It all started with a letter. Not an email or a note — a letter. As Gene Kansas, an Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts alum and preservationist recalls, it began:
“Dear Gene: This is from Jacqueline Jones Royster, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. It’s also from Jackie, the little girl who spent her summers in Sweet Auburn. From both of us, I want to thank you.”
Kansas, then a graduate student in the Ivan Allen College’s Digital Media master’s program, was gathering stories from Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn Historic District, the historic Atlanta neighborhood that was once a significant Black-owned business and cultural district and remains the site of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. preached. King’s birth home, now part of a national historical park, is also in Sweet Auburn.
As a developer focused on historical and cultural preservation, Kansas was also championing the district’s endangered historic spaces. His projects to date include the historic preservation of the Atlanta Daily World Building and the Southern School Book Building.
The letter from Royster, then dean of the Ivan Allen College, encouraged Kansas as he began to write a book about Sweet Auburn, and the two embarked on an eight-year collaboration that culminated in the release of Civil Sights in February 2025. Royster wrote the afterword and is also credited as the book’s cultural editor.
The Georgia Tech connections in the book’s credits also include Molly Slavin, a former Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, who created the classroom curriculum that accompanies the book’s content. The book’s evocative illustrations are by architect and artist Clay Kiningham, who was a student when he and Kansas began collaborating and now teaches in the Georgia Tech School of Architecture.
Historic and Cultural Preservation
Kansas, who also serves on the Ivan Allen College advisory board, said that preserving a building doesn’t just mean restoring its structure. It also means finding a contemporary purpose for the building that’s aligned with its historic past.
“In historic preservation, buildings need to support a contemporary program — without it, you’re just preserving a relic,” said Kansas. “The building needs a way to support itself monetarily, or it could fail, and that failure would resonate in the market.”
Kansas’ company renovated the Southern School Book Building at 135 Auburn Avenue, where John Lewis had an office in 1963 as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It now houses a culturally based workspace and events venue Kansas founded in 2018.
According to Kansas, this kind of restoration brings historic places into everyday use, where their stories can make a difference in our lives and in the lives of others.
“If we go into a built environment fully aware of its history and the ideals it represents, not only do we know where we came from, we also know where we are — and where we’re going,” he said. “That’s critically important during this time when civil and human rights for all remains of the utmost importance.”
A Rich History
The Sweet Auburn Historic District, situated around a mile-and-a-half stretch of Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, is home to large swaths of the history, heritage, and legacy of the Civil Rights movement.
King was born in a two-story house at 501 Auburn Avenue and grew up in Sweet Auburn. His father and grandfather were pastors at the Ebenezer Baptist Church down the street, as was King. The district’s many buildings and streets remember the steps and voices of Civil Rights giants such as John Lewis, Alonzo Herndon, Ella Baker, Roslyn Pope, and many others.
Kansas’ Civil Sights tells a story of Sweet Auburn through the histories of the people and places where both its monumental and everyday heroes and heroines lived, worked, and went to school.
An Uncertain Future
The storied past of Sweet Auburn may not be enough to protect it as Atlanta continues to grow around it, said Kansas.
“Sweet Auburn earned its designation as a National Historic Landmark District in 1976, but since then, nearly half of its historic structures have been lost,” Kansas explained. “Through Civil Sights, we hoped to illuminate not just the extraordinary civil rights history woven into this neighborhood’s streets, but also to underscore the urgent need to protect these irreplaceable places."
