist. I can only point to some of the documents that we have that certainly imply that the reasons for these street name changes were because of racial discrimination on the part of White people."

APEX Museum President and CEO Dan Moore Jr. said these things would happen often.

"If you had individuals that were White in that area that may not want to be associated with those individuals, they would often go to the city council and petition that the name can be changed," Moore said.

However, Moore also points out that some streets in Atlanta have been renamed to honor civil rights leaders and other prominent people.

"If you're looking at street names now, you ought to understand who those people are. Joseph E. Boone, Lowery, Donald Lee Hollowell, those are street names that mean something," Moore said.

Moore believes education and conversations about the past will help Atlanta move forward.

"Our focus is to tell you the story about the human experience so that you don't feel that you're separated from something," Moore said. "In other words, you need to be a part of this."