ATLANTA — A dispute that erupted over the weekend over a possible historic building may be too late to save it. It was once home to Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first African American mayor. But Jackson’s family says the building is too decrepit to save.
The property will likely become part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site instead, with the building gone.
"That needs to be preserved," said John H. Lewis III, a Vine City activist reacting to notices posted outside the onetime Jackson home announcing its impending demolition.
The three-store brick building has been vacant for many years. Its roof has failed, and its demolition won’t harm history, said Maynard Jackson’s former wife Bunnie Jackson Ransom.
“It needs to be torn down. It is dilapidated. It is of no value to anyone. In fact, it makes the community look bad,” Jackson Ransom told 11Alive News Monday.
"I believe that if we were going to preserve this home, then as a community collectively we should have come together to raise these concerns," said newly inaugurated city councilman Antonio Brown. "And that was never done."
However, Lewis complains that the demolition of the Jackson dwelling on Sunset Avenue would obliterate a piece of history that has been obscured by the house next door at 234 Sunset Ave. That’s the former home of Martin Luther King Jr., purchased this year by the National Park Service Foundation. Dr. King lived at the Sunset Avenue residence until his death; his widow and her estate owned the residence until its sale to the Park Service Foundation.
Lewis says the adjacent house built by Maynard Jackson’s father is also notable.
"The community at large, the Jackson family and others want to see the family home of Atlanta’s first African American mayor preserved in no uncertain terms," Lewis said Saturday, before the Jackson family became outspoken against its preservation. Lewis didn't respond Monday to requests for comment.
Historians will tell you that Maynard Jackson actually spent his formative years growing up in a house three miles east of the Sunset Avenue residence, at the home of his grandfather John Wesley Dobbs.
Dobbs was an African American activist during the Jim Crow era who forged coalitions with Mayor William Hartsfield and white Atlanta business leaders. Those arrangements helped keep some of the roughest incidents of racial violence away from Atlanta during the civil rights movement.
The Dobbs house, on John Wesley Dobbs Avenue NE, remains in the family’s hands - owned by a cousin of the late mayor, according to Bunnie Jackson Ransome.
The King Center owns the Sunset Avenue property that Jackson's father reportedly built himself. The family relocated a short period afterward, Jackson Ransom said.
“The building is beyond remediation and needs to be demolished for the sake of public health and safety,” the King Center said in a statement. Once demolished, the land would eventually become part of the King historic site due to emerge on the two adjacent properties.
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