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Atlanta's proposed civil rights museum generated a strong buzz Thursday, a day after a panel of civic leaders said a $100 million facility could be built in downtown Atlanta.
Everyday citizens will get a chance to offer their opinions at a town hall meeting scheduled from 4 to 6 p.m. Jan. 4 at Atlanta City Hall.
The founding director of the Smithsonian Institution's planned National Museum of African American History and Culture, Lonnie Bunch, said Atlanta has an important story to tell about the role its black citizens played in leading the civil rights movement and then governing a city. He said he's excited at the prospects of a center in Atlanta.
"In some ways, Atlanta is the first post-civil rights city," Bunch said. "It's where you can see what happens with African-American leadership, and you begin to see how the business and corporate community responds to this new integrated era."
Atlanta elected its first black mayor, the late Maynard Jackson, in 1973. That was five years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.
Jim Bruns, president of The Atlanta History Center, said the center should be built next to Centennial Olympic Park, on a site offered by the Coca-Cola Co. It's just good business judgment, although there are strong emotions for building the center somewhere along historic Auburn Avenue.
"Centennial Park has substantial critical mass to become the Georgia equivalent of the National Mall in Washington," Bruns said. "I think it makes good business sense to think of that critical mass."
Mayor Shirley Franklin said she looks forward to hearing from residents at the meeting in January. She heard a fair amount about the location of a future center in October, when Coca-Cola offered a 2.5-acre site near the Georgia Aquarium and its World of Coca Cola Museum.
"My feeling is that having a public hearing will allow people to start the conversation again," Franklin said after visiting with the panda cub at Zoo Atlanta. "I'm very excited about the center, and I think the community generally is excited. The public meeting won't be the last time, nor is it the first time, residents have had a chance to express their opinions."
Boyd Coons, executive director of the Atlanta Preservation Center, said the possibility of building a center near Centennial Park highlights the need to preserve the buildings and neighborhoods where civil rights leaders lived and worked.
Building a proposed pathway from the center to the Carter Center and lining it with markers about buildings that used to be nearby isn't as powerful as seeing the actual buildings, he said.
"Care needs to be taken to preserve the actual artifacts which form the context of the civil rights experience," Coons said. "We need to safeguard the sites that still exist in the city, which are the physical context of the civil rights movement."
The center tried to preserve several buildings along Auburn Avenue, but they were torn down this year to make way for new condos and shops.
The demolitions included the Palamont Motor Lodge, which was the only public motel open to African-Americans in the 1960s in downtown Atlanta.
Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
