Southern Poverty Law Center

Westside Atlanta entrepreneur heads SPLC project to build office complex there

By Esther Schrader | Read the full story here

Friend,

Before it can build the springboard for the community outreach it envisions for its offices in Atlanta, the Southern Poverty Law Center is taking a community-first approach.

Who better than someone who has spent two decades doing just that?

To bring to reality its dream of a vibrant office campus that will help boost the fortunes of the city’s Westside, the SPLC has turned to Leonard Adams, a Black entrepreneur who has worked tirelessly to uplift the area rich in civil rights history and in Black educational achievement but marred for years by economic malaise.

The choice of Adams is the cornerstone of the SPLC project scheduled to break ground next year. He will be the “developer” or manager in charge of transforming a 2.5-acre parcel acquired in December of last year into the future home of the SPLC’s Atlanta office, the organization’s largest outpost outside its historic Montgomery, Alabama, headquarters. The two complexes will work in tandem, helping to connect people and organizations to communities in the Deep South. Atlanta will be the SPLC’s gateway to Georgia, and Montgomery will remain the organization’s headquarters, a location central to its mission.

“Leonard was the person who, frankly, sold me on the significance of basing our work on the Westside,” said Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the SPLC.

He is somebody who has worked for decades in the Westside. He’s somebody who has built his own house on the Westside. He believes in investing in the community.

“All of his work is very much grounded in enabling Westsiders to stay in the neighborhood.”

The SPLC envisions a campus of buildings and outdoor landscapes that will provide spaces to support community groups and Westside residents through programming, youth and adult educational opportunities, affordable commercial spaces for local entrepreneurs of color, free event space, arts installations and other community-minded resources. There will also be office space for SPLC employees.

Partnerships and relationships

The decision to move the Atlanta office from its current location in Decatur, an affluent, largely white suburb, to the Westside is viewed by the SPLC leadership as central to the civil rights organization’s new strategic direction, centered in — and in partnership with — the communities it serves. The Westside contains six of Georgia’s 10 historically Black colleges and universities — including Spelman College, Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University — and was home to many prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr. and the SPLC’s first president, Julian Bond.