Tracing the Atlanta 8 Through Sweet Auburn

Each November, Veterans Day invites Americans to consider service in and out of uniform. In 1948, in Atlanta, eight Black men — seven were World War II veterans — entered another front: policing a city that barely recognized their authority.

Their beat was Auburn Avenue, and their orders were clear: Patrol the street, but don’t arrest white citizens. Don’t drive patrol cars. Don’t report to the main station.

The police officers — Henry Hooks, Claude Dixon, Ernest H. Lyons, Robert McKibbens, Willard Strickland, Willie T. Elkins, Johnnie P. Jones, and John Sanders — performed foot patrols in Sweet Auburn. They worked in pairs, and their precinct was in the basement of the Butler Street YMCA. The building anchored a district so politically and culturally central that some called it “Black City Hall.”

Though members of the Atlanta Police Department, the Atlanta 8 were restricted to Black neighborhoods and barred from full authority. If they encountered a white suspect, they had to call for a white officer. These limits were structural and visible, both to their colleagues and the community they served.

A 1947 Newsweek report estimated that a quarter of Atlanta police officers belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Early on, many white officers responded with open hostility. Some filed false reports; others tried to run them off the road. One even offered a $200 bounty to kill a Black officer. Inside the neighborhood, reception was mixed. Officer Lyons later estimated that about a quarter of Black residents resented their presence and another quarter accepted them only “as long as [they] didn’t arrest them.”

Still, the Atlanta 8 became part of daily life in Sweet Auburn. They wore their uniforms with care and pride. They used “sir” and “ma’am.” They walked the same streets each day, solved minor problems before they escalated, and enforced city codes such as ticketing public drunkenness and curbing jaywalking. Officer Lyons, known for his restraint, later reportedly told new officers that the most important tool wasn’t the gun, but the ability to speak clearly and calmly.

By year’s end, the pressure had taken its toll on the Atlanta 8. Two of the original eight had resigned: Willie T. Elkins (within two months) and John Sanders (within a year). Johnnie Jones left the department in 1951. Those who remained stayed long enough to see slow changes. The Butler Street YMCA precinct closed in 1953, when Black officers were allowed into APD headquarters; however, they were still confined to the basement and weren’t able to arrest whites until 1962.

By then, a new generation of Black officers had joined, including Claude Mundy, who was killed in the line of duty in 1961. The risks hadn’t disappeared; only the rules had shifted. Seventy-seven years later, Auburn Avenue still holds the memory of Atlanta’s first Black police officers. The story of the Atlanta 8 offers a way to think about what policing by familiar faces once looked like, and what it still asks of the city.