On the fourth Saturday in September, East Atlanta residents celebrate their neighborhood with the East Atlanta Strut, a festival featuring parades, food, live music, and artist markets.
Since 1998, volunteers have organized and executed the East Atlanta Strut, raising over $100,000 in recent years, which has been poured back into the community. These funds support the public library, local schools, pet rescue organizations, neighborhood beautification projects, organizations that aid the unhoused population, and more.
Various organizations, including Broadway on Bankhead and Nexus Drumline, schools like McNair High School and Drew Charter School, and residents, came together to celebrate East Atlanta’s culture. One such group was the Krewe of Optical Delusions, a marching/walking group featuring black-and-white optical illusions.
Elizabeth Overton walked with the group during this year’s parade and has lived in East Atlanta since 2018. She has participated in the strut for at least a decade. When asked about her favorite part of living in the area, Overton said, “This! The strut is like the holiest day of the year! There’s just so much goodness, and it just feels like a day when everybody’s really in a happy mood, and I love it.”
The Highlander School also had a float in the parade. Opened in 2013, the school is a staple in the East Atlanta community and has participated in the strut for the past 14 years. The school’s theme this year was “A City in the Forest”, paying homage to Atlanta’s nickname, which comes from the fact that 48% of the Metro Atlanta area is covered in trees.
The school chose this theme because nature is central to its philosophy, and it prioritizes kids’ connections with the Earth. The school also chose to protest Atlanta’s current tree loss.
According to a Georgia Tech assessment, Atlanta has lost a quarter of an acre of trees every day between 2008 and 2023.
To Rukia Rogers, owner/director of The Highlander School, the East Atlanta Strut is a time when community members can come together, connect, and showcase the values that matter to them.
“It’s an opportunity for us to give back to our community and to connect with our community,” she said. “90% of our families live in this neighborhood. This is where our children and our families live, grow, and celebrate.”
Some groups chose a more comical theme for the parade; one such group was the Patterson Porch Pirates, who got their name from the area’s streets. For her float, Nealy Rodriguez dressed as a pirate with boxes representing delivery packages stacked in the back of her group’s pickup truck.
“We did porch pirates this year,” Rodriguez explained. “All of our boxes have other people’s addresses on it, like we’re stealing their mail because that happens a lot around here, and we just joke that it’s the porch pirates that came and got our mail.”
Rodriguez praised the “weirdness” of East Atlanta, enjoying the “beautiful melting pot” it is.
“One thing I would like people to know [about East Atlanta] is that the culture here is very strong, and the history here is very strong,” said Sara James, an educator at The Highlander School. “You can feel the spirit of the Muscogee people. You can feel the spirit of the Black and Brown people who were on this land before us.”
