Residents add to Roswell’s Black history

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.