Canopy Atlanta asked more than 90 Collier Heights community members about the journalism they needed. Many residents shared stories of the community's rich history as a Black neighborhood, but they also voiced concerns about how to build a strong and resilient future.
Ann Hill Bond is the guest editor for the Collier Heights Community Issue. She wrote this letter for the TEDxCOLLIERHEIGHTS event on August 16, 2025 held at Frederick Douglass High School.
Collier Heights,
We have known you in every season.
In your blushing springs, when dogwoods swelled white and proud, and in your hard winters, when the wind cut sharp between the brick facades and the porches sagged under years of waiting. We have known you on your loud days, when laughter spilled out from a fish fry and basement parties two doors down from Goodmomma, and on your quiet ones, when the only sound was the rustle of magnolia leaves against the memory of voices gone.
We run our hands across the track-worn banister of your old homes, and they sing to us. A beloved song. An affirmation that “Collier Heights is not for sale.” A psalm whispered low. The creak of a floorboard that once carried a mother’s hurry, a child’s rebellion, a father’s weary step home from a shift that took more from him than it gave.
These walls are lined with the breath of those who lived full, messy, glorious, perfectly imperfect lives.
You, Collier Heights, are not only your manicured lawns and landmark plaques. You are the church mothers who kept a community upright with nothing but cornbread, scripture, and a side-eye sharp enough to slice the foolishness out of anyone who dared to be in sight. You are the number runner, swift and sure, feeding families off the books when the books never fed us. You are the teacher, bending over chipped desks to place the world inside a child’s head. You are the entertainer, moving with grace under neon light, carving out autonomy in a world that would take it from them.
Here, the preacher and the hustler pass each other on the same sidewalk and nod—not in judgment, but in knowing.
We do not wish you hollow progress. We dream for you a future where the houses keep their faces, where the hands that built them still hold the keys. Where a small bus can carry our children to school without erasing the streets they call home. Where the new does not crush the old, but stands beside it like kin.
Let the world understand: our story is not theirs to strip down and resell. It belongs to the ones who came here from places the world forgot and to those who never let themselves be forgotten. It belongs to the unseen victors as much as the notable names.
Collier Heights, you have been good, and you have been hard. You have been tender, and you have been merciful. But you have always been ours. And with every memory within your land, you grow into the future we know is possible—and for that, we thank you.
With love,
Your sons and daughters
Editor: Mariann Martin
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