Last month after Georgia State University announced that there are plans in motion to move the Olympic cauldron out of Summerhill, community members sprang into action.
Residents gathered around 2,000 petition signatures and held rallies in opposition of the move. They say the artifact, which once held the flames of the 1996 Olympic Games torch, is a core part of the neighborhood’s history. It’s also a symbol of the unfulfilled promises of economic revitalization that did not come to fruition and ultimately caused displacement of some Summerhill residents.
Some also said they’re angry with the decision to move the cauldron because it did not involve any input from the community itself.
“I feel a lot of frustration because it honestly just comes across as very disrespectful to the sacrifice that people in Summerhill made in order to have the Olympics happen,” Cheron Pitchford, executive director of the Summerhill Neighborhood Development Corporation, told Capital B Atlanta in June. “This is kind of one of those situations that it feels like time and time again, Black communities will sacrifice for the larger scale purpose, and then just not even be respected for the things that they’ve kind of given up for that.”
After facing backlash, the state and nonprofit officials organizing the cauldron’s move agreed to meet with Summerhill leaders on July 23. Neighborhood leaders hoped the meeting was a chance to stop the move, but they said it was made clear during the meeting that officials have no intentions of altering their plans.
“I think they listened, but I also believe that this was really at best a goodwill gesture, and at worst just performative, that there was really no intent on changing course,” said John Helton, president of the Organized Neighbors of Summerhill. “We’re overall just very disappointed at the outcome, and we are just trying to figure out what our next move is right now.”
On June 11, GSU released a statement announcing the move and that it’s being done in collaboration with Billy Payne, the former head of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, as both helped bring the global event to the city.
“We are very excited about the prominent location where the Olympic Cauldron will be displayed in Centennial Olympic Park, combining the elements of the most iconic moment of the Centennial Games with its greatest physical legacy,” Payne said about the move in June.
Helton said Thursday’s meeting included him and other leaders from the neighborhood and officials from the Georgia World Congress Center, the state Board of Regents, Georgia State University, and the nonprofit group Atlanta ’96 Legacy. Helton said Atlanta ’96 Legacy is financing the move and that Billy Payne is the chair of the group.
Helton said at the meeting it was confirmed that the cauldron’s ownership has now been moved from GSU and the Georgia University System to the Georgia World Congress Center, which will be the entity overseeing the cauldron’s move to Centennial Olympic Park.
“What it boils down to is that they wanted to assemble this all in one place,” Helton said. “That they wanted to refurbish and restore the torch and do something special with it and they feel like that can only happen by moving it to Centennial Park.
“We’ve asked very plainly: Do you not feel that, given everything else, the totality of the situation, and the role that Summerhill has played, and the fact it’s been here for 30 years and it’s so much part of the community that you couldn’t do that here by leaving it intact? And they said ‘No,’” Helton said.
Mary Gay, a longtime Summerhill resident, said that whatever happens moving forward, that the people of Summerhill should remain at the center of these decisions and hopes that some kind of meaningful change can happen — especially for Black, legacy residents.
Gay suggested that if the cauldron’s move is officially happening, Summerhill should be involved in the project.
“I would like that when they develop at Centennial Park, they come back and develop a committee of people that live [in Summerhill] to present this to the world in a way that folks understand that Summerhill residents gave so much in order for this to happen,” Gay said. “I know it’s about the finances of it all. It’s a tourist attraction, all that stuff, and it’s all in one place, but it didn’t happen in just one place.”
Helton said that while he was disheartened by the way that the meeting went, questions also remain about what happens to the remaining Olympic artifacts in Summerhill. The tower of the cauldron and the bridge decorated with the Olympic Rings remains in the neighborhood and on GSU’s property.
Helton said he hopes that GSU and Summerhill can work together to figure out how those artifacts should be handled.
“We won’t believe it’s gone until they move it. But we’ll probably keep trying to do something to influence that decision until that point,” Helton said.
