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The restaurant was originally created as a store by Isoline Campbell McKenna, the daughter of a wealthy white family for whom Ms. вЂњAnythingвЂ™s better than keeping this little house and saying itвЂ™s to honor her.вЂќ вЂњWhy donвЂ™t we honor her by putting a picture of her in a museum? We can teach kids about her or build a statue,вЂќ said Bernice Livsey, a resident who is Black. вЂњAunt FannyвЂ™s Cabin could be a place where all of Black Smyrnites could be celebrated in a space that is reclaimed to give us the dignity that they stole from us for decades.вЂќ вЂњWe have no standing structure that honors our history in Smyrna,вЂќ said Shaun Martin, an architect who is Black and has been studying the cabin for years. Turning the building into a welcome center, a museum or culinary school for Southern food, supporters said, would be a way to honor her. They have plans to tell her story at schools and are holding a design competition to reimagine the cabin. WilliamsвЂ™s grave in the cityвЂ™s South View Cemetery. Local researchers believe she made financial contributions to African Americans in the region, donating to Wheat Street Baptist Church, an African-American church in Atlanta, and raising money for MariettaвЂ™s first Black hospital.ДЄctivists are working to locate Ms. More than 70 years after her death in 1949, very little is actually known about Fanny Williams beyond her role as the restaurantвЂ™s namesake and cook.

She and others working to save Aunt FannyвЂ™s said that the project presented the community with an opportunity to confront the racism that existed within it while also honoring a Black woman who helped build her community. Blackburn became the first and only Black woman to sit on the City Council. Smyrna, a city of about 56,000 people, is about 46 percent white and 33 percent Black. It was, for a time, among the best-known restaurants in the Atlanta area and inspired other local restaurants that romanticized the regionвЂ™s plantation history. The uniforms for female employees included pinafore dresses and head wraps that evoked the era of slavery. Waiters were made to sing for white patrons. Black people worked as cooks, hosts, servers and busboys. But the fate of the Smyrna restaurant has been divisive and personal in a different way, as Black residents recall their own experiences working at Aunt FannyвЂ™s and seek to learn more about the woman at the center of the debate.ДЄunt FannyвЂ™s Cabin, which was segregated in its early years, operated from 1941 to 1992, serving fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, вЂњgen-u-wine Smithfield hamвЂќ and other regional specialties. The argument over Aunt FannyвЂ™s comes at a time when scores of Confederate statues and other symbols of the Old South have been removed or relocated. You canвЂ™t take it away, sweep it under a rug to make yourself feel better about it.вЂќ вЂњThose images of the boys with the menus are atrocious.

AUNT FANNY HOW TO

вЂњThe city is embarrassed and instead of figuring out how to honor Fanny Williams, they want to erase her,вЂќ said Maryline Blackburn, a leader of the Coalition to Save Aunt FannyвЂ™s Cabin, a group of Black and white residents that worked to preserve the building.

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