Greenwood Bottom community cleanup honors MLK Day of service

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is not just a day of celebration: Macon’s George Crawley believes it’s also a day for work and action.

Coretta Scott King once called acts of kindness and service “the greatest birthday gift my husband could receive.”

Inspired by Coretta’s words and his own MLK service work in Atlanta, Crawley sought to organize the first Greenwood Bottom Day of Service Community Cleanup four years ago.

Greenwood Bottom is a historically Black area of Macon south of the downtown business district.

A once bustling hub for Black businesses, Greenwood Bottom sits nestled between Oglethorpe Street and the train tracks which run through South Macon and Tindall Heights to Tatnall Square and Vineville.

As the operations manager of a few recreation centers in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood of Atlanta, Crawley once had the opportunity to do service work alongside then-second lady Jill Biden in the early 2010s.

“I wanted to have that same impact on Macon, where we would have a day of service — a day of dedication,” he said. “A day where we actually commemorate King’s work.”

No one else in Macon celebrated MLK Day with service work, Crawley recalled, and having grown up in west Macon, he was no stranger to Greenwood Bottom.

He took swim classes at memorial gym on Second Street and knew every resident on Telfair, First and Third streets.
Cleaning up Greenwood Bottom became part of an effort to revive the historic community folks knew and loved. Not far from Taylor Iron Works & Supply Co. and Proctor and Gamble — which employed many Black folks at the time — Greenwood Bottom served as an entertainment spot with its historic Roxy Theatre.

The segregation-era theatre was built in 1949 for movies and live shows and has been on Historic Macon’s Fading Five list since 2020.
Icons such as Otis Redding, Little Richard and James Brown performed at the Roxy before it permanently shut down in 1958.
Greenwood Bottom and surrounding neighborhoods were also home to Macon’s historic churches, such as Fulton Baptist Church and Greater Turner Tabernacle.

Black-owned businesses like Harrell’s Barbershop are also staples of Greenwood Bottom — representations of a once thriving area for Black business in Macon.

This year marks the second consecutive Greenwood Bottom community cleanup day. In 2023, roughly 200 folks came together to clear litter.
The community’s efforts to restore the area, Crawley explained, embody the beliefs Martin Luther King Jr. championed during his last visit to Macon before his death.

“Dr. King’s last major visit to Macon was unlike his previous two visits,” he said. “By 1968, Dr. King’s philosophy and his purpose in visiting communities such as Macon had changed, and so Dr. King’s visit here was part of the Poor People’s Campaign.”

King didn’t just make church visits, Crowley noted, but he also went to places like Greenwood Bottom and Tybee — originally a community of enslaved individuals founded in the early 1800s which later suffered from redlining practices.

He encouraged the underserved and undereducated to fight for social and economic equality.

“Dr. King, this nationally acclaimed civil rights leader, this Nobel Peace Prize winner was right there advocating for these people up until his death,” Crowley said.

Sign up online for the Greenwood Bottom Day of Service on Saturday, Jan. 18 from 10 a.m. to noon.
Participants should meet by the MLK Mural located at 1410 MLK Jr. Blvd.