As Egbert Perry walked up to the stage to accept the Council for Quality Growth’s Four Pillars Award, he was overtaken with the spirit of reggae artist Bob Marley. As the song “One Love” was playing, Perry began dancing across the stage.
“Bob Marley’s music was transformational,” Perry said. “Because of that infectious rhythm, the message is easy to miss. The song, after the refrain, really starts with ‘Hear the children cry.’”
Marley’s spirit was present throughout the dinner at the Georgia World Congress Center with 1,300 attendees honoring Perry for his decades of leadership as a transformational developer in Atlanta as founder of the Integral Group. It was Perry who helped bring the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI program to life in 1994.
That’s when he led a controversial effort, working with Renee Glover with the Atlanta Housing Authority, to tear down the first public housing project in the nation, Techwood Homes, and replace it with a mixed-income, mixed-use community, Centennial Place, in time for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.
Perry has been a leading developer, locally and nationally, ever since. Please read more about Perry’s background, the accolades and the dinner.
But this column will focus on the observations and challenges Perry made during his acceptance speech — messages that have a special meaning to Atlanta.
The spirit and music of Bob Marley, who came from Jamaica, was intentional and appropriate. Perry was born and grew up on the small, poor Caribbean island of Antigua.
“Bob Marley gave voice to people who were struggling for justice in an unjust world,” Perry said. “I have gone through my own journey of sorts, seeing the world clearly, and challenging the status quo. Of course, I did it without the musical genius of Bob Marley. But Bob Marley understood that societies have a remarkable ability to create categories of people who become easier not to see, not to hear and not to fully include.”
By leaving people outside of the rooms “where power, opportunity, and prosperity are being distributed,” Marley understood how people could become disconnected from human suffering.
“But Bob Marley never surrendered his cynicism, and I have not either,” Perry said. “He actually believed that humanity was capable of moral evolution, capable of growth, and capable of widening the circle of participation and dignity beyond what previous generations thought possible.”
That’s the spirit Perry brought to Atlanta when he moved here in 1980 to go work with minority builder Herman Russell, who helped nurture many in the real estate industry, including T. Dallas Smith, who spoke at the Four Pillars dinner.
Perry said that when he thinks about Atlanta, he sees a “complicated but unfinished experiment.”
“It’s a city of extraordinary aspiration and visible contradiction, capable of producing immense prosperity while still carrying deep poverty within,” Perry said. “It’s a city that’s often wrestled publicly with issues many other cities avoid privately. And yet, in spite of all that, Atlanta became influential, and I don’t mean just economically or culturally, but also civically.”
Atlanta’s influence has been disproportionate to its size, thanks to its leadership, economic inclusiveness and civic identity.
“Atlanta became influential because, however imperfectly and incompletely, the city was more willing than any other to confront systems of exclusion and broader participation,” Perry said. “I’m not suggesting Atlanta solved these issues. It did not. We have communities that remain outside (of rooms where decisions affecting) communities are being made. We still have profound inequality in this city.”
There’s growing awareness that life expectancy in Atlanta can vary as much as 20 years depending on where people are born and grow up.
“We still have neighborhoods disconnected from opportunity,” Perry said. “Yes, I’m still talking about Atlanta. For too many children born into poverty here, access to quality education, housing stability, healthcare, healthy food and economic opportunity remain way out of reach.”
At the same time, Perry said Atlanta benefited because “previous generations” were willing to challenge the system. He mentioned Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, Ivan Allen Jr., John Lewis, Ted Turner, Shirley Franklin among others. But one leader has not received the recognition he deserved — the late Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson.
“I’m not talking about an impact just in Atlanta, but on every single major American city, because what Maynard Jackson ultimately changed was not symbolism. He actually changed systems,” Perry said. “In my mind, there is a PM and an AM, pre-Maynard and after-Maynard. Said another way, who would not be in this room if not for Maynard’s leadership? I certainly would not have been in this room.”
Jackson fought for economic inclusion and expanded the city’s economic capacity. “Everyone benefited,” Perry said. “Atlanta became stronger because more people were allowed to participate in building it.”
Then Perry tied that theme to the story of immigration in America as well as his own story of moving to the United States when he was 15.
“The blood, sweat, tears, and lives of the African American community, and the struggle for basic dignity and civil rights led to not only the passing of the Civil Rights Act, but the Immigration Act of 1965,” said Perry, adding that immigrants helped give “this country a soul.”
Perry, who chairs the board of the National Center of Civil and Human Rights, said: “America is strongest when it continues expanding that possibility rather than narrowing it, and decline begins when we start shrinking the circle.”
It’s been too easy for people to be dismissive with labels like “shithole countries,” Perry said. “Thank God in heaven, I came from one of those shithole countries.”
Today, people living in so many countries remain almost invisible to systems that profit from those living a marginalized existence.
“If it feels a little uncomfortable, that’s okay,” Perry said. “I’m talking about the cobalt powering our cell phones and our computers, the minerals powering global technology and instruments of war, the labor sustaining global supply chains. There are children out there right now – you heard Bob Marley say: ‘Hear the children crying.’ There are children out there right now mining materials that power devices that are sitting in rooms like the one we’re in tonight, living in conditions most of the developed world would never tolerate.”
Perry continued by saying that “once suffering becomes sufficiently distant and human beings become abstractions, they become disposable populations.
“That is why transformational leadership matters, because transformational leaders force societies to reconsider who belongs fully inside the circle of participation and deserves human dignity,” Perry said. “That is what Bob Marley was trying to force upon us. He was challenging us to confront that in his music all along. That’s why I think he’s the greatest musical genius of our lifetime. He wasn’t just simply talking about injustice, but interconnectedness – the idea that our prosperity, our systems, our economies, our cities, our futures are all inextricably tied together in ways we do not always acknowledge.”
Perry then challenged everyone to question the role they play. Transformational change happens “when people decide that participation matters more than exclusion, humanity more than tribalism, and courage more than comfort.”
Marley was trying to teach us those lessons — to recognize our obligation to one another inside of our own humanity.
“The work of humanity is still very much unfinished. The circle needs to continue being widened,” Perry said. “We know that cities, nations and societies ultimately become stronger when they choose sheer humanity over fear, and participation over exclusion, and moral courage over indifference.”
Egbert Perry serves as an honorary co-chair of Atlanta Way 2.0 alongside his friend Larry Gellerstedt III, Andrew Young and Shirley Franklin. Maria Saporta is CEO of Atlanta Way 2.0.
