Friendship Baptist Church, a historically significant black Baptist church in Atlanta, is one block away from the Georgia Dome and within the area being considered for a new stadium.
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The three have come together in the latest and most expensive civic building for downtown Atlanta: dismantling a stadium that for 21 years has been the sturdy but frumpy home of the Atlanta Falcons and building a billion-dollar luxury stadium with a retractable roof that would be ready for the 2017 season.
But two black churches with deep history stand in the way.
Among the people who put prayer before football, the idea that the city and the state would offer money in exchange for the land on which the two churches sit seems a misguided sense of priorities — especially considering that one of them, Friendship Baptist Church, is one of the most historically important black churches in a region filled with them
“You’re going to disrupt two churches, two houses of worship and prayer, for someone to play ball?” Juanita Jones Abernathy said before a recent service. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Mrs. Abernathy is the widow of the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, a close associate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She is now a member of Friendship Baptist, whose congregants will decide in the coming weeks whether they should take a cash offer and move or stay put and push the stadium north toward a less favorable site.
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