City workers in Atlanta have killed a man living in a tent while clearing a homeless encampment with construction equipment near Martin Luther King’s famous Georgia church.
The death of Cornelius Taylor on Thursday afternoon resulted from an effort to reduce the visibility of people without shelter near the city’s historic Ebenezer Baptist church as an accommodation for crowds expected in the area to celebrate King this weekend and on Monday, the federal holiday dedicated to the civil rights leader’s life and legacy. Taylor’s death has infuriated homelessness advocates and prompted a round of soul searching among city leaders.
“The sweep, prior to which the city failed completely to check the tents, is a stopgap measure to try to project a false, sanitized vision of Atlanta,” activists from the Housing Justice League said in a statement. “Taylor and everyone else living on the streets deserved much more than to be bulldozed out of the way for MLK Weekend festivities. Everyone deserves to live in dignity.”
Atlanta officials have not yet clarified how Taylor died. Witnesses told local media that bulldozers from Atlanta’s department of public works were removing tents from the open area across the street from the church and ran over a man inside a tent who had not left the encampment on Old Wheat Street.
“I am saddened by this terrible incident and extend my thoughts and prayers to the family of the deceased,” Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, said in a statement. “I care deeply about each and every life in this city. We will review each of our processes and procedures and take every precaution to ensure this never happens again while we continue our important work to house our unsheltered population and bring our neighbors inside.”
Historically, the city sends social workers and outreach teams to encampments over a period of months before issuing a final order to evacuate. Those teams work to place people in shelters and, ultimately, permanently housing.
The city had been working with people at the encampment since April and had placed many into shelters, said Cathryn Vassell, CEO of the city’s homelessness organization Partners for Home. Atlanta announced an investment of $60m in new public funding – the largest amount in city history – to address homelessness last year.
That investment comes as Atlanta wrestles with a 60% increase in unsheltered homelessness since the coronavirus pandemic, after previous years of declines.
The Rev Raphael Warnock, one of Georgia’s senators, is a pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist church. The Democrat, who was elected amid Joe Biden’s historic victory in Georgia in the 2020 election, previously announced that he will be attending the inauguration of Donald Trump in Washington on Monday and will not be present for the King memorial day events this year.
Marcus Coleman, a community activist in Atlanta, noted that the city is also hosting the college football championship this weekend, and that the municipal government times its clearances of homeless encampments with high-profile visitor events. “Big money for the city this weekend,” he said. “The death of Cornelius Taylor and the excruciating manner in which he perished seems unbecoming for a city that’s too busy to hate.”
Sylvia Broome, who does outreach to the unhoused in the area, went to the site on Friday where Taylor was killed and choked up as she described the man to a local outlet as someone with a good heart who enjoyed drawing.
“He had dreams, ambitions, he had family, he was a good, good friend of mine and he’s gone,” Broome told WABE. She called for a full investigation.
The Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr was co-pastor at the church from 1960 until he was assassinated in 1968, and Joe Biden was given the rare honor of being the first sitting president to give a Sunday sermon there, in 2023.
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