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Posted inColumns, Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

Michael Sam panel sign of changing climate for Morehouse gays

by Ben Smith

Morehouse College, the alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has never been the kind of seeding ground for championing the civil rights of gays as it was for African Americans and other minorities. To some critics, it has been the opposite. Throughout the 1990s, the Princeton Review ranked the institution as one of the nation’s top homophobic campuses.

Last week’s student-initiated forum at the Thomas Kilgore Jr. Campus Center offered a chance to see how attitudes are becoming more tolerant. A packed crowd of 120, mostly young black men, listened to a panel of students—including football players and an LGBT campus representative—and professors discuss the highly publicized decision by star college football player Michael Sam to declare his homosexuality prior to the NFL draft.

Posted inTom Baxter

‘Dropping bills as fast as Legislative Council could draft them’

Avatar photo by Tom Baxter

The Georgia House has a long tradition of upstart bomb-throwers with a burning desire to change the world in a hurry and a knack for getting under the skin of leadership. One of them once so infuriated the late House Speaker Tom Murphy that he pinned him against the wall of the House anteroom. Some have been one-termers, while others — I’m thinking here of Brian Joyce and Bobby Franklin — stuck around long enough to become elder statesmen of a sort.

But it’s hard to remember any rules-waving freshman making a bigger stir than Rep. Sam Moore, who last week provoked a parade of Republicans to denounce Moore’s bill abolishing the state’s loitering law.

Posted inGuest Column

Good Growth DeKalb seeks plans with long-term vision instead of a Walmart

by Teresa Johnston

By Guest Columnist BRIAN BARTH, co-founder and head environmental consultant of Urban Agriculture, Inc., an Atlanta-based design firm

Just north of downtown Decatur, a two-year long campaign to prevent metro Atlanta’s next Walmart-anchored development from breaking ground hangs in legal limbo. 

While local residents wait for a ruling on whether the developer, Selig Enterprises, circumvented some of the fine print in DeKalb County’s permit approval process, there has been ample time to reflect on what may better serve the neighborhood.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Atlanta’s tech sector to prospect for capital, attention, in Silicon Valley

by David Pendered

There’s just something about a $19 billion price tag on a business acquisition that catches the eye.

This figure has to be in the back of Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s mind as he prepares to lead a trade delegation to Silicon Valley. The group has meetings with 12 venture capital companies and social media platforms to invite them to invest in Atlanta tech companies.

The $19 billion is the sum Facebook has agreed to pay to purchase WhatsApp, a messaging giant. WhatsApp has more than 450 million monthly active users, and more than 70 percent of them are active each day, according to techcrunch.com.

Posted inEleanor Ringel Cater

Anticipating, choosing and predicting the 2014 Oscar winners

Avatar photo by Eleanor Ringel Cater

The Oscars are like an old friend you don’t see much anymore. You still care about ‘em, but in a sort of distant, dispassionate way. I haven’t truly cared about the Oscars in a long time. Not passionately, I mean. But I do have an affection for them.

And let’s face it. There are sexier awards shows, more entertaining awards shows, even more serious awards shows. But the Oscar is the one everyone wants. Longevity has its privileges. So does institutional memory.

Here is my guesswork for the Oscar nominees in the six major categories.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Transportation update: GRTA’s acting director, MARTA reorg on hold, Atlanta’s transportation planning

by David Pendered

Some degree of clarity is emerging in metro Atlanta’s cauldron of transportation planners, managers, and planning.

GRTA Executive Director Jannine Miller visited the Capitol Thursday to say her goodbyes to lawmakers and introduce them to Kirk Fjelstul, her deputy director who was named by GRTA’s board as acting director. Down Mitchell Street from the Capitol, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed remains without a transportation planning director as the city tries to figure out how to realign Martin Luther King Jr. Drive around the future Falcons stadium and implement its bike share program.

Posted inLatest News

Breaking Bad Fan? I’m here to talk about actor Aaron Paul

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By David Luse

I attended an advanced screening of Need For Speed earlier this week. Stars Aaron Paul and Kid Cudi, and director Scott Waugh were available afterward for a Q&A to promote and talk about their film.

The three of them then invited everyone out for pizza at Ormsby’s, a West Midtown hotspot that supports a young, intellectual twenty-something crowd. The hilarious thing was that the owner or manager-on-duty of Ormsby’s disallowed outside pizza. So we were served from a rental Suburban across the street. It was all handled with good humor, and for Ormsby’s part, it was reasonable given that they serve food. Everyone went in for drinks afterward.

Well while sipping on a Reissdorf (they really have a fantastic beer selection) I chatted with the director and squeezed a question out of Aaron Paul. If you don’t care about the movie, skip the next four paragraphs.

Posted inLatest News

Judge orders MLK’s Nobel Prize, Bible moved to ‘neutral’ safe deposit box; not known if Bernice King will comply

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By Maria Saporta

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled Wednesday that Bernice King should turn over her late father’s Nobel Peace Prize award and her personal Bible to a court-controlled safe deposit box.

The judge said he would hold onto the keys of that safe deposit box until the case has been settled.

Bernice King’s two brothers — Dexter King and Martin Luther King III — have taken legal action against her for not turning over those two prized possessions so they can sell them to a private buyer.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Atlanta’s latest plan for MLK Drive: Shift vehicles onto a two-lane street

by David Pendered

Atlanta now is proposing to reroute traffic west of the Falcons stadium from Martin Luther King Jr. Drive to a two-lane residential street that has curbside parking.

The Parsons Brinckerfhoff engineering firm designed this solution to the closure of the MLK viaduct. The proposal would create a seamless MLK Drive corridor, Richard Mendoza, the city’s public works commissioner, said Wednesday during a work session convened by the Atlanta City Council’s Utilities Committee.

Posted inLatest News

Morris Brown starts over – looks for new buyer after Pope & Land deal fails

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By Douglas Sams of the Atlanta Business Chronicle and Maria Saporta

Morris Brown College wants to put most of its historic 35-acre Atlanta campus on the market.

The move comes after an attempt to reach an agreement between Morris Brown and Atlanta developer Pope & Land Enterprises Inc. appears to have fallen through. Read the full documents regarding the sale.

The campus is near one of Atlanta’s most ambitious projects — a more than $1 billion stadium for the Atlanta Falcons. Morris Brown is just west of the Falcons stadium site at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Northside Drive, and the future of the campus will be at the center of discussions about how the entire area is redeveloped.

Posted inATL Business Chronicle, Maria's Metro

Column: Community Foundation had ‘amazing’ 2013 — giving away about 5,500 grants and a total of $121 million

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By Maria Saporta
Published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on February 14, 2014

Thanks to an anonymous donor who made a record-setting $103.9 million gift at the end of the year, the Community Foundation was able to enjoy a record-setting year in 2013.

The Community Foundation received a total of $196 million in gifts in 2013 — the most it has received in its 63-year history.

Posted inLatest News

Local nonprofit MAP International celebrates 60th anniversary in 2014

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

By Maria Saporta

Sixty years ago, MAP International was founded by the late J. Raymond Knighton in Chicago when he accepted a donation of $25,000 in surplus medicines from a leading pharmaceutical company.

That became the mission and working model of the international nonprofit, which now has its global headquarters in Atlanta and its operational base in Brunswick. For the past 60 years, MAP International has been providing medicines, helping prevent diseases and promoting health to create hope and lasting change in communities around the world.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Falcons can cancel stadium deal Sept. 30 if Atlanta doesn’t provide $200 million, Herndon Homes parking

by David Pendered

Terms of the deal for the Falcons stadium underscore the risks inherent in a delay in Atlanta’s sale of the bonds to fund the stadium, even as the Atlanta City Council appears to be in no rush to abandon land the state seeks for the stadium.

The Falcons can terminate the deal if Atlanta hasn’t sold bonds and deposited into the appropriate account at least $200 million by Sept. 30. The Falcons can back out if the former Herndon Homes public housing site isn’t made available for surface parking. There seems to be no mention of what happens if Atlanta declines to abandon its property.

Posted inMaria's Metro

Revisiting Papa’s round house

Avatar photo by Maria Saporta

You can travel back in time.

For our journey to the past, we went to 935 Crest Valley Drive in Sandy Springs to visit an 18-sided (virtually round) home that my father had designed 50 years ago.

Curbed Atlanta had posted a story on Feb. 11 about the house complete with a series of photos. A friend suggested we should try to get a tour of the home.

After a wonderful telephone conversation with real estate agent Jason Morris, we were invited to come to the house on Sunday. There was an added bonus — the owner Ann Jones — would be there.

Papa — better known to the world as Ike Saporta — had designed the house for Mrs. Jones in 1964. She had kept it suspended in time for five decades — barely altering Papa’s original vision.

Posted inSaba Long

Maker method of teaching considered in metro schools

by Saba Long

The K-12 education system is overwhelmingly rote in nature. Students memorize formulas and facts year after year, moving from one standardized test to the next.

Yet we know real life application and tangible problem solving skills gives students a sense of place in the world around them.

Across the country, school boards are hearing proposals to bring the Maker mentality into classrooms. Four years ago at the request of the school superintendent, Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller of Studio H developed a yearlong lesson plan for juniors at a high school in Bertie, a sprawling, rural county in North Carolina.

The students, they proposed, would design and build projects meaningful to the town’s agricultural economy, including a chicken coop. Students would learn welding, and the basics of architecture would be acquired. Soft skills such as team building and critical thinking would be developed during each project.

Posted inDavid Pendered

Symbols old and new capture angst emerging around Falcons stadium

by David Pendered

The Falcons stadium is the next “Peyton wall” of Atlanta, a lawyer said Monday, comparing the sports venue to an actual wall the city erected across Peyton Road in 1962 to separate black and white neighborhoods.

By another account, the stadium saga is Atlanta’s version of “Groundhog Day.” In the movie, actor Bill Murray relived the same depressing events day after day after day. Poor people are the protagonists in this comparison to real life.

Posted inUncategorized

Bearing witness: the Rosenwald Schools

by Jamil Zainaldin

By 1917 the Reconstruction that was to have secured freedom and equal opportunity for 4 and a half million former slaves in the South had vanished. In its place was the vision of a “New South” that promised commercial success for the crippled region and profit aplenty for Northern industry.

Marring that vision, however, was the Jim Crow system built upon the legal separation of the races that was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. By the second decade of the 20th century, most of the region remained an agriculture-dominated society that suffered from economic, educational, and cultural poverty and deprivation.

The poorest of the poor were African Americans who lived in the country, for whom the dream of freedom was virtually extinguished. Public education in the South was generally lacking for everyone, including most whites, but the minimalist support for rural black schools (where they even existed) was appalling.

Posted inTom Baxter

Hell No-ism could leave state in a hell of a mess

Avatar photo by Tom Baxter

Hell No-ism is riding high in state legislatures this year, and nowhere more so than under the Golden Dome.

The Missouri legislature is considering a bill that would require schools to notify parents of any instruction related to the theory of evolution, which the author of the bill described as “indoctrination,” and allow parents to hold their children out of the classes where it would be taught. The Kansas House last week passed a measure which would allow businesses not to serve gays, provided they said they were doing it on religious principle.

Not to be outdone, a legislator in Oklahoma has proposed doing away with marriage altogether — at least, the state’s role in it — to avoid being required to recognize gay marriage.

All this is great fodder for the liberal blogs, and gives the nation’s East and West Coasts another opportunity to opine the backwardness of its middle. But these are all just tantrum bills, destined to die in their state’s senate chambers or their courts.

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