Meeting recounts time in segregated Roswell

By AMBER PERRY amber@appenmedia.com

ROSWELL, Ga. — Sandra Taylor remembers taking the bus with her mom in the 1950s from Roswell to Atlanta to shop. She would go down the aisle, notice empty seats on the bus and ask her mother if they could sit there.

“She would say, ‘Hush’ and just squeeze my hand and drag me to the back of the bus,” Taylor said.

Taylor and Charles Grogan, Roswell’s Black historian, added details to Roswell’s Black history that original documents couldn’t offer during a Feb. 2 presentation led by Roswell Historical Society Archivist Elaine DeNiro.

While no longer residents, Taylor and Grogan gave the packed audience in a Roswell Public Library conference room intertwining first-hand accounts of what it was like to grow up Black in a racially segregated city.

In “Black History: Honoring Our Past,” DeNiro described ledgers, news articles and photographs – some that included Taylor, Grogan, their family members and even some audience members, who would then bolster the history with their own experiences, or the experience of those that came before them, gathered from oral tradition.

Around the room, some uttered, “... Not much different than today.”

Pleasant Hill Baptist Church

DeNiro began the account with the

Cherokee Nation, which owned slaves based on an 1833 census. She followed up with the history of Roswell’s founding families, who reintroduced slaves to the area from the coast.

The enslaved were given land in 1855, DeNiro said, to establish a place of worship — Pleasant Hill Baptist Church. Grogan remembered visiting with his uncle, whose parents were buried there. According to the cemetery’s description, the congregation dates to 1847.

In 1922, land was purchased where the current church building sits. The Rev. Joshua Grogan headed the church at the time, but years later, he baptized Taylor when she was 9. The reverend was her cousin.

“I remember him telling me to close my eyes, to hold my breath, that ‘I’ll take care of you,’” Taylor said.

Grogan and Taylor recalled segregated movie theaters. The Roswell theater was off limits, so Taylor went to the one in Marietta, but upstairs. The bottom floor was reserved for Whites only.

“I don’t think they ever cleaned upstairs,” Taylor said. “You would step on popcorn boxes and sticky soda on the floor.”

Grogan went to the theater in Alpharetta, also confined to the upstairs space. He worked as a cleaner at the Roswell theater, but he couldn’t attend a show.

See ROSWELL, Page 20