The history of the Tucker area stretches back almost 200 years. Over that time, the community has had a front row seat to everything from a Civil War to an historic cityhood vote. It also, like most other communities across America, witnessed segregation and discrimination against many of its residents throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
In honor of Black History Month, the City of Tucker Communications Team sat down with several longtime residents who experienced those days, giving them the chance to reflect and share their stories with younger generations. The result is a documentary, Four Streets, which focuses on Tucker’s Peters Park community. The documentary will debut with a special screening at Tucker Recreation Center in February.
In the film, residents talk about how they’ve witnessed their neighborhood change over the last 70 years, in some ways for the better and in some ways not.
“I’ve been here ever since I was born [in] 1947,” recalls Mary Ramey Harper. As she sits in her home on Tucker Industrial Road, she looks out at the businesses that have sprung up around her and remembers the way things used to be. “Across the street it was a pasture. It was nothing but trees and fields all around. I remember the dirt roads…and then they started to pave them.”
“This street was Ramey Road, which is our dad,” Harper’s sister Patricia Ramey Smith remembers. “It was Ramey Road for a long time.”
“Once they started building the factories and building up here, they changed the name,” Harper adds.
Virginia Turks Sharpe was born in the Peters Park community in 1953. The youngest of 10 children, Sharpe shares those same memories of growing up in a close-knit residential neighborhood. She says over the years, she and her neighbors have had to work to preserve the character of the area.
“The goal was eventually for this whole area to be commercial, but we kind of fought against that,” she explains. “We went to DeKalb County and fought against that. So, we stopped that from happening in the community. We tried to preserve the area. Some families were offered money to buy their land, but the majority decided to hold onto what they had…because we value this little area right here.”
Common themes throughout the interviews included the importance of faith and family to the Peters Park community, as well as what the future holds for one of Tucker’s oldest neighborhoods.
Four Streets will be available on the City’s YouTube channel following the February premiere.
