ATLANTA — Sunday marked 30 years since boxing legend Muhammad Ali lit the cauldron to mark the start of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
Now, the community where the Olympic cauldron still stands is fighting to keep it from moving to a new location.
“This isn’t just about Summer Hill. This is really about how you treat the citizens of Atlanta,” said Cheron Pitchford, the executive director for the Summerhill Neighborhood Development Corporation.
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The people who call the Summerhill neighborhood home say this is bigger than just them. For three decades, a symbol of the Olympics has stood tall.
“It is instrumental to our neighborhood. If you ride through, you see the cauldron on our actual houses,” Pitchford said. “It’s been here for 30 years based on an agreement with community that it would be here.”
But recently Georgia State University proposed moving the cauldron to Centennial Olympic Park. The university says the move will better connect Atlanta’s legacy with downtown.
Organizers said they were planning to meet with Georgia State University officials, but they say the meeting was canceled. It’s a meeting they still want to see happen.
“We, first and foremost, wanna be able to sit down with all the decision makers so that we can figure out what makes the most sense. Our hope is, of course, that it stays here where it belongs,” Pitchford said.
“As an outside institution, you don’t come in and just make changes without interacting with community and having those conversations and especially communities that sacrifice so much,” she added.
Channel 2 Action News is still working to learn if Georgia State officials will be able to meet with stakeholders to discuss the cauldron’s future.
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