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History of African American underclass community in northwestern DeKalb County, Georgia, from its settling in the late-1920s to its present displacement through gentrification. Thesis is that black underclass communities are the result of America’s historic racism and subordination of blacks, whose members are left little choice but to engage in illegality as survival strategies. The work reveals the hard-work routines of people relegated to the bottom of American society, as well as their fun-loving leisure activities and embracing of vice as pleasurable. Established during Jim Crow segregation, Lynwood Park cultivated a reputation for danger and toughness to keep out outsiders, so that its children could have some semblance of a “normal ” upbringing. The community’s color line was then patrolled by dangerous men who created somebodiness for themselves as tough protectors, which ensured that they would be emulated as heroes. The work records the social and cultural history of the community as recalled and interpreted by residents in an oral interview project. Covers community organization and institutions, such as churches and schools, as well as tensions within the community an