Know All About Rodney Cook Sr Peace Park

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Vine City, a neighborhood on Atlanta's Westside, is only a few blocks from Downtown, the city's central business district, where CNN and Coca-Cola have their respective headquarters. The recently opened Mercedes-Benz-Stadium, the Atlanta Falcons' new 1.6 billion dollar home, can be seen towering over the neighborhood. Nonetheless, the signs of decades of neglect and decay, as well as struggles with poverty, drugs, and high crime rates, are visible almost everywhere in Vine City. Many of the structures in the area appear dilapidated. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the neighborhood was hard hit by the foreclosure crisis; many houses are still abandoned and boarded up.

This is expected to change with the construction of a new public park. Vine City residents and park stakeholders celebrated the groundbreaking of what will become Rodney Cook Sr Peace Park, a 16-acre public park with a retention pond and bronze statues of civil rights leaders, in May 2017. However, the road there was bumpy, and construction was halted due to ground pollution and disagreements over the park's name. Those lengthy debates and setbacks raised ...
... many questions about who public space is built for and what it can do for and to a community.

A thriving black middle-class neighborhood
Vine City was once a thriving black middle-class community with a thriving cultural and political life. It was an important center for the African American civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century. Martin Luther King Jr. moved his family to the area in 1967, and his widow Coretta lived there until 2004. Paschal's, the famous soul food restaurant, opened its doors in 1947 and quickly became a meeting place for King, Andrew Young, John Lewis, Julian Bond, Ralph Abernathy, and Stokely Carmichael.

The neighborhood began to decline in the 1970s. White flight to the suburbs, disinvestment in the inner city, and the development of the interstate system, which frequently cut through the middle of black neighborhoods, all left their mark on Atlanta's in-town communities, as they did in so many other American cities. Heavy rain in 2002 severely damaged a large portion of Vine City, which was exacerbated by an antiquated sewer system. Most residents were unable to rebuild their homes, so the city purchased the plots, which sat vacant for over a decade - until Rodney Cook Jr. proposed rebuilding Historic Mims Park on the vacant lot in 2011.

The original Mims Park was not far from where Rodney Cook Sr. Park is now located. It was named after Atlanta mayor Livingston Mims and designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. It provided green space to Vine City residents in the early twentieth century until it was demolished in the 1950s to make way for an elementary school. Rodney Cook Jr., a descendant of Mims, claims his late father, Rodney Cook Sr., gave him the mission to rebuild the historic park and turn it into a memorial to Atlanta's civil rights history.

Originally, the park, like the historic park, was supposed to be named after Mims. A bronze statue of Livingston Mims, along with those of other famous civil rights leaders, was also included in the park's original design. This decision, however, sparked widespread outrage. Many have criticized the plan to honor Livingston Mims with a park in a black neighborhood because he fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, especially at a time when activists across the South are attempting to remove Confederate statues.

Story behind the name
Rodney Cook Jr. then decided to name the park after his father, Rodney Cook Sr., a Republican Congressman and civil rights ally in the 1960s. The cook peace park will now include statues of Dorothy Bolden, W.E.B. Du Bois, Grace Towns Hamilton, and Hosea Williams, as well as a "peace column" with an observation deck and a statue of Tomochichi, the Native American who gifted the land that would become Savannah to Georgia's governor.