Fresh Loaf

Atlanta’s much ballyhooed Center for Civil and Human Rights will take an important step toward becoming a reality – a site dedication ceremony – this coming Monday.

Didn’t know a site had been selected? You’re not alone.

Neither City Hall, which helped start the ball rolling for the museum; nor the Atlanta Development Authority, which will issue bonds to help pay for it; nor the Center for Civil and Human Rights Partnership, the city-sponsored group charged with raising private funding, has ever announced that a site had been formally selected.

“I guess you could say that’s what’s happening on Monday,” says A.J. Robinson, president of Central Atlanta Progress, who headed up a panel of business leaders that helped determine the cost and mission of the proposed center in late 2006.

To call the site selection a below-the-radar decision is like saying Paris Hilton doesn’t mind having her picture taken. City Councilman Kwanza Hall, who represents the area, says he didn’t know about the dedication event until just this past Monday. Other council folk we asked hadn’t heard a thing.

So when was this decision made – and, more to the point, who made it?

Robinson says he, Partnership Executive Director Doug Shipman and a handful of others made the call, but he couldn’t specify a particular meeting or memo in which the choice was finalized.

“We made that decision over the course of the past few months with the mayor’s input,” he says.

Now, in fairness to Robinson, it’s not his job to announce this decision. He’s not an elected official and CAP is a private group that represents the interests of downtown businesses and property owners.

But the Center for Civil and Human Rights, if it’s done well, will have deep meaning for Atlanta. It’s expected to cost $125 million – some of which would be public money – and draw tens of thousands of visitors from all over the country. And it’s likely that the center would eventually house the Martin Luther King papers. So it seems odd that key decisions regarding a project of such public significance would be made quietly, behind closed doors, with the announcement coming later to little fanfare.

That said, the chosen site – yes, we know we’ve kept you hanging – is fairly well known. It’s a 2.5-acre lot next to the World of Coca-Cola at the intersection of Ivan Allen Boulevard and Centennial Olympic Park Drive. Coke offered to donate the property for the museum site two years ago, the aforementioned panel of bigwigs recommended that the offer be accepted and Mayor Shirley Franklin spoke approvingly of the location at the time.

But it was never a done deal. Until now.

While no alternative site was ever specifically identified, Councilman Hall says Coke’s offer “took me aback because I’d been working on looking for a location on Auburn Avenue.”

Many people, including Evelyn Lowery, the wife of Civil Rights leader Joseph Lowery, have publicly questioned the appropriateness of placing a museum dedicated to the struggle for civil rights next to giant aquarium and a shrine to a soft drink, rather than within the King Historic District.

Hall now says he believes that Centennial Olympic Park will be a good location for the center.

If there are villains in this outcome, it could be the churches and other major landowners along Auburn Avenue who allowed the street to deteriorate while keeping a tight grip on their property investments.

Just this April, the Herndon Building, the historic office building erected in 1924 by Alonzo Herndon, Atlanta’s first black business tycoon, collapsed and had to be razed after years of neglect by its owner, the Butler Street YMCA.

So, instead of an Auburn Avenue site being donated for the civil rights museum, it was Coke that stepped up to the plate. We’re just lucky it didn’t end up in the parking lot of Lenox Square.

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Tags: A.J. Robinson, Atlanta-Development-Authority, Center for Civil and Human Rights, Central Atlanta Progress, City Councilman Kwanza Hall, Coca-Cola, Green Atlanta, Mayor-Shirley-Franklin, World of Coke.