While most Atlanta residents remember the late Jovita Moore for her work in front of the camera as the long-standing news anchor on WSB-TV, Grant Park resident Atiba Mbiwan remembers her most for her work behind the scenes.
Mbiwan said he met Moore in the early 2000s as the nonprofits that they both were affiliated with often worked together. Mbiwan is the executive director of the Zeist Foundation, a nonprofit organization helping underserved children, and Moore was a board member for Our House, a nonprofit that provides resources for unhoused families. Calling Moore “community oriented” and “authentic,” Mbiwan said the two kept in touch over the years.
“She was one of those special people who engaged with the community,” Mbiwan said. “With her stature, she could have easily served on the board of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, but she served on a nonprofit that’s serving the poorest of our people. It just speaks to how well she was respected and loved by the people in Atlanta.”
And now the recent removal of a mural in her honor is sparking backlash.
After Moore passed suddenly in 2021 from brain cancer, a mural was painted in Grant Park, about three blocks away from Mbiwan’s home. He and other Atlanta residents were disheartened to learn that a new coffee shop where the mural was located decided to paint over the artwork.
Mbiwan said he felt Bellwood Coffee disregarded the community when it decided to cover the mural, which featured Moore’s name and face, with the cafe’s logo. Online backlash against the company quickly ensued as more residents found out about the situation. One resident on X called covering the mural “disrespectful” and another called it “a miss on cultural preservation.”
After facing the backlash online, the company posted on its Instagram page on May 1 that they “made a mistake” and plan to commission a new mural of Moore.
“If you’re not caught up, we leased a building in Grant Park, and painted over a mural of Jovita Moore,” the company wrote in the post. “If you’re wanting to know why, we could give you a few practical reasons, none of which have anything to do with Jovita or her ATL legacy.
“To those of you who are saddened, angry, disappointed: We hear you, and we understand. We want to make this right by commissioning another mural. We want to be better, to listen well to our community, and to slow down before making impactful decisions.”
The company did not immediately respond to Capital B Atlanta’s request for comment.
Bellwood Coffee has cafés in Decatur, East Atlanta Village, Riverside, Midtown, and Grant Park. The owners are brothers Joel and Charles Norman, along with Tommy Keough, according to the company’s website.
Their Grant Park location opened at the end of April. The company wrote in a post on X on April 30 that the windows of their new shop cut significantly into the mural. The company said it didn’t realize how much the mural meant to “the community of Atlanta.”
The original artist of the mural, Tommy Bronx, posted a statement on his instagram that “it’s tough” to see his art covered up. Bronx was commissioned by soccer team Atlanta United FC to paint the Moore mural as part of a series of murals across the city depicting community leaders.
“It’s been powerful to see how much it meant to the community,” Bronx wrote. “Public art lives in the people and the place it’s created for, and this one clearly resonated. I appreciate everyone who’s spoken up and shown love. Hoping whatever comes next reflects that.”
Bronx declined Capital B Atlanta’s request for comment.
Black artists weigh in
Local artist Fabian Williams said the Moore incident was a “landmine” that the coffee company could have avoided if it had included the neighborhood in its decision to cover the mural.
Williams faced his own mural controversy last year. South Atlanta residents pushed for a mural that he painted of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre to be reworked after they felt left out of the creation process by the National Center for Civil and Human Rights who commissioned the work.
“Just because you own a building does not mean you run things. Yes, legally, you own the building, but the art — art is very important and I had to learn that, too, myself about my own work, how powerful it can be,” Williams said. “People take an ownership to art, especially public art, so you got to be careful with how you move.”
He said he felt that Bellwood Coffee’s decision to cover up the mural sent a symbolic message to the community that it was time to “move on” from Moore’s death.
“What they did is they erased her and what they’re saying about Jovita Moore is that her time is gone, and it’s time for us to move on and think about this other thing,” Williams said.
“We might still be mourning Jovita Moore. I don’t know why that mural ended up there. I don’t know if Jovita lived in the neighborhood or not, but her presence is felt, and now they’re gonna have to fix it.”
While Bellwood Coffee hasn’t made any statement about who it will commission to recreate the new mural or if it plans to do any community engagement around its design, Williams said he feels the original artist, Bronx, should be the one to do the mural. But other Atlanta creatives feel differently.
Sumayyah Ali, a local art consultant, said she appreciates Bellwood Coffee’s apology and hopes that the company will get a Black female artist to do the new painting. She said that a Black artist and organization should have been the one to create the original mural in the first place.
“So that’s one layer that Bellwood Coffee owns [the building], a non-Black organization, and a non-Black artist put the mural up of a Black woman, and then it was covered over,” Ali said. “There’s a layer that’s there that’s cultural.
“It’s very upsetting to constantly see companies and brands and organizations hire non-Black artists to tell our stories in our communities and our people have to digest that.”
Caleb Smith, who previously ran a studio business in Grant Park that supported and provided work space for local creatives, said covering the mural was a smaller example of how gentrification is changing the city and leaving Black residents behind.
Smith said his brief stint in the Grant Park neighborhood was “unwelcoming” to his business and to Black creatives. On multiple occasions, he said white residents living nearby called the police on his business shortly after his company moved in.
“They are trying to take away our essence as a city, especially our Black class, where we see things like Jovita Moore’s mural just being painted over — that shows that they don’t value our culture, our contributions, and also not having a pulse of what she meant to the city,” Smith said. “So just seeing that — I was not surprised because I think that that shows this sentiment of erasure, of basically, like, ‘We don’t want your history, we don’t care about your history.’”
Mbiwan said he’s also seen the changes that have taken place in Grant Park over the past 20 years.
“Like so many places in the city of Atlanta and across the country, you have people moving in with higher incomes and more white folks than in the past 50 years, because the white flight to the suburbs has slowed down, and now you have young white people who want to live in the city,” Mbiwan said.
While it remains unclear what the future holds for a new mural of Moore, Mbiwan said he hopes to see the city continuing to remember who she was and her impact.
“She was a model for the media and professionals in that realm. And just like we have statues and street names and other things that we do to honor people, to me, the mural was that,” Mbiwan said. “To me, it’s more than just, when we finish mourning, take it down. No, let’s keep it up so people who knew about her will be able to continue to pay respect and those who didn’t know her can find out about her.”
