Neil DeRosa and The Transformation of The Pickrick
My great-uncle Neil DeRosa ran the placement center in one of the most symbolically loaded buildings in Atlanta.
Segregationist Lester Maddox owned the Pickrick, a diner at 891 Hemphill Street NW. Maddox became governor of Georgia in 1966. A year before that, he shut the diner down rather than comply with a court order to desegregate it. On one occasion, he waved a gun at three black men who came to eat at the diner.
Georgia Tech bought the building shortly after Maddox closed it and converted it into the Fred W. Ajax Placement Center. Neil became director two years later. He spent those years helping thousands of Georgia Tech students launch their careers from a building that had been a monument to segregation. Under his leadership, the center became central to the university’s career services.
Neil had bigger ambitions too. In July 1967, he wrote to the presidents of Georgia’s universities proposing a state placement association. Thirty-five representatives showed up to the meeting at Georgia Tech that August and formed what became the Georgia College Placement Association. By 1971, the association had grown enough to meet with Governor Jimmy Carter.
The building served as the placement center until 1993. Georgia Tech leveled the building in 2008. The site is now part of the EcoCommons, with a memorial featuring three pillars representing the three ITC students who attempted to desegregate the restaurant.
In the summer of 1969, Neil was chaperoning a Georgia Tech YMCA trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. When they reached Leningrad, he had a heart attack and died. He was 46. My father was 21.
A Georgia Tech alumnus, John Simmons, recalled the trip: “About 10 students got close during the journey, going through great times and hardships, with their most difficult moment coming when their adult advisor died.”
In two years, Neil turned a building that stood for violent resistance to civil rights into a place that helped students build their futures. He didn’t live to see much beyond it.
You can read more about what happened once GT and Neil DeRosa took over the Pickrick in the Georgia Tech alumni magazine below…
(Click images below for larger version)
From Maddox Country to DeRosa Country, the transformation of the Pickrick Diner
Read more here… (NYTimes: July 23, 1964)
More history of the Pickrick Restaurant at Atlanta Time Machine
