"Old Wheat Street itself is unremarkable now: two blocks long, empty save for parked cars, the clang of construction at one end and a new shiny housing complex rising over the alley. But in 1956, Auburn Avenue which it runs parallel to was dubbed the richest Negro street in the world, home to Black-owned banks, newspapers and funeral homes until a highway cut it in two, an urban planning decision that decimated the flourishing Black community."
"Griffeth swatted at the late-August mosquitoes and slowly walked away. Lolita Griffeth, fiance of Cornelius Taylor, near the street in Atlanta, Georgia, that held the encampment where Taylor was killed. At 9am on 16 January, a front loader weighing five tons rolled into the alley. Police, flanked by the department of public works and staff from the non-profit SafeHouse Outreach, followed close behind."
Lolita Griffeth returned to Old Wheat Street and identified the exact spots where she and her fiance once camped and where Cornelius Taylor died. A front loader entered the alley during a clearance and crushed Taylor inside his shelter. A nearby city sign prohibits camping and storing personal property on streets and rights-of-way. Old Wheat Street sits behind historic Auburn Avenue, once a thriving Black commercial corridor until a highway split the neighborhood. Over a decade, a multicolored homeless encampment grew along the alley, but the encampment has since been erased and replaced by construction and new housing.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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