Blood on King's Shadow

Atlanta asks itself if killing Cornelius Taylor, a homeless man steps from Martin Luther King Jr's historic church, is worth appeasing visitors, state lawmakers and local developers.

Maybe the right lesson to teach children emptying out of school buses behind the King Center is to tell them that Martin Luther King Jr. died trying to improve the lives of poor people, and 57 years later the city of his birth will kill poor people if it makes them more comfortable visiting his grave.

The word “irony” isn’t quite strong enough. The blood of Cornelius Taylor staining Old Wheat Street mocks everything King stood for.

I wish I could say the reference to blood on the street was a metaphor. The city killed Taylor while trying to remove homeless people from the area. It did not kill him while trying to clean up Old Wheat Street.

Taylor’s blood was still there days later, under the snow, in his torn and discarded tent, amid the trash pile of people’s former belongings, beside a wan shrine of votive candles, surrounded by a dozen people still just as homeless on the day he died who went right back there the next day.

Taylor’s blood is still there, a week later.

That’s also metaphorically true, ironically. The encampment on Old Wheat Street is a community that speaks about its members like they are family. Gus Hendricks showed me the ruin the city left behind of his street brother’s belongings, still stained with blood..

“This time they killed somebody that we all love. And hate.” The Old Wheat Street crew chuckled at that. Taylor’s nickname among friends was “Psycho,” which perhaps makes his reputation for being hard-headed unsurprising. “He was a character that you could love. He was a character that'll give you food when you hungry. He was a character that'll hug your neck when you hurt. He was a character that'll listen … sometimes … but that's all of us. Yeah, I just described all of us, but we love them dearly.”

Encampments can be difficult to break up, and that camaraderie is one reason why. People bind together for mutual support and safety. A street corner with a dozen people you know might feel safer than a shelter with a hundred people you don’t.

Going on initial news coverage, I reported that Atlanta Public Works employees killed Taylor with a bulldozer. To be accurate, the city used a back loader, with a claw on one end. Witnesses said they used the claw to lift the tent, and crushed him with it.

“Don't listen to them. We're the law,” Gus Hendricks said the police told them on Old Wheat Street. “They're just civilians. That's exactly what they told us. They told us. We going to tell y'all weeks in advance as to when you gotta go. Oh, two days later, they came in and killed my brother.”

People living on Old Wheat Street told me Saturday that they tried to warn city workers and police that Taylor was still in the tent when the construction equipment came in, and were brushed aside.

That claim will likely be substantiated or refuted once bodyworn camera video from the incident is made public. Several police officers were on the scene, bystanders said. Atlanta’s bodyworn camera policy requires police to have their cameras operating when an officer is interacting with a member of the public in an official capacity.

But the city will not release bodyworn camera footage before an investigation is concluded, a police spokesman said. The initial incident report from the police has not yet been released - a report that is taking an uncharacteristically long time to write. Normally, that report is released within five days, which suggests that a team of city attorneys is hand-crafting the language and trying to figure out how to leave as much detail off of the page while remaining marginally credible in a court of law.

Taylor’s family has already lawyered up. Mawuli Davis represents them.

Nonetheless, powerful political and economic forces having been bearing on the men and women sheltering from homelessness in King’s shadow. Taylor’s death was a byproduct of years of pressure from state lawmakers who view homelessness as a sign of progressive policy failures, along with months of strident appeals from neighboring property owners and the tourism interests of the city itself.

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Darlene Chaney and her cousin Cornelius Taylor, around 2018.

Cornelius Taylor struggled, but his family said he did not struggle alone.

“Whenever he had access to a phone, he called,” said Darlene Chaney. Taylor is her cousin, technically, but she, her brother Derek and Taylor were raised in the same household by her mother Catherine. Their relationship is more like brother and sister, she said. “[Taylor] knew that I was willing to stop drop and roll for him, whatever we had to do, Understand that when he was ready, I was ready to do whatever I needed to do to help him.”

I’ve noticed something over the years, after tragedy strikes someone who has been homeless for a long time, or has been struggling to overcome addiction or mental illness, and I’m talking with their family.

Conversations are intense, but rarely emotional. People may be livid, or despondent, but you wouldn’t know it from the tone of their voice. What I hear most often is a flat sense of resignation, because they went through the five stages of grief years before a camera crew shows up. They’ve been expecting a knock on the door for a long time.

But sometimes the how matters.

“They said my brother is dead, and on hearing it my first thought was ‘it was the diabetes.’ I didn’t have a sense of comfort from that at all, but then to find out that he had been killed and the manner in which he was killed … that’s a type of pain I haven’t been able to manage.”

They grew up in Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood in the ‘80s, when the area was better known for its murder rate than a golf tour and bougie restaurants. In another life, Taylor might have become a successful artist, or a chef in one of those restaurants.

“We go out to eat,” Chaney said. “He told me his his hopes and dreams, because he did have those hopes. To cook! Really, to cook. Really. He wanted to be clean as a family man. He wanted be that big brother again, that could really be present, to be the active uncle, to be the active father.”

Taylor suffered from bipolar disorder, which had troubled him in his youth but didn’t derail him until their mother died in 2002. Since then, Taylor had been bouncing in and out of shelters and struggling with substance addiction. He continuously ran into barriers to come off the street - income, or having a state-issued ID, in addition to bipolar-driven stubbornness.

“There was a place over in Decatur that was willing to give him some type of assistance, like a place to sleep. Not sure if it was a rehab,” she said. “When I asked him why he wasn't going to go … the rules were, like, he had to be there by 5 p.m. but he would have to check out by 8 a.m. and it was in Decatur. His community is downtown Atlanta.”

His life was on an upswing, Chaney said. He had gotten a job. His girlfriend had found her way to a shelter bed.

“Knowing that he was trying to turn over a new leaf and it was taken from him, that’s difficult … because of the plan and the hopes that we had together,” Chaney said.

She believes a crime was committed when he was killed.

“I want to make sure he’s seen as a man, a father, a brother, uncle, and I just … I don't want him to be just that man that was killed by a bulldozer or whatever. But I do want it to be known that he was killed.” Darlene Chaney spoke for an hour about her cousin - someone she was raised with and views more like a brother - her voice unbroken until this comment.

“Make sure that people know he was loved and he was cared for. He belonged to somebody. He did not just belong to the street. He belongs to people.”

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The sight of men and women huddling in clusters under a bridge or behind a warehouse or in a field on a side street isn’t just an economic or moral failure. It’s a political problem.

I’ve spent the last year covering politics and democracy in the American South for The Guardian. I’ve been in big cities like Charleston and Jackson and rural communities — Orangeburg, S.C. or Union Springs, Alabama, or Marion, N.C. Talk to anyone long enough about local problems, and homelessness comes up as the measurement of the competence of the local government.

The average person sees homeless people clustered on a street corner and asks themselves why they’re paying taxes.

The right has weaponized this outrage over the last four years, amplifying images of street disorder in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. Homelessness, arguably, just cost London Breed her job as mayor of San Francisco, even though the situation in the Tenderloin has greatly improved over the last year.

New Orleans is about to host a Superbowl. Louisiana’s governor has explicitly tied homeless encampment clearances to making the city palatable for tourists ahead of Mardi Gras and the game. Over the objections of city officials, Gov. Jeff Landry sent state troopers — an agency that had, up until last week, been the subject of a federal civil rights investigation — to take homeless people to a makeshift, temporary facility operated by friends of the governor on an emergency no-bid contract, out of eyesight of the Superdome and French Quarter.

In 2022, the encampment debate reached Georgia. The Cicero Institute, a libertarian advocacy organization funded by Peter Thiel, talked Sen. Carden Summers from Cordele into floating a bill that would make camping on public property a misdemeanor and denying state grants to cities that didn’t enforce the ban, while directing people without shelter to areas under government control.

As in, round up the homeless and put them in camps.

It didn’t get very far for obvious reasons even in Georgia, but it did spur a study committee that eventually passed legislation that was … ok? The state now requires cities to enforce their anti-camping ordinances. But the new law also outlawed the nefarious practice of carting homeless people to a different county to get them out of the way. Atlanta — despite a checkered history on this subject from the 1996 Olympics — tends to be on the receiving end of this problem, as the homeless services strategy of some outlying counties has been a ride to Grady Hospital in the back of a cruiser.

If, say, Peachtree City puts a homeless person in an Uber to Grady to get them out of the way, the law today says Atlanta can send Peachtree City a bill for services rendered.

Note that, aside from the city’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations at the King Center, Atlanta also hosted the College Football Championship on Monday.

Atlanta will host eight matches of the FIFA Men’s World Cup in June and July of 2026, including a semi-final. The event is expected to generate more than half a billion in economic impact for the state, according to a study conducted by the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. It’s impact on Atlanta’s international image will be roughly equivalent to the Olympics as more than a quarter million people descend on the city from out of state.

Given what is happening in New Orleans, you can see what the pressure from the state will look like. Homeless encampments are cheap points for any Republican to score. And they made sure the city couldn’t “solve” homelessness with bus tickets to Savannah this time.

“Decommissioning” encampments has become an important political initiative. That is as much or more about local politics and local stakeholders as it is political pressure from state lawmakers.

Partners For Home, Atlanta’s city nonprofit agency for combatting homelessness, has housed 1,030 people since 2020 who lived in an encampment, said Cathryn Vassell, its CEO. The city has closed 56 encampments since then. Homelessness numbers cratered in 2021 and 2022, as federal money for pandemic relief flooded in to fund permanently supportive housing and boost shelters.

But the number of unsheltered homeless - not couch surfing; people on the street — increased for the first time in a decade in Atlanta in 2023, and rose again last year. The annual Point In Time count of Atlanta’s homelessness will be conducted Monday night.

Homelessness advocates gathered at City Hall on Thursday, asking to speak with Mayor Andre Dickens. Darlene Chaney and other members of Taylor’s family wanted to present a letter demanding an end to encampment sweeps. Police prevented them from entering the mayor’s offices.

"There has to be a change in how we handle homelessness,” said city councilwoman Lilliana Bakhtiari at the city council meeting later that day. She called for a moratorium on encampment sweeps. “It is not working. It has not been working."

Vassell has already paused sweeps, she said. She’s heard the public comments at the city council and seen the social media blowback around Taylor’s death, questioning the city’s commitment to the Housing First model, she said.

“That is our mantra, that is our soapbox,” she said. “,We lead with that, and everything that we say and talk about — you've never not heard me talk about housing as being the solution to homelessness — and that's literally where every single dollar that we raise and align and leverage is going to.”

Experience has taught social workers that they need to maintain contact with an encampment for months before a final sweep. Many people who have been on the street for a long time will refuse help because they don’t have a relationship with the person offering it. Trust has long been broken. So, outreach teams spend months doing what they can to make friends and to prove they can help.

“There were multiple instances since April that teams have been going out, including in June when we sent eight people to the shelter we stood up at the Atlanta Medical Center.,” Vassell said.

By the time the police show up with DPW equipment, social workers should already have the name of every person at an encampment, and ideally have some place for them to go. Outreach workers knew Cornelius Taylor. They knew that his girlfriend had been referred to shelter a couple days before the closure, along with some other folks from from the location.

This is why missing someone in a tent is so infuriating: it should be impossible.

“There need to be tighter controls,” Vassell said. “Triple checking that every tent has been cleared and a thorough, thorough inspection. And you know, I think all parties are committed to that.”

Partners for Home has a standard operating procedures for closing an encampment. Those procedures do not specify who is responsible for searching a tent before sending in construction equipment. The city agency contracts field work to other organizations, in this case Safehouse, a shelter and homeless services nonprofit headquartered about half a mile away. Other homelessness nonprofits have also been active at Old Wheat Street over the last year, including Intown Cares, Remerge and others, including outreach based at Ebenezer Baptist itself.

I asked city spokespeople specific questions about who was in charge at the site, and would have presumably been responsible for ensuring no bodies were in a tent being cleared by a back loader. I have not yet received a reply to that request for information.

City officials, local property managers and the people in the encampment say that the city had made its intentions clear about closing the encampment months ago.

I’ve obtained some emails between outreach workers from nonprofit groups, city leaders and local property owners, showing that the city began coming under increasing pressure to close this specific encampment last year.

One email chain describes how organizations like Safehouse coordinated to provide transportation and shelter against a June 6 deadline, when Eric Borders, representing the Wheat Street Charitable Foundation, intended to clean up Old Wheat Street.

Unsheltered people on the street said they were presented with few viable options, which is why they remained or returned after the June clearance.

“The only place they try to take you is a warming shelter,” said Don Turner, who has been homeless for many years and is part of the Old Wheat Street group. “And then they kick into some apartments, and they say you don't qualify because you got to have three times the money that you made. They always disqualify you for something.”

Pressure increased in the weeks leading up to the closure of the Old Wheat Street encampment. in the form of Davinci Barcelo, who said he is a consultant with the Historical District Development Corporation which is building apartments at the corner of Old Wheat Street and Hilliard Avenue.

Barcelo formed a volunteer “public safety” organization called SAFE — Sweet Auburn Frontline Enforcement — with the explicit goal of running off the encampment behind the construction.

“We provide security solutions for that area, because we have a development in that space,” Barcelo said. “And, you know, I was back there the day before the bulldozers came. I've been the one who's been, you know, organizing the the initiative, as far as getting that area cleared out and cleaned up. So … yeah, I'm familiar with Cornelius.”

Barcelo, whose real name is Daniel Barnett, is best known in Atlanta for trying to relaunch Freaknik. On January 8, Barcelo and his group confronted people in the encampment as social workers were trying to coax people to shelter.

“He was complaining about these people, and being incredibly derogatory to the unhoused individuals in the encampment, and was threatening to, quote, ‘forcibly remove them.’” Vassell said. “I mean, the irony of it all is this … developer, coming out and literally making threats to the lives of the people that were there, which prompted us to say we need to get this on the schedule, and we need to do something before this crazy person does.”

Barcelo agreed that he had been there that day, and that he had made threats.

“I’ve definitely been the one leading,” he said. “Yeah, I was telling them they needed to clear and I was telling them in an aggressive manner and they need to move. I was telling that for their own protection, so they can avoid any future conflicts with the police or anything like that.”

I asked him if that meant conflicts with him as well.

“I mean, yeah, that was a part of it, too,” Barcelo replied. “You know, it's not necessarily like, again, I don't know exactly how it was described, but I can tell you that, you know, I'm not shying away from my responsibility.”

Normally, if a closure is expedited, the city will send a crisis team to an encampment closure, Vassell said. “We will try to coordinate all available resources to go out, to give folks notice and to assess folks, and get them connected to whatever resources we can offer, and typically in an expedited closure, then that means we're offering access to emergency shelter.”

Vassell began to surge resources to the site after Barcelo began aggressively pushing city officials to close the encampment in December, she said. Between December 30 and January 16, twelve people left Old Wheat Street for shelters. One person found permanent housing; another’s permanent housing is pending, she said.

Barcelo said he checked Taylor’s blue tent himself the day before the clearance and heard breathing inside, but couldn’t be sure if it was him or Taylor’s dog. Barcelo suggested — with no more evidence than the discarded needles around Taylor’s tent and his own relationship with the man — that Taylor might have overdosed before being crushed. (A toxicology report typically takes weeks to deliver.)

He is sharply critical of the social services community working on Auburn Avenue, arguing that nonprofit organizations are effectively manufacturing homelessness by pocketing money for relief instead of moving people to shelter. That inaction, he says, makes development uneconomic.

“We were redlined from an insurance company standpoint,” Barcelo said of the HDDC development. "It costs us basically a Mercedes every month just to have insurance. And there's only one carrier that will cover us … They don't want to give us some money because of risk, the risk which is being manufactured, which is the homeless encampment in the back of Old Wheat Street.”

He’s referring to an insurance problem around affordable housing that I’ve written about before. Apartments are considered commercial property for insurance purposes, and high crime can raise insurance rates. But those crime rates are measured in concentrations of 100,000 people at a time. That’s an entire Atlanta police zone. The entirety of NPU-M has less than 40,000 residents.

“I'm going to write that, and people are going to be like, ‘so they got a guy killed because somebody's insurance payments were too high,’” I said to Barcelo. “You're going to read that. What are you going to say?”

At first, he had no comment.

“I mean, if that's what they take from [reading that] and they walk away with it, it's really unfortunate, because that's, that's really not what it is,” he said. “What it is, is that at some level of this whole situation, you know … Cornelius was a grown man. He was responsible for his own life and, granted, his life was cut short due to a bulldozer, which ultimately, you know, was the question. Now, ultimately, you know, was there a miscommunication between city staff employees pertaining to DPW workers and things like that? That's really what it is.”

An assassin killed Martin Luther King Jr. while the Nobel Peace Prize winner was planning a Poor People’s March on Washington in 1968. Poverty, even more than race, was the subject of King’s Nobel acceptance address. Any casual student of King’s legacy understands that ending poverty was the central, inseparable issue of the last days of his life.

And yet, Atlanta, the city too busy to hate, was also too busy to properly check whether anyone was still inside a tent they were clearing from an encampment of unsheltered people across the street from Ebenezer Baptist church downtown last Thursday.

“Cornelius has come many days to our opportunity to receive food and to receive clothing,” said Rev. Olivia Maxwell, associate pastor for congregational care at Ebenezer Baptist. “He's a part of our community. We celebrated him on Sunday … We brought his family together in our church, and we're really hopeful to celebrate his life once [his body is] released, and we're working with it with his family to do the celebration of life at our church when the time arises.”

I choose to identify with the underprivileged.
I choose to identify with the poor.
I choose to give my life for the hungry.
I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity.
I choose to live for and with those who find themselves seeing life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign. This is the way I’m going.
If it means suffering a little bit, I’m going that way.
If it means sacrificing, I’m going that way.
If it means dying for them, I’m going that way, because
I heard a voice saying, ‘Do something for others.’
–Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.