This year’s MLK Jr. Day celebration in Atlanta is on Monday, but last week King Center CEO Bernice A. King was reflecting on a recent tragic milestone.
Friday marks the one-year anniversary of the killing of Cornelius Taylor. Witnesses said the 46-year-old unhoused Black man was sleeping in a tent across from Ebenezer Baptist Church on the morning of Jan. 16, 2025, when he was run over by a city of Atlanta construction vehicle that was clearing the homeless encampment ahead of the annual MLK Jr. Day parade.
The contradiction of a Black man being crushed to death by a government vehicle across the street from the church once led by Martin Luther King, a champion for civil and human rights, wasn’t lost on his youngest daughter, who led a moment of silence in Taylor’s honor during last year’s King Day celebration at Ebenezer. The outcome of the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Taylor’s family last year is yet to be determined.
King praised the work Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and the city’s taskforce on homelessness has done to house the unhoused since Taylor’s killing, but said that work needs to continue. Recently, she said she saw another homeless encampment pop up on Edgewood Avenue, not far from where Taylor was killed a year ago, underscoring the persistence of the region’s affordable housing crisis.
“The place where [the unhoused] had been, quote, unquote, ‘cleared out’ from, they’ve returned to,” King told Capital B Atlanta last week. “It’s not an easy issue. There’s a lot of mental health challenges that go along with having to solve this issue. Not everyone who becomes homeless has a mental health challenge, but over time, it develops if people are lingering there.”
Addressing housing and additional economic insecurity has been a growing part of King’s work in recent years.
She helped launch Ready Life, a financial technology platform that specializes in helping turn renters into homeowners, in 2022. Last summer, she joined the leadership team at Redemption Bank, a mission-driven Black-led lender. In November, she and Pastor Jamal Bryant partnered on food distribution drives to aid people impacted by cuts to SNAP benefits.
During her interview with Capital B Atlanta, King noted the relative progress Atlanta made combatting homelessness last year, when the city saw its overall homeless population increase by just 1% year-over-year as opposed to 7% in 2024 and 33% in 2023.
“Some of the efforts that the mayor has taken, I’m very happy about,” King said, “but I think it has to be a collective effort with all communities.”
She called on officials in the surrounding cities of Decatur, East Point, and College Park to collaborate with Atlanta officials to curb homelessness in their communities.
“If Atlanta is the city that seems to be making the most headway, we may need to look at that,” King said. “How do we scale that? How do we ensure that happens in the other communities?”
King also called for greater unity among Americans increasingly divided by politics in the wake of the shooting death of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent last week in Minneapolis. Her remarks echoed the theme of this year’s King Day festivities at The King Center in Atlanta: “Mission Possible II: Building Community, Uniting a Nation – The Nonviolent Way.”
Recent polling conducted by Pew Research last year showed the nation’s political divide continues to grow and may be fueling a rise in political violence.
“In order for us to put the right people in office, we’ve got to destroy this notion of us and them,” King said. “And the only way we destroy that is we’ve got to learn how to live together with each other. … That’s not going to happen overnight. It’s a process, but we have to be committed to the process to turn this thing around.”
King also voiced support for legislation aimed at combatting corporate ownership of single-family homes in Georgia. She noted that metro Atlanta has been one of the epicenters of the practice, and said action by lawmakers in the General Assembly is long overdue.
Republican state House members last year declined to advance a proposed law known as HB 555 that would have capped the number of single-family homes a company can own at 2,000 units.
“I want to know, why are we always late to the party?” King said. “This has been happening for a while, and we always react after the fact. … There should have been a cap [on corporate owned single family homes] from the very beginning. It’s prohibiting so many people in communities from being able to create and develop wealth.”
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