EXPO
They’re counting on you There’s still time for you to help determine who offers the best goods and services in East Metro Atlanta. The ballot is online and on pages 8&9.
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WELLNESS
YOUTH
This bulb not only adds flavor to foods, it also has lots of medicinal uses, and what it lacks in curative powers, it makes up for at dinner time.11
Glen Haven Elementary students won a Disney “Get Active, Get Fit!” party for winning a challenge to move every day at school. 12
The incredibly edible garlic
February 26, 2011
Winning moves
Volume 16, Number 44
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Hidden Hills getting $5.2 million to fight blight By Donna Williams Lewis
Boarded-up foreclosed properties could soon disappear from the Hidden Hills community in Stone Mountain with the help of $5.2 million in federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds. The community of 1,650 homes, which has about 55 vacant houses, has been approved by DeKalb County as the target neighborhood for funds from the U.S. Department of Housing. The HUD program provides for fund recipients to demolish blighted structures and to acquire, refurbish and sell foreclosed or abandoned homes. While the money has been allocated for DeKalb County, an application to receive the funds must be filed to HUD by March 1. A response is expected by April 15, and officials hope to see work going on in the community by summer. Pauline Dailey, president of the Hidden Hills Civic Association, said she appreciates the focus on her neighborhood, a former
golf course community located off South Hairston and Redan roads. “I think they chose Hidden Hills because they felt like it was on the edge of going one way or the other,” Dailey said. “Rather than see it go from being a top neighborhood to nothing, they chose us so that we could maintain.” DeKalb County received $18.5 million in 2009 from the first year of the neighborhood stabilization funds, known as NSP1. Chris Morris, DeKalb’s director of community development, said applicants for the current year’s program, NSP3, were directed to focus on neighborhoods, rather than doing isolated projects over wide areas. “When we look at many factors that strengthen neighborhoods, NSP3 funds by themselves won’t do it,” Morris said. “But when you combine NSP3 funds with an active homeowners association and an activity level where the neighborhood is already working to address issues … we can all work together to say we’ve made a difference.” Morris said Hidden Hills was selected af-
Pauline Dailey peers in the window of a foreclosed home on her street in the Hidden Hills community.
Jennifer Ffrench Parker / CrossRoadsNews
ter a local market analysis was conducted by professors Michael Rich and Moshe Haspel of Emory University’s Office of UniversityCommunity Partnerships. The professors were commissioned by the
county to find the HUD-deemed “areas of greatest need” based on the number of foreclosures, seriously delinquent loans, vacated Please see HIDDEN HILLS, page 6
A Hero’s Welcome Home Lewis awarded nation’s highest civilian honor By Carla Parker
The city too busy to hate was the city full of pride when President Barack Obama placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, around the neck of U.S. Rep. John Lewis on Feb. 15. When Lewis returned to Atlanta on Feb. 21, more than 100 supporters showed up at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport with congratulatory signs and posters to welcome home their hometown hero. Nine-year-old Marsalis Causey from Ellenwood went with his mother, Dawn Causey, and sister Nebia and a homemade “You Rock” sign decorated with photos of Lewis they got from the Internet. “I’ve never met a person like him before,” said Marsalis, a fourth-grader from Henderson Elementary in Clayton County. “I’m glad that he is here with us. He has done a lot for this country.” Lewis, who worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement, was one of 15 people who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House. He was born Feb. 21, 1940, to a family of sharecroppers outside of Troy, Ala. At the time, African-Americans were subjected to a humiliating segregation in education and all
Supporters greet Lewis at HartsfieldJackson on his return from the nation’s capital, where he was honored by President Barack Obama. Carla Parker / CrossRoadsNews
U.S. Rep. John Lewis embraces Soloman Mustafa Reid at Hartsfield-Jackson International on Feb. 21. Lewis was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Feb. 15.
public facilities and had no right to vote. From an early age, John Lewis was committed to the goal of education for himself and justice for his people. Inspired by the example of King and Rosa Parks in the Montgomery bus boycott, he joined the struggle for civil rights. Parks refused an order to make room for a white passenger.
At the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Lewis led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. During the March 7, 1965, “Bloody
Sunday” march in Alabama from Selma to Montgomery, Lewis and fellow marchers were on a 54-mile trek to dramatize the plight of African-Americans and to commemorate the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot three weeks earlier by a state trooper Please see LEWIS, page 5