Justice for Cornelius Taylor Coalition continues community care activism with The People’s Table

Survivors of the Old Wheat Street encampment helped lead efforts to feed, build community with and supply unhoused neighbors on the afternoon of Dec. 12, the second time in as many weeks for the Justice for Cornelius Taylor Coalition. 

This time, the Coalition created a pop-up distribution where they served hot foods, performed music together, danced, gave out health and warmth supplies for winter, and got to know some of their fellow Atlantans who feel their city officials have them behind. Coalition members opted to hold this outside Georgia Plaza Park, a stone’s throw from City Hall, the Capitol, a Department of Public Safety Capitol Police Division office and Atlanta’s largest homeless shelter.

“We chose to do it in front of the public safety building because this is what public safety looks like,” said Nora Bonner of the Atlanta People’s Campaign, a group collaborating on the project with the Coalition, the Rising Majority and the local Movement for Black Lives chapter. Bonner described this as part of a larger project hoping to wean Atlanta off police and law enforcement as lone means of public safety.

Allen Hall, a Coalition leader and an elder of the encampment where city officials ordered the sweep that killed Taylor in January, explained that it’s quite simple, as banners at the event said: Everybody eats. 

“If anybody’s out here, they’re compassionate,” Hall said. “It takes compassionate people from different organizations. It’s just the mutual compassion that we have for people who are less fortunate and impoverished in society. Personally, by me having a lived experience of being homeless for 31 years, of course, I’m compassionate about it.”

Hall hopes to embody a positivity of people caring for one another as this work continues, emphasizing that the government ought to be full of caring people who prioritize easily accessible services for anyone in need.

“We need better policies in place,” Hall said. “With the city officials, it’s just a concern with society here in America.”

For instance, the Coalition also urges governments at all levels to make health care easily accessible and affordable for all. A medic was on hand to provide basic care, such as blood pressure checks and listening to key organs with a stethoscope, as well as informed medical opinions on any symptoms, concerns or questions from unsheltered attendees.

One such attendee was Rudolph, who particularly enjoyed the music volunteers played in a circle of drums, flute and clarinet.

“When we say with homeless shelters ‘We ain’t have no shelter for the homeless,’ then they indicate the alternative for us—the turning point,” Rudolph said. 

He explained that alternative as a current system of rounding up unhoused people en masse, as opposed to something positive to help restore their lives. Often it results in vicious cycles of being sent by bus or train, passed around from place to place with no goal but to send unhoused people elsewhere as someone else’s problem, Rudolph said.

He said his situation has tested his faith in God, asking God whether God will come through for him and so many other people suffering in this world. Rudolph has appreciated care from shelters but emphasized it’s not enough to sustain a turnaround in an unhoused person’s life.

“I’m still blessed,” Rudolph clarified. “I can’t do everything on my own. Trying to take a step in life, not knowing where you’re going, not knowing what to do, you jump too fast. You have to give it time, planted like a seed, to root and grow.”

And the group of organizations hosting this distribution made clear this event was merely a planted seed to root and grow in the new year.The local chapter of the American Friends Service Committee sponsors the Coalition. Its website hosts donation links to support the Coalition’s efforts toward these ends and a petition to demand policy changes from local government.