About Pleasant Hill

Booker T. Washington Community Center

Pleasant Hill is an African American neighborhood in Macon that developed during the post-Civil War era to become a thriving community of middle-class African Americans. It was the seat of late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century black education and culture in Middle Georgia, and its legacy is seen in the many schoolteachers and noted scholars, authors, and artists that emerged from the community. Pleasant Hill’s schools and schoolteachers were instrumental in building the community and made it prosper in the face of the Jim Crow south. The neighborhood’s history sheds light on how African Americans built a community of residences, churches, schools, parks, and community centers in the realities of a segregated society. Finally, it made history with the birth of rock and roll through the work of natives such as Little Richard, Clint Brantley, Al “Fats” Gonder, and Hamp Swain. Pleasant Hill was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.