Fresh Loaf

Less than an hour after Pres.-elect Barack Obama’s victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park, more than 300 people gathered early Wednesday morning at the intersection of Jackson Street and Auburn Avenue outside the Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church — the same house of worship where Civil Rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. preached and organized.

Chants of “Yes, We Did,” drum circles and blaring car horns motivated the crowd of young and old and all races and ethnicities. There was even the electric slide.

I left at 1:45 a.m. and people were still going strong. Here are just a few of the photos. We’ll post more tomorrow as well as snapshots and reports of the Georgia GOP party held in Buckhead.

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The site for Atlanta’s planned Civil Rights Cola Museum, um, we mean the Center for Civil and Human Rights, was unveiled Monday next door to the World of Coke in a ceremony long on corporate plugs and short on civil rights figures.

Broadcaster and activist Xernona Clayton was in the front row of observers, along with the widow of the late Ralph David Abernathy Jr. and such familiar businessmen as developer Herman Russell and life-insurance magnate Jesse Hill. But no John Lewis. No Joseph Lowery. No member of the King family.

Mayor Shirley Franklin says Lowery asked her to undertake a formal site review after Coke offered in 2006 to donate 1.2 acres alongside its soft-drink shrine. Last year, an advisory panel appointed by the mayor recommended the Coke site be chosen, but there was no public announcement of the final site selection before this week.

Although Auburn Avenue, in the heart of the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic District, was an obvious alternative, no specific land there was ever identified.

“If you look at other possible sites,” Franklin says, “You don’t get the number of visitors as this centrally located place, which is in the middle of the activity center for downtown.”

Franklin estimated that, aided by its proximity to the World of Coke and the Georgia Aquarium, the $125 million center could draw 800,000 visitors in its first year.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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