Museum Review

Coca-Cola giving land for museum on civil rights

From the Baltimore Sun:

ATLANTA // The Coca-Cola Co. announced yesterday that it is donating $10 million worth of prime downtown land to the city to develop a civil rights museum in the hometown of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Coca-Cola chairman and chief executive Neville Isdell said his company is donating 2 1/2 acres near the Georgia Aquarium and the new World of Coca-Cola, now under construction. Coke previously donated 9 acres for the aquarium.

"There is no more appropriate home for a civil rights museum than the cradle of America's civil rights movement," Isdell said. "This city is the principal guardian of Dr. King's dream. It's our duty -- as citizens of Atlanta -- not just to preserve his dream but to build upon it."

The civil rights attraction is expected to be a display site for King's papers, which a team of city leaders bought for $32 million this summer and donated to Morehouse College -- saving them from the auction block. A stipulation in the agreement with Morehouse allows the 7,000-document collection to be displayed at a future civil rights museum.

Coke gave $2 million toward winning the King papers, which trace his intellectual progression from college through the eve of his assassination in 1968.

The city is in the first stages of planning a civil rights attraction, which could cost as much as $100 million, funds likely to come from corporate benefactors and perhaps public coffers.
No money has been raised, but Mayor Shirley Franklin hopes to see such a venue within three to five years.

"This is a big step, to have a prime real estate in downtown Atlanta only blocks from where Dr. King lived and worked as a young man," she said. "I plan to put all the influences of my office to get it done," she said of the attraction.

Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who was a leading civil rights activist during the 1960s, said Atlanta is the "capital of the modern-day civil rights movement" and should have a civil rights museum, like other cities that were prominent in the movement, such as Birmingham and Montgomery in Alabama and Memphis, Tenn.

With King's papers now in Atlanta, Lewis expects more important collections to come to the city after a museum is built. "It will inspire other people that were involved in the civil rights struggle to donate their papers," Lewis said.

Franklin has been quietly working to build an Atlanta civil rights attraction for at least a year, she said yesterday.

The notion gained momentum after the city acquired the King papers, said A.J. Robinson, head of Central Atlanta Progress, a downtown business group that has committed several staffers to the mayor's effort.

A civil rights museum would not only honor the city's history and legacy, but it could bring tourists, hotel guests and dollars to the city's economy. Cities such as Baltimore, Cincinnati, Memphis and Detroit have destinations honoring civil rights and other aspects of African-American history. The Smithsonian Institution is planning a National Museum of African American History and Culture.

posted by UltimateWriter @ 1:28 PM