Ken Burns documentary about The Projects airing on pbs

[get these nets]

airs this week on pbs
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New doc chronicles the downfall, communal resolve of Atlanta’s notorious ‘Little Vietnam’

PBS documentary “East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story” was produced by Ken Burns and made by his daughter, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon

Mar 24, 2020,

An aerial of the East Lake Meadows housing project, circa 1996.
Tim Huber; photography courtesy of PBS
FreshlyFreshly married at age 17 with two children, Atlanta native Aseelah Muhammad was struggling to find full-time work in the early 1990s when she and her husband qualified for public housing assistance. The family was given two choices: Bankhead Courts or East Lake Meadows. Muhammad knew the latter’s reputation, but she often attended a prayer service across the street, so choosing East Lake made her feel safer.

On the day Muhammad’s family moved in—not more than four hours after they’d unpacked—a man was murdered during a dice game just beneath the steps leading to her second-floor apartment.

“My girls wanted to put the stuff back in the trunk and go find some other place to live,” Muhammad, 53, recalled in a recent interview with Curbed Atlanta. “I had to explain to them, ‘This is it. We don’t have another place. We don’t have the means.’ It was hard to get them to understand that, they were so young.”



Now retired from a long career as a senior claims auditor with Kaiser Permanente, Muhammad eventually uprooted her family to Gwinnett County—but not before participating in the community-led demise of East Lake Meadows in the mid-1990s, the public housing complex so violent it’s still referred to as “Little Vietnam.”

Alongside academics, government officials, and journalists, Muhammad joins many former neighbors in recounting both the horrors and resilient, communal bonds that were forged during trying circumstances in a new PBS documentary that debuted Tuesday, East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story.

With an hour-and-45-minute running time, the Ken Burns-produced documentary offers an unflinching, moving, and in-depth retelling of how racism played a role in the creation of East Lake Meadows and living conditions that quickly became deplorable. Burns’s daughter, Sarah Burns, and her husband David McMahon (The Central Park Five, Jackie Robinson) directed the film and share producing credits.

“We always thought of this as not just telling the story of East Lake Meadows, and the residents’ stories, but as something a lot of people can relate to,” said Burns, who’s based with her husband in Brooklyn.

Rusted white apartment stairs with high grass and barbwire fencing in 1997.
Tim Huber
The documentary traces Atlanta’s public housing story from the clearing of slums in the 1930s and the rise of Techwood Homes near Georgia Tech (built for white, middle-class families, as many were across the country), through redlining practices, the suburban “white flight” boom, and rapid degradation of housing projects across the city.

In 1970, the Atlanta Public Housing Authority opened East Lake Meadows—a sprawling, spartan complex of 650 units set among eastside hills, in what was then considered no man’s land by city officials—on the Atlanta Athletic Club’s former practice golf course. Thousands of low-income Atlantans, mostly black, moved in. At first, many considered the heated, relatively spacious units as heavenly, relative to where they’d come from. “We were just happy there,” one resident, Beverly Parks, says in the film. “Until it became a nightmare.”

The apartments’ shoddy, cheap construction, lack of government funding and maintenance, and especially the crack epidemic of the 1980s took an ugly toll. Children were caught in drug-related gunfire as mother’s sheltered babies in their bathrooms to avoid bullets. One interview subject vividly recalls watching, as a boy, a gunshot victim’s last long breaths. Another describes the environment as “ruthless.”

But with a snappy soundtrack as its pulse, the documentary is also a celebration of life, chronicling families who invented their own fun and a network of grandmothers who held political—almost mafioso—might within the community. The latter group included firebrand Eva Davis, the community's outspoken longtime tenant leader, whose apartment was firebombed by drug dealers in an (unsuccessful) attempt to keep her quiet.

Eva Davis at East Lake Meadows in September 1986. East Lake Boulevard SE was renamed Eva Davis Way in honor of the late community leader in 2018.
Louie Favorite, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Pre-Olympics efforts in Atlanta to break up concentrations of poverty by creating mixed-income settings, often with lower-density townhomes, helped usher in the phased demolition of East Lake Meadows. But the process of relocating was fraught with complications, and only an estimated 15 percent of residents elected to—or were able to— return.

Atlanta real estate titan Tom Cousins, who created the nonprofit East Lake Community Foundation, ultimately partnered with the AHA to develop the Villages of East Lake that stand today. The community’s 542 units—half reserved for lower-income residents—are served by a new Publix, bank, and one of Atlanta’s best performing school systems, Drew Charter, as filmmakers note.